Eumolpus' Pro Encolpio and Lichas' In Encolpium: Petr. Sat. 107

Abstract

This paper offers a close reading of one of the less studied scenes in Petronius’ novel: the debate between the poetaster Eumolpus and the captain Lichas during the ‘trial’ of Encolpius and Giton, who pose as shorn and branded fugitives on board Lichas’ ship. I argue that (1) the careful structure and composition of this episode suggests that the narrator Encolpius was well aware of the rhetorical and literary conventions of the sources he was exploiting when re-shaping this episode of his past; and (2) although certain points in this debate are similar to motifs frequently and effectively employed in Ciceronian speeches, Eumolpus and Lichas may be viewed as amateurs involved in a rhetorical controversia of the type studied by the Elder Seneca and used by the Younger Seneca in the plot of some of his plays. But more important than the portrayal of Eumolpus as a ‘hopeless Cicero’ or an unskilled student of rhetoric is the way in which the trial-scene in Petronius ‘disintegrates’ from a pair of equally long speeches to a pair of uneven arguments and then to mere slapstick and blows. This is characteristic of the way in which Petronius constructs his text and elicits humour: several literary sources are exploited for the composition of a single, multi-layered episode, whose plot eventually crumbles and falls to pieces.

Dr Costas Panayotakis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he has been teaching since 1993. He is the author of Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical Elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden 1995), and of annotated translations into Modern Greek of Publilius, and of selected plays of Plautus and Terence. He is currently working on a commentary on the fragments of the mimographer Decimus Laberius.