Petronius

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics

BBC

Stand-up, History, Comedy

4.8 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A fresh look at the ancient world.

Natalie Haynes, critic, writer and reformed stand-up comedian, brings the ancient world entertainingly up to date. In each of the four programmes she profiles a figure from ancient Greece or Rome and creates a stand-up routine around them. She then goes in search of the links which make the ancient world still very relevant in the 21st century.

Episode 1: The worst dinner party in history. Natalie investigates the work of the writer Petronius, creator of the infamous Satyricon, later made into a film by Fellini. It’s all about excess; as a vegetarian, Natalie’s particularly revolted by the way in which the Romans insisted on making edible food look disgusting. With satirical cartoonist Martin Rowson, Fellini fan Richard Dyer and historian Victoria Rimell.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2014.

Transcript

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0:00.0	He scored goals, lifted trophies and broken records along the way.
0:05.4	And now he's got a podcast.
0:07.2	Welcome to the Wayne Rooney show.
0:09.1	Twice a week, Wayne Rooney, Kay Kerd and me, Kelly Summers,
0:12.6	break down the biggest stories in the Premier League and beyond.
0:15.6	As much as you'd like to say,
0:16.7	loyalty in football now is no existence, whether that's fun players or managers.
0:20.5	Plus, we'll hear the funniest
0:21.7	wildest and most outrageous stories from wayne's career the way new and he show everybody's talking about it
0:27.9	listen on bbc sounds hello thank you for coming today i would like to talk to you about the roman satirist
0:34.3	petronius so Petronius.
0:43.2	So Petronius lived in the first century AD.
0:46.5	He is the arbiter eleganti,
0:49.2	the arbiter of what is elegant for Nero.
0:51.5	That's Christopher Biggins, if you remember your emperors.
1:29.6	The I Claudius route. I will obviously be allowing those as touchstones throughout. So he's the arbiter Elegentiae of Christopher Biggins slash the Emperor Nero. And his job is to decide what is cool and what is not cool. He is a spectacular snob. And incredibly holier than now, I think, in terms of what's hip and what isn't. And eventually, of course, so often with people who say, that's cool, that's not, that's cool, that's not. He annoys the wrong person. And therefore, in 66 AD, he is accused of treason. Yes. Which means that he has to commit suicide. Now I know, because it seems right, like the first century AD especially, is basically one long Kurt Cobain tribute, right?
1:35.8	People are committing suicide about every 20 minutes, so I feel like I should set the record straight, at least a little.
1:43.3	If you are accused of, for example, treason, and you kill yourself before you're convicted, then your family are still your heirs.
1:45.2	If, on the other hand, you're convicted before you can commit suicide, then your property is taken and divided up amongst your accusers.
1:50.6	So, it's a better bet to kill yourself. You may have noticed the already very obvious problem in this,
1:56.9	which is that if you own something really nice, there's a little bit of an incentive for
2:01.6	somebody to accuse you of treason. And it does happen. A man named Valerius Asiaticus has a very
	...

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