Word: giton
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...YOUNG bisexual wanderers. Encolpius and Ascyltus, quarrel over possession of a beautfiul young boy, Giton. Ascyltus gets him, leaving Encolpius weeping in a building which unsympathetically collapses, driving Encolpius alone out into the world. In a scene at a Roman art gallery. Encolpius meets a poet named Eumolphus, and the two talk of the decadent disrepair of the art of their time, and look back wistfully to past classics. Having thus conveniently suspended the present in cultural malaise, the two head off to a banquet/orgy given by Trimalchio. a fat old fart whom Petronius, the author of the original Satyricon...
...Scenes are shifted, new ones are added, characters are blunted or sharpened. Still, Fellini has left the Petronian framework intact. Like almost all his social satire, Satyricon is a picaresque journey through the beds and banquet hails of Rome. Now Encolpius skirmishes for the affections of the young invert Giton (Max Born); now impotent, he whimpers about his "blunted sword"; now he overstuffs his gullet at a vulgarian's feast; now he is a starveling captive aboard a slave ship...
...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 sow. for instance, with a bellyful of live thrushes-displaying all the joy of a labor racketeer showing off the power...
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...
...without them and the sundry other amourous moments wherein the chastest of embraces have been substituted for move strictly anatomical descriptions, it is difficult to understand how Petronius acquired so great a reputation for unblushing realism. If the reader is persuaded that the affection of Enclopius and Ascyltos for Giton is a purely platonic one and such as is on more than proper between master and servant, he is missing as tasty a hit of aesthetic yohimbin as there is to be found this side of a celebrated international museum in Paris. And if he is missing...
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