Mimesis (10 page)

And now we come to the third and possibly most important difference from the Homeric style, the most significant peculiarity of Petronius’ Banquet: it is closer to our modern conception of a realistic presentation than anything else that has come down to us from antiquity; and this not so much because of the common vulgarity of its subject matter but above all because of its precise and completely unschematized fixation of the social milieu. The guests gathered at Trimalchio’s party are southern Italian freedmen-parvenus of the first century; they hold the views of such people and speak their language almost without literary stylization. The like can hardly be found anywhere else. Comedy indicates the social milieu much more abstractly and schematically, much less specifically as to time and place; it hardly exhibits the rudiments of individualized speech in its characters. Satire, to be sure, contains much that tends in our direction, but the presentation is never so broad, it is moralistic and concerned with branding some specific vice or ridiculous trait. The romance, finally,
fabula milesiaca
, the genre which doubtless includes Petronius’ work, is—in the other specimens and fragments that have come down to us—so crammed with magic, adventure, and mythology, so overburdened with erotic detail, that it cannot possibly be considered an imitation of everyday life as it existed at the time—quite apart from the unrealistic and rhetorical stylization of its language. A broad and truly workaday style of presentation is most nearly approximated by certain products of Alexandrian literature, for instance the two women at the festival of Adonis, by Theocritus, or the brothelkeeper bringing suit, by Herondas. But both these pieces, which are in verse, are more playful in their realistic portrayal of sociological background data, and also more linguistically stylized, than Petronius. Petronius’ literary ambition, like that of the realists of modern times, is to imitate a random, everyday, contemporary milieu with its sociological background, and to have his characters speak their jargon without recourse to any form of stylization. Thus he reached the ultimate limit of the advance of realism in antiquity. Whether he was the first and only writer to embark upon such a venture, whether and how far the Roman
mime had blazed the trail for him, are questions which need not be taken up in this context.

Now if Petronius marks the ultimate limit to which realism attained in antiquity, his work will accordingly serve to show what that realism could not or would not do. The Banquet is a purely comic work. The individual characters, as well as the connecting narrative, are consciously and consistently kept on the lowest level of style both in diction and treatment. And this necessarily implies that everything problematic, everything psychologically or sociologically suggestive of serious, let alone tragic, complications must be excluded, for its excessive weight would break the style. Let us pause here for a moment and think of the nineteenth-century realists, of Balzac or Flaubert, of Tolstoi or Dostoevski. Old Grandet (in
Eugénie Grandet
) or Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov are not mere caricatures, as Trimalchio is, but terrible realities which must be taken wholly seriously; they are involved in tragic complications, and notwithstanding their grotesqueness, are themselves tragic. In modern literature the technique of imitation can evolve a serious, problematic, and tragic conception of any character regardless of type and social standing, of any occurrence regardless of whether it be legendary, broadly political, or narrowly domestic; and in most cases it actually does so. Precisely that is completely impossible in antiquity. There are, it is true, some transitional forms in bucolic and amatory poetry, but on the whole the rule of the separation of styles, touched upon in the first chapter of this study, remains inviolate. Everything commonly realistic, everything pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on any level except the comic, which admits no problematic probing. As a result the boundaries of realism are narrow. And if we take the word realism a little more strictly, we are forced to conclude that there could be no serious literary treatment of everyday occupations and social classes—merchants, artisans, peasants, slaves—of everyday scenes and places—home, shop, field, store—of everyday customs and institutions—marriage, children, work, earning a living—in short, of the people and its life. Linked with this is the fact that the realists of antiquity do not make clear the social forces underlying the facts and conditions which they present. This could only be done in the realm of the serio-problematic. But since the characters do not leave the realm of the comic, their relation to the social whole is either a matter of clever adaptation or of grotesquely blameworthy isolation. In the latter case, the realistically portrayed individual is always in the wrong in his conflict with the social whole, which is represented as a
given fact, an institution unalterably established in the background of the action and requiring no explanation in regard either to its origin or to its effects. This too has altered in modern times. In the realistic literature of antiquity, the existence of society poses no historical problem; it may at best pose a problem in ethics, but even then the ethical question is more concerned with the individual members of society than with the social whole. No matter how many persons may be branded as given to vice or as ridiculous, criticism of vices and excesses poses the problem as one for the individual; consequently, social criticism never leads to a definition of the motive forces within society.

Hence, behind the bustle which Petronius sets before us, we sense nothing which might help us understand the action in terms of its economic and political context; and the historical movement, of which we spoke above, is here only a surface movement. Of course this observation is not intended to suggest that Petronius ought to have worked an essay in national economy into his Banquet. He need not even have gone as far as Balzac who, in the novel mentioned above,
Eugénie Grandet
, described the growth of Grandet’s fortune in a manner which reflects all of French history from the Revolution to the Restoration. An entirely unsystematic but continuous and conscious connection with the events and conditions of the time would have been enough. A modern Petronius would link a portrait of a profiteer to the inflation after the First World War, let us say, or to some other well-known crisis. Thackeray, although his method of elaboration remains ethical rather than historical, already links his great novel to the background of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic era. Nothing of the sort is found in Petronius. When the subject is the price of food stuffs (chapter 44), or other aspects of urban life (chapters 44, 45 and
passim
), or the history of the guests’ lives and fortunes (the passage quoted and especially chapters 57 and 75f.), he will not even allude to a specific place, a definite time, a particular political and economic situation. True enough, we can easily determine that the place is a town in Southern Italy, the time that of the early emperors; the modern historian can use these indications as sociological raw material, and Petronius’ contemporaries of course knew all this, possibly in greater detail than we do—but the author himself attributes no importance whatever to the contemporary-historical aspect of his work. Had he done so, that is, had he established a link between his individual events or relationships and specific political and economic situations
of the early imperial period, a distinct historical background would have been provided for the reader, which he could supplement with his own knowledge; and the result would have been a historical third dimension in comparison with which Petronius’ perspective, of which we spoke above, must appear but a two-dimensional surface; and we could use the term “historical movement” strictly and not merely in a comparative sense. But that would have violated the style within which Petronius undertook to remain; it would not have been possible without an idea which he could not conceive, that is, the idea of historical “forces.” As things are, the kinesis—however animated—is limited to the picture itself; back of it, nothing moves, the world is static. We are clearly dealing with a period sketch, a portrait of a time; but the time is presented as though it had always existed unchanged as it does at present in this place, with masters bequeathing large slices of their wealth to slaves who do their sexual bidding, with enormously profitable deals within the reach of merchants, and so forth. The historicity of all these things, the fact that they are determined by an era, is not in itself of interest to Petronius or his contemporary readers. But we moderns note the fact and our historians of economics base their conclusions upon it.

Here we encounter a difficult question of principle which cannot be circumvented. If the literature of antiquity was unable to represent everyday life seriously, that is, in full appreciation of its problems and with an eye for its historical background; if it could represent it only in the low style, comically or at best idyllically, statically and ahistorically, the implication is that these things mark the limits not only of the realism of antiquity but of its historical consciousness as well. For it is precisely in the intellectual and economic conditions of everyday life that those forces are revealed which underlie historical movements; these, whether military, diplomatic, or related to the inner constitution of the state, are only the product, the final result, of variations in the depths of everyday life.

In this connection we may examine a specimen of antique historiography. I have selected a text which is not too far removed in time from the Banquet, and indeed one which represents a revolutionary movement from the depths, the beginning of the revolt of the Germanic legions after the death of Augustus, in Tacitus’
Annals
, Book 1, chapters 16f. It reads as follows:

Hic rerum urbanarum status erat, cum Pannonicas legiones seditio
incessit, nullis novis causis, nisi quod mutatus princeps licentiam turbarum et ex civili bello spem praemiorum ostendebat. Castris aestivis tres simul legiones habebantur, praesidente lunio Blaeso, qui fine Augusti et initiis Tiberii auditis ob iustitium aut gaudium intermiserat solita munia. Eo principio lascivire miles, discordare, pessimi cuiusque sermonibus praebere aures, denique luxum et otium cupere, disciplinam et laborem aspernari. Erat in castris Percennius quidam, dux olim theatralium operarum, dein gregarius miles, procax lingua et miscere coetus histrionali studio doctus. Is imperitos animos et, quaenam post Augustum militiae condicio, ambigentes impellere paulatim nocturnis conloquiis aut flexo in vesperam die et dilapsis melioribus deterrimum quemque congregare. Postremo promptis iam et aliis seditionis ministris, velut contionabundus interrogabat, cur paucis centurionibus, paucioribus tribunis in modum servorum oboedirent. Quando ausuros exposcere remedia, nisi novum et adhuc nutantem principem precibus vel armis adirent? Satis per tot annos ignavia peccatum, quod tricena aut quadragena stipendia senes et plerique truncato ex vulneribus corpore tolerent. Ne dimissis quidem finem esse militiae, sed aput vexillum tendentes alio vocabulo eosdem labores perferre. Ac si quis tot casus vita superaverit, trahi adhuc diversas in terras, ubi per nomen agrorum uligines paludum vel inculta montium accipiant. Enimvero militiam ipsam gravem, infructuosam: denis in diem assibus animam et corpus aestimari: hinc vestem arma tentoria, hinc saevitiam centurionum et vacationes munerum redimi. At Hercule verbera et vulnera, duram hiemem, exercitas aestates, bellum atrox aut sterilem pacem sempiterna. Nec aliud levamentum, quam si certis sub legibus militia iniretur: ut singulos denarios mererent, sextus decumus stipendii annus finem adferret; ne ultra sub vexillis tenerentur, sed isdem in castris praemium pecunia solveretur. An praetorias cohortes, quae binos denarios acceperint, quae post sedecim annos penatibus suis reddantur, plus periculorum suscipere? Non obtrectari a se urbanas excubias; sibi tamen aput horridas gentes e contuberniis hostem aspice.—Adstrepebat vulgus, diversis incitamentis, hi verberum notas, illi canitiem, plurimi detrita tegmina et nudum corpus exprobrantes. …

(Thus stood affairs at Rome, when a sedition made its appearance in the legions in Pannonia, without any fresh grounds, save
that the accession of a new prince promised impunity to tumult, and held out the hope of advantages to be derived from a civil war. Three legions occupied a summer camp together, commanded by Junius Blaesus, who, upon notice of the death of Augustus and accession of Tiberius, had granted the soldiers a recess from their wonted duties for some days, as a time either of public mourning or festivity. From this beginning they waxed wanton and quarrelsome, lent their ears to the discourses of every profligate, and at last they longed for a life of dissipation and idleness, and spurned all military discipline and labor. In the camp was one Percennius, formerly a busy leader of theatrical factions, after that a common soldier, of a petulant tongue, and from his experience in theatrical party zeal, well qualified to stir up the bad passions of a crowd. Upon minds uninformed, and agitated with doubts as to what might be the condition of military service now that Augustus was dead, he wrought gradually by confabulations by night, or when day verged towards its close; and when all the better-disposed had retired to their respective quarters, he would congregate all the most depraved about him.

Lastly, when now also other ministers of sedition were at hand to second his designs, in imitation of a general solemnly haranguing his men, he asked them—“Why did they obey, like slaves, a few centurions and fewer tribunes? When would they be bold enough to demand redress, unless they approached the prince, yet a novice, and tottering on his throne, either with entreaties or arms? Enough had they erred in remaining passive through so many years, since decrepit with age and maimed with wounds, after a course of service of thirty or forty years, they were still doomed to carry arms; nor even to those who were discharged was there any end of service, but they were still kept to the colors, and under another name endured the same hardships. And if any of them survived so many dangers, still were they dragged into countries far remote, where, under the name of lands, they are presented with swampy fens, or mountain wastes. But surely, burdensome and ungainful of itself was the occupation of war;—ten asses a day the poor price of their persons and lives; out of this they must buy clothes, and tents, and arms,—out of this the cruelty of centurions must be redeemed, and occasional exemptions from duty; but, by Hercules, stripes, wounds, hard winters and laborious summers, bloody wars and barren peace, were miseries eternally to be
endured; nor remained there other remedy than to enter the service upon certain conditions, as that their pay should be a denarius a day, sixteen years be the utmost term of serving; beyond that period to be no longer obliged to follow the colors, but have their reward in money, paid them in the camp where they earned it. Did the praetorian guards, who had double pay,—they who after sixteen years’ service were sent home, undergo more dangers? This was not said in disparagement of the city guards; their own lot, however, was, serving among uncivilized nations, to have the enemy in view from their tents.”