Word: encolpius
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wilted Poppies. Encolpius opens the book with a scabrous philippic against "modern" education, sounding a little like Bernard Shaw denouncing formal schooling. But Encolpius tires of this theme and soon becomes involved with his two comrades-in-arms in a sale of stolen goods. Later, the two older men quarrel, and Encolpius suggests they divide their belongings and separate. Ascyltus agrees-and draws his sword, threatening to divide the boy Giton. The most sustained satire of the volume describes a lavish dinner at the mansion of Trimalchio, wealthy and flatulent onetime slave. He presents each outrageous new dish-a roast...
Petronius' story follows the happenstance progress of three impure pilgrims: the freeloader Encolpius (whose name means, roughly, "the crotch''); the effeminate boy Giton. who is Encolpius' "brother" ("frater" to Romans had a double meaning of homosexuality); and Ascyltus. who lusts after Giton. With a straight face. Petronius defended the propriety of his romance...
...Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...
...literature, swaggering Dean Moriarty is perhaps closest in his amorality to a character created by Petronius Arbiter in the ist century A.D.-the rascally Encolpius, who lived by his wits in Nero's fat and frightened time. In contemporary terms, Moriarty seems even closer to a prison psychosis that is a variety of the Ganser Syndrome.* Its symptoms, as described by one psychiatrist, sound like a playback from Kerouac's novel: "The patient exaggerates his mood and his feelings: he 'lets himself go' and gets himself into a highly emotional state. He is uncooperative, refuses...