The Broken Door

Caesar and the paraclausithyron in Petronius’ Bellum Civile

Abstract

The paper scrutinizes the longest poetic inset of the Satyrica, the so-called Bellum Civile, which recounts the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and remains one of the most analysed and controversial texts in Petronian philology. The starting point for interpretation concerns the relationship between the framing prose narrative and the poem. In line with recent scholarship, this study examines the Caesar scene, the central section of the poem from a new perspective, incorporating Roman love elegy in addition to the much-discussed Virgilian and Lucanian parallels. The elegiac topoi and vocabulary thus offer an opportunity to reassess the function of the Bellum Civile within the Satyrica, as well as its relation to narrative structure and characterization.