method of Horace in his Satires when we read the dramatic description of
the shipwreck in Petronius. The blackness of night descends upon the
water; the little bark which contains the hero and his friends is at the
mercy of the sea; Lichas, the master of the vessel, is swept from the deck
by a wave, Encolpius and his comrade Giton prepare to die in each other's
embrace, but the tragic scene ends with a ridiculous picture of Eumolpus
bellowing out above the roar of the storm a new poem which he is setting
down upon a huge piece of parchment. Evidently Petronius has the same
dread of being taken too seriously which Horace shows so often in his
Satires. The cynical, or at least unmoral, attitude of Petronius is
brought out in a still more marked way at the close of this same passage.
Of those upon the ill-fated ship the degenerates Encolpius, Giton, and
Eumolpus, who have wronged Lichas irreparably, escape, while the pious
Lichas meets a horrible death. All this seems to make it clear that not
only does the subject which Petronius has treated inevitably involve a
satire upon contemporary society, but that the author takes a satirical or
cynical attitude toward life.

Another characteristic of the story is its realism. There are no
marvellous adventures, and in fact no improbable incidents in it. The
author never obtrudes his own personality upon us, as his successor
Apuleius sometimes does, or as Thackeray has done. We know what the people
in the story are like, not from the author's description of them, but from
their actions, from the subjects about which they talk, and from the way
in which they talk. Agamemnon converses as a rhetorician might talk,
Habinnas like a millionnaire stone-cutter, and Echion like a rag-dealer,
and their language and style are what we should expect from men of their
standing in society and of their occupations. The conversations of
Trimalchio and his freedmen guests are not witty, and their jests are not
clever. This adherence to the true principles of realism is the more