SOURCE: "An Ancient Roman Novel," The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. II, January to October, 1903, pp. 125-36.

In the following essay, Bowen summarizes the Satyricon, with particular emphasis on the section called "Trimalchio's Dinner. "

Fiction is the all-prevailing form of literature today. There is hardly a civilized nation whose literature is not now dominated by the novel. In France, Germany, Italy, and Russia this form of literature is conceded to be supreme; and in England and America the tyranny of the novel is acknowledged without question. How long fiction will continue to reign supreme is a problem to which the future alone can give a definite and correct answer. There are some among us, however, who assume the role of the prophet and jauntily inform us that the novel is already doomed. An eminent French littérateur recently announced with all the gravity and authority of an oracle that...