Vicky Rimell Losing the Plot: Narration and Intoxication in Petronius’ Satyricon.


The Satyricon is one of the few ancient texts whose first person narrator confesses to being intoxicated during the events he recounts. In Trimalchio’s cena, for instance, he mentions twice that the wine has gone to his head (41.12; 79.2), and throughout he emphasizes his myopia and memory loss (e.g. 56.10). This paper investigates how the narrator’s apparent intoxication propels the Satyricon, how disoriented narration functions as a canny, exculpatory pose which belies complex narrative strategies, or as a comic enactment of stylistic theories that define literature as ‘sober’ or ‘drunk’, and finally, what implications drugged or drunken narration poses for the Satyricon’s readers.

I look in detail at three scenes: first, the whining and dining in Quartilla’s brothel, where Encolpius and friends are force-fed the aphrodisiac satyrion. Just before he is made aware of the intoxicating contents of his drink, Encolpius reports that the thread of conversation was suddenly broken (iam deficiente fabularum contextu 20.5). Was this the point where the drug went to his head? I suggest that satyrion looks much like a disjointed Satyricon, and discuss the implications of this for reading a text which has long disoriented critics. Second, the pregnant entrance of Habinnas into Trimalchio’s dining room at Sat.65, where drunkenness is a metaphor for poetic licence, as it is throughout the cena. Third, the epic escape from Trimalchio’s labyrinth at Sat 72, where Encolpius’ drunken vision of the gallery he also saw on entering the villa double-crosses readers’ perspectives, allowing no alternative to hallucination whichever way we look.

At the crux of my argument is the claim that intoxicated narration advertises the anti-classical moderation and intensity of Petronius’ text. Further, I suggest that the ingestion of drink and drugs is implicitly paralleled in the Satyricon with the act of reading this fiction; it models the seduction of an audience as well as exposing and therefore inciting readers’ (in)ability to follow its complex narrative strategies.