Petronius

Gaius Petronius Arbiter moved through Nero's court in the mid-first century AD, a period when proximity to the emperor could elevate or destroy you in a season. Somewhere in those years — likely during Nero's reign from 54 to 68 — he wrote the Satyricon, a work so singular and profane that scholars still argue over what chunks are missing and what it all meant. The novel outlasted him by two millennia. In 1895 Henryk Sienkiewicz made Petronius a central figure in Quo Vadis, his historical novel of Neronian Rome, and Leo Genn played him in the 1951 film. He died around 66 AD, the court and the…