Trimalchio

The story is also funny.

Niceros delivers it at a dinner party hosted by Trimalchio.

a wealthy freedman whose guests constantly compete for attention.

Their language, boasts of anxieties, are essential to the scene.

Petronius offers a supernatural anecdote while simultaneously portraying how a particular kind of Roman storyteller seeks to make a room believe him.

So let's talk about this whole Petronius and Trimalchio's dinner.

The surviving Satyricon follows characters through episodes of appetite, deception, and social embarrassment.

The longest substantial continuous section of the Cine Trimalchionis.

Opimium Falernian, 100 years old.

While we were studying the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands and cried, "'Oh me, to think that wine lives longer than poor little man.

Let's fill them up.

There's life in wine and this is the real Opimium.

But the person who told me about it is archaeologist Dr. Emlyn Dodd from the University of Adelaide.

Now, he's an expert on ancient Mediterranean culture, and he knows all about what the Greeks and Romans were up to when it comes to wine.

There's this very famous instance in the Satyricon by Petronius, which is again this early imperial narrative story where this fictional person, Trimalchio, who's a very wealthy person, he's made a lot of money off the wine industry, He describes bringing out a 100-year-old Falernian wine for his ostentatious banquet that he's putting on, which is almost certainly not true, but it's kind of emphasizing to us that this did exist as a thing, that wealthy Romans tried to bring out old wines of remarkable ages to impress their guests and their patrons, and often used it as a sort of ignorant way of showing off, because of course your 100 year old wine was probably not a particularly good wine by that point in time and they might have even been cheated or deceived into the fact that this was a 100 year old wine.

The point of me reading out this story, though, is that it shows that the ancient world valued aged wines and that they were a sign of wealth and luxury.

Generations of people have been told that the Romans built a special room for being sick, when in fact they had just built a corridor.

Then there is Trimalchio, the most appalling host in all of literature, invented by the writer Petronius.

Trimalchio is enormously rich and has no idea how to behave.

He arrives late to his own dinner party, carried in on cushions, and announces that he did not really want to come in yet, but has done so as a favour to his guests.

Then, rather than greet anybody, he has a game board brought to the table and finishes his game.

Somebody hands you a drink.

You stand in the kitchen with a stranger.

And the stranger says, So, how do you know Trimalchio? I'm not sure I do.

You can't cough, or they're going to beat you.

And in, even in some households such as the freedman Trimalchio's house, he goes for a pee, he washes his hands, and he might dry his hands on your hair.

Claire, you're not gonna throw up as well, are you?

No, I hope not, because, uh, women who threw up were considered loose women, possibly adulterers.

Already drunk, his hand lying on his wife's shoulder, his forehead decorated by several crowns, and wet from the scent that ran into his eyes, he sat down in the seat of honor and immediately requested wine.

Trimalchio, charmed by his good humor, asked for an even larger cup.

The frescoes at Pompeii provide perfect illustration to Petronius' account and the orgiastic behavior of the rich citizens governed by Nero.

But Pompeii, frozen forever by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, also supplies a considerable amount of further information on Roman behavior.