Classical World

Not long before Schmeling published his commentary on Petronius—twenty years in the making, it covers the entire text (with the exception of the fragments not included in LφOH)—three similar works, each concentrating on specific sections and together offering detailed annotations on chapters 1-15 and 79-115, became available in print: Breitenstein (Berlin 2009), Habermehl (Berlin 2006) and Vannini (Berlin 2010; reviewed in CW 105 [2012] 278-79). Given their existence, one obvious choice would have been to focus more particularly on the sections not discussed there. A commentary in one volume on the whole text, however, does need to follow some kind of blueprint, offering information [End Page 541] on as wide a range of aspects as possible within a relatively small number of pages and, consequently, devoting an equal amount of attention to each chapter of the Satyrica. Certain thematic priorities are nevertheless also essential. Schmeling, who is currently assembling an OCT Petronius, shows declared and marked restraint in his commentary on loci desperati, which are legion in the novel, and, as his lemmata betray, does not appear to be planning any significant deviations from Müller's Teubner. His interest lies primarily in the work's literary background, a concern visible not only in his introduction, but also in some broad-ranging thoughts on individual passages. One such example is his consideration of Encolpius' affair with Circe as presented in Sat. 125-139: here Schmeling cites comparable texts at singular length. He has, in addition, paid special attention to socio-historical Realien, with the result that his annotations on one section in particular—a portion of the text not included in other recent commentaries—represent truly enormous progress: what he has to tell us about the Cena Trimalchionis will greatly advance our understanding of this, the Satyrica's most notorious episode.

It is evident that Schmeling, who in 1970, together with J. P. Sullivan, founded the Petronian Society and who has been one of the trailblazers for modern studies on the ancient novel, drew here more extensively on Satyrica scholarship from the seventies and eighties than on recent research. Sometimes, as in the case of J. Bodel's unpublished thesis on the freedmen in Petronius (University of Michigan, 1984), this was more than warranted. When it came to Roman sexualities, however, he ought perhaps not to have relied so heavily on his friend Sullivan. The latter, in his book on Petronius—published in 1968 and untouched by Foucault and all that came after him—took Freudian psychoanalysis as his frame of reference for the erotic scenes in the Satyrica, and so looked at the sexual behavior displayed in a different period and within a different social system from a twentieth-century point of view. Schmeling would have been better advised to base his approach instead on that of H. P. Obermeyer (Martial und der Diskurs über männliche "Homosexualität" in der frühen Kaiserzeit, Tübingen, 1998). He might then have thought twice about calling a relationship in antiquity between a man and a boy plain "homosexual" and thus improved his commentary on 16-26.6, 85-87 and 135-140.

Roman sexualities form (much like narrative technique, the influence of mime, implicit and explicit literary theory, and Weltanschauung) a subject which Schmeling does not address in his introduction, confining himself rather to notes (and often just short ones) ad hoc. This has inevitably led, on occasion, to some repetition and ensuing lack of space for more important matters. The introductory part of the book looks at author and date, the manuscript tradition, lost sections of the novel, language, genre, the poems, and intertextuality. Here, as in the commentary proper, Schmeling mostly prefers not to propose solutions for the familiar and vexed questions raised by the text, but simply presents the various answers put forward to date. There are times when one does wish he had tendered his...