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chapter 17
Petronius’ linguistic resources
Martti Leiwo
Petronius uses many linguistic devices to characterise his narrative and the
persons he describes, employing resources from the fields of vocabulary,
morphology, syntax, code-switching, rhetoric and pragmatics; 1 the only
major linguistic possibility that he leaves underexploited is the description
of pronunciation. 2 Many studies of Petronius’ language deal with the
idiosyncrasies of his expressions, but the subject is still not fully understood,
in part because his work is a literary creation that deliberately violates the
literary conventions of classical Latin (see Adams 2005b: 77–8; Herman
2003: 139). The difference between this prescriptive or normative good
literary Latin and the Latin of Petronius is notable. So, how can we define
the language of Petronius?
The study of Petronius’ language begins with the understanding that it
varies both by genre (e.g. between dialogue and narrative) and by social
context (e.g. between the speech of one character and another). Much has
already been written on different aspects of this variation; 3 here my aim
is to examine a few specific usages and see what light they can shed on
Petronius’ linguistic and literary technique.
The Satyricon involves many different genres (see e.g. Petersmann 1977:
26; Callebat 1998: 10–2, 25–6; Biville 2003: 50–2), and Petronius writes
according to his conceptions of the respective genres (oratory, epic poetry,
tragic drama, derisive poetry) and also tries to use different registers for
1 I would like to express my warmest thanks to Eleanor Dickey for her exceptional criticism and help
in all matters, especially with my English. I am also very grateful to my research assistant Riku
Partanen for providing me with examples and excellent ideas.
2 See Daheim and Blänsdorf 2003: 96–7. The omission is not absolute, as some variant spellings in the
text of Petronius probably indicate non-standard pronunciations, e.g. Hermeros’ saplutus, dupundii,
dupunduarius (37.6, 58.4, 58.5); it is possible that additional variant spellings may have disappeared in
the course of the text’s transmission. Although Roman writers did not often use variant spellings to
characterise individuals’ speech, regional and social differences in pronunciation existed (see Adams
2007) and sometimes appear in Latin literature by means of variant spellings (e.g. Catul. 84).
3 See e.g. Petersmann 1977, Pinkster1987, Boyce1991, and the various pieces in Herman and Rosén
2003.
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