Language and parody in Petronius' Satyricon

Abstract

The author begins his article by delineating the kinds of speech in Petronius' Satyricon. Since the differentiation which contends that there is a greater number of sensual elements in everyday speech and a greater number of cognitive elements in literary language is inadequate, the author sets forth other elements which help us to differentiate everyday from literary language. The author investigates these elements using examples from Petronius' Satyricon. In the first place among these elements one should mention the tendency of everyday speech to use paratactical constructions of the sentence. In addition, mention is made of the following: exclamations, imperatives, swearing and begging, tag words of affirmation and negation, interrogative pronouns, interrogative formulas, short affective sentences and sensual elements in cognitive sentences. In the continuation of his paper the author mentions the role of the addressee in the manifestation of one's thoughts and the attention one shows to the personality of the person one is addressing. The author next looks at the sensual-perceptual aspect of everyday speech. He finally mentions the trivial and frugal nature of everyday speech. If one aims to to come up with some kind of differentiation within the everyday speech of Satyricon, then we can subsume the everyday speech of Encolpius and his associates under educated city speech while the speech of Trimalchion's social circle, alongside the language of members of the plebeian social circle, can generally be considered the speech of the populace. For understanding the question delineated in the article concerning the opposition between the human and the poetic it is enormously important that this opposition did not exist from time immemorial but that there was a time when poetic language was truly human in the primordial sense of the word. In this sense the opposition between the poetic and the human opens up a wholly new opposition, the opposition between contemporary poetic production and the production of former times. In such a manner the horizon of questions discussed in the article is broadened with a new question: what are the reasons for this state of affairs? Addressing exactly this question in Satyricon, Petronius at the same time questions the truth of his contemporary artistic production and in this manner puts on trial the truth of the language of his own literary heritage.