Petronius

The Petronius who wrote the Satyricon is almost certainly the Gaius Petronius whom Tacitus describes as Nero's arbiter elegantiae — a man of exquisite taste who served as consul and governor before falling victim to court intrigue. He died in 66 AD, opening his veins at a dinner party while chatting with friends about light verse — not philosophy.

The Satyricon survives only in fragments, the longest of which is the Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner of Trimalchio), a devastating satirical portrait of a grotesquely wealthy freedman's banquet. The prose is a tour de force of colloquial Latin, capturing the speech patterns of the uneducated new rich with merciless accuracy. The novel as a whole — a picaresque narrative of sexual misadventure in southern Italy — is bawdy, brilliant, and unique in Roman literature.