Petronius’ Satyricon, a comic fictional story of imperial date, features the most remarkable character in Latin literature, Trimalchio, a wealthy, manipulative and intimidating ex-slave from the East, who succeeded in creating a new social and cultural identity for himself. In his narrative of Trimalchio's dinner party, Petronius shows how visual and material culture associated with the Roman upper classes is appropriated by Trimalchio to ensure a superior position in the community he inhabits and to project to his dinner guests a refashioned identity and an image of power that bears traces of his cultural memory. Nevertheless, Trimalchio is regularly ridiculed by the narrator as an uncouth multimillionaire with morbidly bad taste and risible pretensions to elevated aesthetics. This ridicule, I argue, reveals more about Roman anxieties about transgressing class boundaries and the freeborn narrator's envy and resentment for the freedman's achievements than any insight of the so-called ‘freedman culture’ in the early Roman empire.
I divided my working schedule at the BSR into two parts: (I) studying at the BSR library and (II) visiting museums and archaeological sites. I saw (a) Nero's Domus Aurea as imperial domestic space which the freedman Trimalchio aspired to, (b) the first-century BC megalographic paintings of the Via Graziosa (in the Vatican Museums) depicting scenes from the Odyssey, which could be paralleled with paintings of scenes from the Homeric epics described by the narrator in Trimalchio's atrium, (c) the tomb of Eurysaces and its inscriptions at the Porta Maggiore and the relief of the Mausoleum of the Haterii in the Vatican Museums as evidence of freedman funerary monuments to which I could compare Trimalchio's as-yet unbuilt funerary monument, (d) inscriptions pertaining to freedmen in the Archaeological Museum of Rome, and (e) public spaces and domestic architecture (houses with their mosaics) in Pompeii. Discussing these with colleagues at the BSR enhanced my research by refining the argument and adding detail and depth to it. I very much regret that in the end I was unable to visit Herculaneum and Pozzuoli — important locations for my research which I should have seen; but even with the best planning in the world I could not fit everything into my allocated Visiting Fellowship period.
I tackled different episodes from ‘Dinner at Trimalchio's’ according to the pieces of material culture I would see on each of my visits. For example, I worked on the funerary monument of Trimalchio (Satyricon 71) after I saw the Tomb of Eurysaces and the relief of the Mausoleum of the Haterii, but when I needed to work on the automata and other technological devices found in the narrative of the dinner party (for example, Trimalchio's cuckoo clock or the dish with the four figures of the satyr Marsyas, or the dish of the phallic god Priapus emitting juice) for which we do not have any surviving parallels I stayed in the BSR library and used its excellent facilities, consulting Robert Coates-Stephens for guidance when appropriate. At the BSR I wrote from scratch three papers, one of them being an 8,000-word article entitled ‘Trimalchio's automata’, which will be coming out in an Oxford University Press volume on Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity, and another being a 7,000-word paper, entitled ‘Memories from Trimalchio's past’, which is to be included in an edited volume on Memory, Ritual, and Identity in Greece and Rome (De Gruyter).
The preliminary conclusions of my investigations are (a) that there is a continuity in the architectural patterns and the domestic-decoration preferences of powerful Republican and Imperial freeborn people, on the one hand, and the freedman Trimalchio, on the other, and (b) that there is an air of power, imperium and sophistication about the material culture one encounters in Trimalchio's house. It is used so as to fashion an identity for a man who (as ex-slave) had no respectable past or ancestors and no roots in the aristocracy but aspired to grandeur without erasing his servile past. I argue that the narrator fails to see or identify with this aspiration and that he deliberately presents in his narrative the picture of a vulgar freedman who does his best to impress.
