Petronius - in Fiction

In Fiction

Petronius appears or is referenced in several works of fiction:

• A stanza of Petronius' poetry is in Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts: "Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores . . . Yield not to misfortune: the far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind and the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting..."
• In the 1835 short story "A Tale of Roman Life" by Alexander Pushkin, Petronius' final days in Cumae are chronicled.
• David Wishart's novel Nero is narrated by Petronius, and is presented as his last testament before his enforced suicide.
• Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel Quo Vadis and its adaptations, where C. Petronius is the preferred courtier of Nero, using his wit to adulate and mock him at the same time. He is horrified at Nero's burning of Rome, and eventually commits suicide to escape both Nero's antics and his anticipated execution.
• In the 1951 film of Quo Vadis, Petronius is portrayed by Leo Genn, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
• In the 2001 film of Quo Vadis, Petronius is portrayed by Boguslaw Linda.
• Mika Waltari's novel The Roman.
• in Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Door into Summer, in which the protagonist's cat is named "Petronius the Arbiter".
• in Jesse Browner's novel The Uncertain Hour, which recounts Petronius' final banquet and suicide (as told by Tacitus, Annals 16).
• in Anthony Burgess's novel The Kingdom of the Wicked, Gaius Petronius appears as a major character, an advisor to Nero.
• George Orwell in "Bookshop Memories" (1936): "Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petronius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators."

In recent times, a popular quote (reportedly by Charlton Ogburn, 1957) on reorganization is often (but spuriously) attributed to a Gaius Petronius. In one version it reads:

We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.