ABSTRACT
If the critique of Roman social and ethical norms revealed in Petronius’ suicide was radical and idiosyncratic, it was also prophetic. Petronius’ death expresses the culmination of an increasing elite tendency to perceive social forms as mutable and arbitrary, a perception that had been growing steadily more acute and agitated from at least the time of Ovid. As the terminal point of one tradition of Roman ethical thought, however, the death of Petronius marks also the beginning of another, in which understandings of the nature of the individual come to be informed by a profound distrust of the moral value of social convention, a transition which is accordingly characterized by various attempts to situate the epistemological locus of ethics elsewhere.
