SOURCE: "Petronius," in The Greek and Roman Critics, University of Toronto Press, 1965, pp. 262-8.

In the following excerpt, Grube outlines Petronius's thoughts on poetry, particularly his attack on declamations and his assessment that the arts had reached a degenerated state in Rome.

… [Petronius] is always superbly alive.¹ In that amazing medley of riotous and indecent adventures which make up the Satyricon we find several passages bearing on literature. The book as we have it begins with a violent tirade against the practice of declamations which Encolpius addresses to a teacher of rhetoric called Agamemnon. It may be quoted here as a typical denunciation, making, in a more lively manner, most of the criticisms which recur throughout the century:

Are declaimers pursued by another kind of Furies when they shout: 'These wounds were received on behalf of our public freedom', 'this eye was lost for your sake', 'give me...