Petronius Arbiter is a little-known character in Roman history eclipsed as he is by his ill-fated and much maligned patron: the Emperor Nero. However, Petronius does in some ways deserve to be better known as the probable author of the fragments we have of the text of ‘The Satyricon’. I say fragments precisely because we have unfortunately little of the original text left to us.

However, what we have of it will shock even the most ardent libertine as in it Petronius is probably portraying the Emperor Nero - at least in part - as his central character in spite of being one of Nero’s closest confidents until - as Tacitus relates - (1) Nero had premonitions of Stalin and decided to kill his confident because he ‘knew too much’. The acts related are principally homosexual and paedophilic in nature - quite literally a good part of the existent work is essentially a hymnal to sexual intercourse with young male children that would make even NAMBLA blush - and thus it is hardly surprising that the work has long been unknown outside of specialists and when it began being published in translation: it was frequently excerpted in jewish-owned, pornographic publications.

In spite of the vile nature of the treatise itself it does have one significant reference to jews in one of the disjointed fragments we have. To wit:

‘A Jew may adore his god in the sky,

And pour out his woes to ears of the sky,

But unless he shorten his scabbard to see,

That the tip of his penis will always hang free,

He’ll be driven from home to a city in Greece,

And spend all his Sabbaths – eating in peace,’ (2) 

Petronius’ point here is beautifully made in that he echoes a popular Roman and Greek observation about the jews in the absurdity of their worship and devotion to Yahweh who - unlike any other God - does not manifest himself on earth and as such offers no proof of his existence. Yahweh has no idols and does not offer miraculous interventions for his followers and in fact does nothing to win them over to his worship. In the Roman and Greek view of the world: the Gods and Goddesses were anthropomorphic and were as fickle and capricious as men and women (essentially a form of highly evolved human), but the jews conceived of something wholly new: a God bent on and delighting in sadistically punishing, torturing and murdering his followers while offering no actual incentive to worship him other than terror.

The Romans and Greeks simply couldn’t conceive that it was in any way sane to worship a God who offered no advantages to his followers as they operated in a world where the worship of the divine was almost both a democracy and evolutionary meritocracy where anyone could more or less become a member of whatever cult and belief system they chose. The saner cults tended to survive and the more outlandish tended to fall by the wayside or be supressed if they had begun to take on a subversive nature (such as the numerous suppressions of the cult of Isis in Rome).

Petronius is observing through the medium of satirical rhyme that the jews worship a God that they can’t prove ever existed in the first place and that their bleats and whines to the empty sky filled with no God are the nonsense of a monstrously deluded and highly superstitious people. After all, if Yahweh exists - Petronius reasons - then the jews wouldn’t have been conquered by the Romans and wouldn’t be constantly be in revolt against Roman civilisation.

Petronius’ delightfully vicious swipe at Yahweh and his personal cult of lunatics is further represented in his remarks about circumcision and the tip of a jew’s penis ‘always hanging free’. An allusion of course to Judaism’s status as a barbaric eastern religion in Roman and Greek eyes as well as poking fun at the way that jewish men emasculate themselves before Yahweh. In this sense Petronius is furthering his criticism as well by suggesting that if a jew cares to learn reason and enjoy life then he will be rejected by his or her fellow jews, ‘he’ll be driven from home’, and then the jew concerned can enjoy life away from his or her barbarous religion in the civilised world (represented by ‘a city in Greece’). Petronius rightly identifies the covenant of circumcision as the cornerstone of Judaism - albeit the symbolic one - and the embodiment of jewish barbarity on par with that of the Egyptians and Arabs in Petronius’ mind. (3)

This allusion to jews choosing to live outside of Judaism in ‘a city in Greece’ (i.e., in civilisation) is more perceptive than it might at first sound in that it is a direct reference to the Hellenizing jews of this period who either minimized or rejected Judaism: plumping instead for Greek philosophy and logic. They were much hated by their highly religious kin to such an extent that calls for their mass murder as a mitzvah to Yahweh were not uncommon at the time and nor are they today.

What Petronius is saying here is very simply that while worshippers of Judaism - and hence in his view jews as a people - are superstitious, barbarous and backwards: those jews who spurn their birth-right and try to live and think as Romans and Greeks do are praiseworthy as they are no longer called to war with the gentiles and can sup with them in apparent peace.

Thus in some respects Petronius’ is an example of pagan anti-Judaism that is of itself praiseworthy, but not without defect as he has not gone far enough in his understanding of Judaism and merely treats it as a naïve national superstition as opposed to the bloodthirsty cult that it in fact was then and to some extent is still now. 

References

(1) Tac. An. 17:18-19

(2) Anthologia Latina (1973 edition): Fragment 696

(3) Petr. 102