“... free, were a significant class. There might be some sneering at their parvenu ways, as there is in Petronius’ portrait of Trimalchio, the pretentious, ostentatious but befuddled host in The Satyricon. But many rose to positions of great influence, particularly as government bureaucrats. Because Romans saw status differentiation as a matter of law rather than ...”

“... in any case, sophisticated rhetoric can create more picturesque disgust. Similarly with the novel: Petronius and Apuleius both maintain, in this narrow sense, verbal decency for indecent descriptions: cool ingenuousness in the one, and slangy euphuism in the other, do much better as foils. Less can be said about social levels, especially in a society where ...”

“... place to ordinary characters. Trimalchio, the freedman host of a lavishly vulgar dinner party in Petronius’ Satyricon, written during the reign of Nero, is a figure we think we recognise: The Great Gatsby started out as ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’. Through the eyes of the Satyricon’s narrator, we see the clash between Trimalchio’s legal status and his ...”

“... and political sway of the brash nouveaux riches, uncomfortably reminiscent of Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyrica. This is an extremely intelligent and observant book (for the most part intelligently translated, though the House of Apollo irritatingly appears throughout as the House of ‘Apolline’). For all its self-confessed provisionality, it is by ...”

“... succeed Thrale himself) and she has gone down in Johnsonian annals as an 18th-century version of Petronius’ licentious Ephesian matron, confirming the impossibility of female constancy, matter too soft to bear even Johnson’s lasting mark. In ‘The Double Tradition of Dr Johnson’, Bertrand Bronson puzzled over the split in Johnsonian studies between ...”

“... refined’ but admits puzzlement as to what the canon did with the feathers.) By the time of Petronius the dish was already an absurdity. Decapitated at the table, live thrushes (the poor man’s fig-pecker) fluttered out of the boar’s open neck to be recaptured by slaves acting the parts of huntsmen. A second slash of the sabre and sausages tumbled ...”

“... example of the type, which survived into the Imperial period in the guise of men like Otho and Petronius. Even Augustus, at least during the early part of his career, seems not to have been without a taste for some of the pursuits which his propaganda against Antonius denounced. He took his wife Livia from her first husband while she was pregnant, and ...”

“... Ambiguities of Grammar’; it too has been lost) and – unlike Seneca, Lucan or Petronius – avoided being implicated in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate the emperor in 65 ad. In the 70s, under Vespasian, he was appointed to a series of senior administrative positions, and in 79 was admiral of the fleet stationed at Misenum, on the ...”

“... telling improper stories and shaking with laughter as she dies ‘thinking of saints and of Petronius Arbiter’. She has a table with four ornamental dolls dressed, Yeats told Lady Gregory, like Beardsley drawings, and she turns them to the wall when a priest comes to say Mass. The lady of Yeats’s poems was Mabel. ‘I cannot overstate her strange ...”

“... receive emphasis but its nascent modernity: ‘What is particularly impressive is the way in which Petronius ... practised one of the most sophisticated techniques of the modern novel,’ and ‘Richardson had an intuitive understanding of modern psycho-pathology.’ The teleological pressure here, with the achievements of former times repeatedly being ...”

“... is the name of the wealthy and vulgar ex-slave in the best-known chapter of the Satyricon by Petronius (c.AD 27-66), ‘Cena Trimalchionis’, variously translated as ‘The Party at Trimalchio’s’ or ‘Trimalchio’s Feast’. Trimalchio’s feast provides what West calls ‘one of the best accounts of domestic revelry to survive from the reign of ...”

“... BC) and Terence (c.185-159 BC) – as well as the two comic novels, the Satyricon by Petronius (who lived a short, eventful life under Nero, c.27-66 AD) and the Golden Ass by the great orator, neo-Platonist philosopher, priest and magistrate Apuleius (c.123-180 AD), give us some of our best evidence as to how the dominant Romans felt about the ...”

“... rich former slave whose money and grossly extravagant dinner party form the central episode in Petronius’ Satyricon. Churchwell, with characteristic energy and fullness of detail, explains why this notion popped into Fitzgerald’s head. Trimalchio and the Satyricon were much in the newspapers in the fall of 1922 as the New York Society for the ...”

“... means of a sign showing Hercules supporting the world on his shoulders, over a motto derived from Petronius: Totus mundus agit histrionem. Shakespeare’s plays often flaunt their Roman heritage: Titus Andronicus is structured around a series of allusions to Ovid that can even seem to shape the course of the action – most strikingly in the episode where ...”

“... Sophocles, Strindberg and Webster; in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell and David Hume. He took a turn through French literature then doubled back to the English Romantics. He read Cicero and Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley ...”