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Trimalchio as Narrator and Stage Director in the Cena: An Unobserved Parallelism in Petronius’ Satyricon 78

Scholars of Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis have interpreted the theatrical aspects of Trimalchio’s lavish banquet as indicative of his ridiculously ostentatious behavior.1 Yet none have considered how this theatricality illustrates the protagonist’s attempt to control death and posterity via material wealth. This is most eloquently shown in the enactment of the funeral towards the end of the banquet.2 Furthermore, Trimalchio’s funeral spectacle exhibits several intratextual links with the ghost story he has earlier recounted to his dinner guests, so as to intimate that there are unexpected and uncontrollable forces in the world (63). Both funeral ritual and ghost story are stagemanaged “performances” by Trimalchio, and both end in disaster because external forces wreak havoc when they intrude. These links between the ghost story and the mock funeral could be viewed as rendering the former a narrative anticipation of the latter, thus allowing the novel’s readers to foresee the development of events. As narrator, however, Trimalchio fails to observe these links, and stages his funeral as a visual, apotropaic act, as if by doing so he will somehow exert control over his actual death. Thus he goes directly against the moral he offers to his listeners at the conclusion of his ghost story. This technique seems to be a narrative strategy devised by Petronius to expose one more aspect of Trimalchio’s naïveté in the Cena. To my knowledge, Trimalchio’s ghost story and his funeral spectacle have thus far been unanimously treated as quite independent narrative units.3 The extent to which the ghost story and funeral spectacle resemble each other has never been elucidated. In what follows, I shall argue that Trimalchio’s ghost story (63)—a prime example of the host’s attempts to astound his guests—foreshadows the disastrous end of the banquet (78). Thus Trimalchio unwittingly gives readers a taste of what is to come when uncontrollable external forces are provoked.