Petronius

Petronius was a Roman writer traditionally identified with a courtier of Nero. The surviving Satyricon offers a fragmented comic narrative of travel, fraud, sexuality and social ambition, including the famous dinner of the freedman Trimalchio.

In Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, with the help of his cultivated uncle Petronius and the informer Chilo, Vinicius searches for her, but contact with the Christians gradually turns possession into love and forces him to question the violence accepted by Nero’s court. In Margaret George’s Emperor Nero, the narrative covers the Pisonian conspiracy and the enforced deaths of figures including Seneca, Lucan and Petronius, followed by Poppaea’s death, Nero’s artistic tour of Greece and the final revolts against his government. Other novels featuring Petronius include Petronius’s The Satyricon and Petronius’s The Satyricon and the Apocolocyntosis.