ABSTRACT
The Satyrica is a first-person narrative told by Encolpius, a young man who moves from place to place together with his boy-love, Giton. He has various encounters with all kinds of people mostly living on the fringes of society, and has several adventures in his search for a free meal and sex. The manuscripts containing the text of the Satyrica identify the author by the name of “Petronius,” which remains just a name on the title page. Many scholars from the sixteenth century onwards have been tempted to identify the writer of the Satyrica with the Caius Petronius that the Roman historian Tacitus describes in his Annales. The realism of Petronius and the use of his novel as a potential document of Roman social life have been widely discussed in modern scholarship. Petronius shows the same conformity to the dominant male ideology in the characterization of the male characters.
