Word: trimalchio
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...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, patterned after the Emperor Nero. The debauch at the party is complete, happily (for me) beyond the descriptive power of adjectives and adverbs. Merriment is cooled by a breach of good taste when Eumolphus accuses Trimalchio of plagiarizing Lucretius...
...Trimalchio, having thus in one evening satiated every imaginable desire of the will, decides that the time has come for him to meet his makers. He rehearses his death once, and then is gone, leaving Encolpius and a weeping Mrs. Trimakbio at his grave. Mrs. Trimalchio looks up and into Encolpius's dilated blue eyes. And soon they are entwined there by the grave. Mrs. Trimalchio concludes, "Better to hang a dead husband than lose a living lover," but Encolpius is beginning to come apart, to lose himself sexually. At this point, he is estranged from himself only emotionally...
...catalogue of images is not as unrelated as it seems. At its best, the scenario synthesizes art, moving like music, and spreading out like a suite of paintings. In this, Fellini Satyricon exceeds the original. Petronius could only describe the obscenity of the banquet staged by Trimalchio, the nouveau riche. Fellini could portray it as a vignette of Rome at the end of its parabola of grandeur, complete with elaborate jokes and hoaxes. It is an occasion as bizarre and funny as the film's conclusion-in which a lady leaves a fortune to friends, with the proviso that...
...social commentary, your story on Gabriele Lagerwall [Oct. 25] ranks with Trimalchio's banquet...
...lavish feast described by Petronius in a fragment of the Satyricon, a penetrating report of social life in the days of Nero. Trimalchio, the host, was a wealthy freedman with more farms "than a kite could flap over," and so many slaves that "not one in ten has ever seen his master...