Petronius Arbiter

"The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. The first realistic novel and the father of the picaresque genre, it recounts the sleazy progress of a pair of literate scholars as they wander through the cities of the southern Mediterranean. En route they encounter characters the author wickedly satirizes - a teacher in higher education, a libidinous priestess, a vulgar freedman turned millionaire, a...

This is work of fiction by the Latin author Petronius written about the middle of the first century A.D. The identity of Petronius is uncertain. He may well have been Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a courtier and companion in debauchery of the Emperor Nero, who fell out of his master's favor and committed suicide in A.D. 65. The Satyricon is a somewhat scandalous work of fiction of which only fragments (Bks. 14, 15, and 16 from its at least twenty books)...

Fellini recreates the bawdy and lecherous days of Nero's reign in ancient Rome and its lack of concern with human dignity and obsession with perverse sex. The film is also an allegorical satire of the self-indulgence of modern society.

"The 'Satyrica' ('Satyricon liber'), a comic-picaresque fiction in prose and verse traditionally attributed to the Neronian Petronius (d. AD 66) but possibly of Flavian or Trajanic date, survives only as fragments of a much larger whole. It takes the form of a first-person narrative by the endearing ne'er-do-well Encolpius, a brilliant storyteller, parodist, and mimic who recalls episodes from his past life as a wandering bohemian, living by his wits...

Variety lights: A beautiful and ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises. The white sheik: During a day in their honeymoon, a couple is separated by the city's lust and the desires it produces. I vitelloni: Details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to...