"One of the most licentious and repulsive works in Roman literature" is the way W. E. H. Lecky describes the Satyrica (Satyricon, before A.D. 66) in his History of European Morals (1911). The English critic and novelist Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise (1938) recalls his college days fondly because he remembers Petronius: "I had four editions of the Satyrica. The best I had bound in black crushed levant and kept on my pew in chapel where it looked like some solemn book of devotion and was never disturbed. To sit reading it during the sermon, looking reverently towards the headmaster scintillating from the pulpit and then returning to my racy Latin." Such is the reputation of Petronius and his Satyrica, repulsive and racy, bound in black crushed levant.

The Petronian family apparently had its origins in the Equestrian Order and remained at that level until the late Roman Republic...