‘How tough it is for outlaws’ (quam male est extra legem uiuentibus, Sat. 125.4),Footnote ¹ laments Encolpius, the petty-criminal narrator of Petronius’ Satyrica, as he frets about whether he and his buddies will be found out as they engage in a scheme to fleece the legacy hunters of Croton. But Encolpius and his crew are outlaws in more senses than one. Having forgotten, or simply disregarded, marital-reproductive household arrangements, they engage in novel forms of relationality that their cultural lexicon can barely cover as they quest after sex, feasts, money, or simply subsistence. Much Petronian scholarship, promoting a reading that looks down on the characters, views these forms of relationality as parodic and ‘purely comic’, ludicrously failed attempts by low, satirized characters to appropriate sublime Roman social institutions like fraternal pietas. In this article, taking as my primary example the reformulation of brotherhood and the use of the kin term frater by Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton, I read these forms of sociality as queer: that is to say, potentially challenging to normativity rather than simply inadequate to meet its demands.Footnote ² Petronian brotherhood, read in this light, appears richly shaded and contested, not merely a one-dimensional misappropriation composed for the benefit of a ‘superior’ elite audience. What exactly it means to be a ‘brother’ in this postlapsarian world is always an active question in the scenes involving the trio. I offer in this article a more detailed close reading of Petronian brotherhood than has been possible in other, briefer scholarly accounts, focusing in particular on the competing conceptualizations of ‘brotherhood’ by different characters, from Encolpius’ exclusive use of the term as something like ‘boyfriend’ to Ascyltos’ more capacious use of the word.

Brotherhood is hard to miss in the Satyrica. The appellation frater follows the Encolpius–Ascyltos–Giton trio from their first appearance at the beginning of the extant text, and the language of siblinghood persists all the way to Croton. frater is used 25 times in the extant text in reference to the interrelationships of the three men.Footnote ³ The modern reader is deprived of a great deal of information that would aid in interpreting the relationships among the trio: we cannot know for sure (though there has certainly been ample speculation) in what circumstances Encolpius met Ascyltos or Giton, how long he has been travelling with them when the extant text begins, what relationship Encolpius and Giton had with Lichas and Tryphaena to occasion the events on the ship, what happened that one time in the uiridarium (‘garden’) with Ascyltos, and so forth.Footnote ⁴ So the reader has the curious impression of getting a glimpse into a set of relationships already well established and developed, and having to extrapolate from the way the characters act what exactly the nature of these relationships might be. As far as the extant text goes, the pre- and post-Cena scenes between Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton (9–11 and 79f.) form a parallel pair of lovers’ quarrels as Giton is exchanged from bed to bed and each of the older men is ‘caught out’ by the other, but there are no perfect symmetries. The scenes are densely packed with intersecting levels of significance, and the roles of the three men continually shift. Are they friends, brothers, messmates, spouses, who is the wife, who is the husband, who is paired up with whom, who wants whom? The answer seems to change over and over, and none of the old terms quite seem to fit. As a result, fraternity is expanded to cover a range of forms of relationality.

Scholarship on the sociality of the trio tends to focus on the ‘instability’ of these relationships, set in contrast to the purported stability of normative kinship relationships (both blood brotherhood and state-sanctioned heterosexual marriage, i.e., conjugality and consanguinity). The humour in the scenes supposedly arises from the fact that the fratres consider themselves lofty literary figures, whereas they are in fact thoroughly ‘disreputable’, a band of ‘promiscuous homosexual rogues’Footnote ⁵ who ‘abuse’ and ‘misappropriate’ the ‘norms of brotherly love’.Footnote ⁶ According to this point of view, their use of brotherhood is a simple metaphor, and a bad one at that. The high is inappropriately applied to the low: ‘we’ laugh. But this kind of reading views the trio from the point of view of the normative: it directs its mastering gaze down from above, perceiving and acknowledging a lack of fit with normativity, but immediately defanging that lack of fit with tension-defusing laughter rather than seeking to examine it more deeply. We (philologists? Roman elite men?) ridicule those hopelessly misguided, self-deluding fools, shutting down novelistic polyglossia for the sake of a monolithic normativizing (and moralistic) reading, and that is the end of the story.Footnote ⁷ I seek here to substitute such a top-down gaze for a bottom-up one, and to track the way the fratres themselves view their relationships, how they appropriate the bond of brotherhood and resignify it. It is not the case, at any rate, that anyone has a particularly normatively ‘successful’ relationship in the Satyrica, conjugal, fraternal, or otherwise; the outlaw characters must work with the limited material they have in a social milieu in which marginality is brought to the centre.

Although plagued by the ever-smoldering seeds of civil conflict from the mythical origins of Rome on, the language of brotherhood nonetheless retained its seductive symbolic force to the extent that it was used metaphorically of all manner of male–male relationships, from polite acquaintance to intimate friendship.Footnote ⁸ It is, therefore, not unusual per se for a Roman man to refer to another unrelated to him as ‘brother’; Encolpius and co draw on a familiar extension of kinship terminology. However, they go too far. They seek not to supplement kin relations with homosocial bonds imaged through a brother-metaphor, as a Roman gentleman would very well be expected to do, but to replace the normative household itself, everywhere absent in the Satyrica, with a set of male–male relationships that are explicitly sexual, lacking in the disavowal and sublimation of physical sexuality upon which homosociality is grounded.Footnote ⁹ The fact that ‘brother’ was already a standard metaphor for relationships between unrelated men means that the trio's resignification of the term confronts not only kinship but also a broader field of male–male relations.

The interrelationships among the members of the trio do not fit easily into normative Roman conceptions of sociality. None of them have wives or children (nor do they mention the desire or expectation to marry or sire children); none of them mention parents, siblings, or any other blood relatives.Footnote ¹⁰ Encolpius and Ascyltos alternately have sex with Giton, and both feel they have some kind of claim on him; he is sometimes represented as if he were a slave, but at other times he appears to have some degree of agency of his own.Footnote ¹¹ The two older men have had some kind of sexual encounter in the past (as Sat. 9 reveals, hinting at a tryst in a garden), but the broken text prevents us knowing the details of their sexual relationship or whether it was limited to a single encounter. The trio is on the road and on the run, stuck in perpetually looping adventure time: this is not a settled household arrangement, but something more contingent. The three seem to have gathered primarily for financial security, or at least Encolpius suggests as much when he tells Ascyltos they ought to part company and ‘drive out [their] poverty by separate enterprises’ (paupertatem nostram priuatis quaestibus…expellere, 9.4). But the fact that all three members of the trio have engaged in sexual activity with one another immediately complicates the formation of the ménage à trois as a matter of simple financial expediency. Complex emotional bonds link the fratres, uniting them and setting them at odds in turn. Within the petty-criminal lifestyle and outside of normative kinship, some very queer bonds are forged: queer both in the sense that they exceed the bounds of the normative Roman household, and that they incorporate kinds of intimacy between men that would normally generate anxiety.

frater, the primary Latin kin term for ‘brother’, is very often used of these bonds, and it takes on a peculiar familiarity in the frequency of its use, becoming a kind of queerly uncanny doublet of itself. The term frater is used only three times in relation to actual ‘blood’ brothers, and twice these brothers are positioned in the ‘over there’ of myth: the brother of the freedman Chrysanthus, to whom he denied inheritance because of conflict between them (43.4); the ‘brothers’ Diomedes and Ganymede; Trimalchio's butchered—or reinvented?Footnote ¹²—version of Agamemnon and Menelaus (59.1); and the twin sons of Laocoon in Eumolpus’ Troiae halosis (89.46). Of course, we cannot know about the brothers that are lost to us forever with the fragmentation of the text, but nonetheless the frequency with which brotherhood language is used of the three rogues compared to its use in reference to actual brothers is immediately striking. The ‘queer’ variant of brotherhood overshadows ‘actual’ brotherhood; the purported ‘copy’ begins to seem threatening to the putative authenticity of the ‘original’ which by its very absence appears unreal. What can ‘brotherhood’ possibly mean when nobody has a ‘real’ brother? And what meaning do kin relationships have, anyway, in a milieu without kin and without reproductive futurism? One of the issues here, as we shall see, is that ‘brotherhood’, even this queer brotherhood, seems to mean different things to Encolpius and Ascyltos. The boundaries of this ‘new’ kind of brotherhood are far from uncontested. They grope towards something else, something elsewhere, but their different ideas of what this new thing is set them in conflict.

Modern scholarship has certainly not been blind to the non-standard nature of the intimacies within the trio. Several scholars, in particular Craig Williams, have focused on the paradigm of ‘brotherhood’ as a way for the characters of the Satyrica to ‘sidestep’ issues of penetration, and to structure their relationships more fluidly than the ‘priapic paradigm’ of clearly demarcated penetrator and penetratee allows.Footnote ¹³ To the normative imaginary in its strictest terms, penetration of one (citizen) man by another was, regardless of circumstances, inherently an act of violation, depriving the penetrated man of his status and masculinity, equating him with a social inferior like a woman or slave.Footnote ¹⁴ But if two men are in a relationship of ‘brotherhood’, it is not obvious who is superior, and it is not necessary that one member of the brother-pair gain his status at the expense of the other.

The hypothesis of brotherhood as an equalizing term, however, must account for the fact that brother language is not used equally among the members of the trio. Although the appellation frater is used at times of all three members of the Encolpius–Ascyltos–Giton trio, it is not applied in symmetrical ways. Tracking the usage of frater reveals that, although Encolpius frequently refers to Giton as his frater,Footnote ¹⁵ he is chary of referring to Ascyltos as such: in fact, he never does so in the extant text. On several occasions, Ascyltos refers to Encolpius as frater Footnote ¹⁶ (and Giton also calls Ascyltos Encolpius’ frater Footnote ¹⁷), but Encolpius does not reciprocate. If Ascyltos interpellates Encolpius as ‘brother’, he implicitly refuses the call and addresses Ascyltos in terms of friendship instead. frater, for Encolpius, does indeed at times seem almost equivalent to ‘boyfriend’, and he apparently regards Giton as his only boyfriend. frater is his default way of referring to, and addressing, Giton. Sometimes it seems relatively neutral, a straightforwardly descriptive way of referring to Giton. On several occasions, however, calling Giton frater appears to be for Encolpius a way of claiming him as his own against rival attempts on the boy: he tells Quartilla, when she asks whose Giton is, that he is his frater (24.6). He does not say merely that he belongs to him, but that he is his brother; the term is a pointed declaration, something like ‘he's my boyfriend’. Encolpius is enraged when he catches Ascyltos in bed with ‘a brother not his own’ (fratre non suo, 79.9). Giton, he implies, is his brother and his alone, not Ascyltos’. Sharing is impermissible.

Perhaps the most telling scene for Encolpius’ ‘exclusive’ view of brotherhood comes long after Ascyltos has dropped out of the story. Circe, exploiting her knowledge of Encolpius’ relationship with Giton, offers herself to him as a soror, imploring him to simply ‘adopt’ a sister alongside his brother. Here is the resultant exchange:

Circe reaches towards a notion of ‘siblinghood’ as the basis for non-monogamy, a way to justify having several lovers at once by invoking a ‘natural’ fact about kinship: it is possible to have more than one sibling simultaneously, on the same terms. One has an equivalent relationship with each of one's siblings: Circe wants Encolpius to love her just as he loves Giton, and there is no need for him to give Giton up in order to do so. Circe's proposal is, in many ways, the natural conclusion to the logic of siblinghood. If you intend to treat your lover as a kind of metaphorical sibling, why not go the whole hog and incorporate into your sex life the non-exclusivity of blood siblings? One might wonder at the content of the enquiries Circe has supposedly made into Encolpius’ sex life: has she heard about his obsession with ‘brotherhood’ and the fact he is fond of referring to Giton as his frater, or is this somehow a shared idiom in the world of the Satyrica, even beyond the Ascyltos–Encolpius–Giton trio? Or does Encolpius merely characterize Circe in such a way as to reflect his own obsession with brotherhood?

At any rate, however, Encolpius does not assent to this ‘commonsensical’ invocation of the non-exclusivity of sibling terminology, but instead says he will give up Giton for Circe, as though he thinks himself capable of having only one ‘sibling’ at once. Encolpius has transformed the meaning of ‘siblinghood’: to him, it is a way of describing an exclusive relationship. He may—and does—have other lovers, but Giton is his only ‘brother’. But even here, there is another fillip of non-exclusivity, whether or not Encolpius intends it. Addressing Circe in religious tones, he assures her that he will give Giton to her as a kind of offering: dono tibi fratrem meum. While he seems to mean that he will give up Giton in favour of Circe (donare meaning ‘to give up for the sake of’, OLD 3), the phrase could easily be taken to mean that he will give Giton to Circe (donare meaning ‘to present, grant, give to’, OLD 2), that is, Circe will ‘have’ both Encolpius and Giton. And who in the Satyrica would refuse a gift of Giton to enjoy for themselves, given his apparently universal desirability (though that universal desirability is a function of the way Encolpius sees the world)? Tryphaena and Quartilla have already enjoyed Giton as a tasty morsel; why not Circe also, especially given her penchant for men of a low social status? And if Circe wants Encolpius to love her like he loves Giton, shouldn't she, by analogy, be able to love Giton the way Encolpius does, if Giton is ‘given’ to her? Circe's proposal that one can have more than one sibling ‘stains’ Encolpius’ remark. And she is not deaf to the salacious possibilities: she assures Encolpius that ‘he need not fear anyone meddlesome, because [his] brother is far off’ (neque est quod curiosum aliquem extimescas: longe ab hoc loco frater est). The generalizing aliquis immediately morphs into the specific frater: initially feigning that she could mean just anyone, she proceeds to conjure up the image of Giton's presence only to banish it, but the fantasy of Giton as voyeur lingers—and voyeurism in the Satyrica repeatedly leads to (attempted) sexual activity.Footnote ¹⁸ The non-exclusivity of sibling terminology, when used in a sexual sense, invokes the never quite realized potential for group sex between multiple ‘brothers’ and/or ‘sisters’.Footnote ¹⁹

Another crucial point here is the way in which Encolpius thinks brotherhood is established. After the Cena and more squabbling over Giton, Ascyltos finally proposes that they hand over the matter of Giton's brotherhood to the boy himself:

Giton's freedom has been limited, Ascyltos implies, but now a choice is open to him. Certainly Giton oscillates continually between being represented by Ascyltos and Encolpius as exchanged or stolen property or a kind of disputed inheritance, and having agency of his own. Ascyltos here envisions ‘brotherhood’ as a matter of choice, closer in that respect to conjugality than consanguinity. But it is unclear whether Ascyltos imagines that Giton is choosing which of the two men will become his brother, or whether he is choosing between two men who are already his brothers. Does Giton's choice form brotherhood in the first place, or is there something prior to choice? Where Circe spoke in terms of adoption, adoptare, invoking a legal mechanism for the creation of kinship but playfully reworking it (one strictly ‘adopts’ a child, not a sibling), Ascyltos seems to have something more informal in mind.

Although Ascyltos’ view of the formation of brotherhood remains somewhat elusive (such is the case elsewhere also, as we shall see), Encolpius proceeds to reveal exactly how he thinks brotherhood is initiated. He is confident that Giton will choose him as his brother, because their ‘long association has transmuted itself into a blood relation’ (uetustissimam consuetudinem putabam in sanguinis pignus transisse, 80.6). This is rather a stunning thing for Encolpius to say:Footnote ²⁰ he thinks that a long-established relationship of ‘familiarity’, consuetudo, can bring about an actual blood bond. The phrase sanguinis pignus is rare; it is found elsewhere only in two pieces of (Neronian) literature:Footnote ²¹ Seneca's Oedipus, where it is used of the children of Oedipus and Jocasta, an ‘ill-omened pledge of [Oedipus’] blood’ (inauspicatum sanguinis pignus mei, 1022), and Lucan's Bellum Ciuile, where it is used of the ‘pledges of united blood’ Julia took to the underworld (pignora iuncti | sanguinis, 1.111). pignus, in its primary meaning, is something given as surety for a bond; a guarantee of faith (OLD 1). As such, it is used of children who act as surety for a marriage. Such is apparently the meaning of sanguinis pignus in Seneca and Lucan, but Encolpius means something entirely different, and thus uses the phrase in a unique way. He seems to be using sanguis in the sense of ‘blood relationship’ or ‘consanguinity’ (OLD 8b, where Sat. 80 is cited). His long-lasting relationship with Giton has, therefore, ‘passed over into a pledge of consanguinity’ (80.6).

Encolpius, wittingly or not—and he makes the statement, buried in a relative clause, so casually that one can overlook the implications—here poses a strong challenge to ‘natural’ brotherhood by suggesting that association can actually create blood kinship. Indeed, some Roman sources emphasize the shared experiences of brothers as a basis for fraternal pietas, albeit secondarily to the ‘natural fact’ of shared birth: commonality of both nature and nurture establishes emotional intimacy and loyalty between brothers.Footnote ²² But Encolpius here stretches the metaphoricity of their queer brotherhood to its very limits, to the point where it is collapsed with blood brotherhood. Once the relationship has been established by consuetudo, ‘metaphorical’ brotherhood merges completely with ‘actual’ blood brotherhood. This does not even seem to be a consciously willed process; it is the consuetudo itself that has grammatical agency to ‘pass over’, transisse. It seems that, to Encolpius’ mind, once intimacy and familiarity reach a certain point, the relationship automatically becomes one of blood. It then becomes Giton's relationship with Encolpius as his ‘blood brother’ that is the basis for a loyalty which should impel Giton to follow Encolpius as his lover. Brother and lover are one and the same; tenor and vehicle have merged. Encolpius shows no compunction whatsoever about the overtly incestuous overtones; no incest taboo seems even to exist to him. Beneath the surface of Encolpius’ casual claim about Giton's relationship to him lies the framework of something totally alien to normative kinship even as it claims a complete identity with it. But almost immediately after having gestured towards a rupture of this kind, Encolpius reverts to the idea of brotherhood as choice: Giton, he says, immediately ‘chose Ascyltos as his brother’ (fratrem Ascylton elegit, 80.7). Just as he is forced to yield Giton to Ascyltos, he is also compelled to concede to the definition Ascyltos has just offered of brotherhood, a simple matter of choice.

But Ascyltos’ views on brotherhood, insofar as they can even be determined through the murky glass of Encolpius’ narrative, are perhaps rather more complex than he suggests during the brother-choice scene. One of the most notorious loci for ‘brotherhood’ in the Satyrica is Ascyltos’ invocation of his ‘brotherhood’ with Encolpius during their first quarrel over Giton. After Encolpius accuses Ascyltos of having submitted to penetration and oral sex, Ascyltos responds with something rather more elusive and much less easy to fit into the rigid scheme of triumphant penetrator and humiliated penetrated party:

Much scholarly discussion of this scene has focused on how Ascyltos’ statement might relate to the penetrator–penetrated paradigm: is he accusing Encolpius of being penetrated by Giton, or is he invoking his own penetration by Encolpius?Footnote ²³ Normative discourse insists that it must be one or the other. Indeed, the juxtaposition of Ascyltos’ outburst with Encolpius’ accusations, which clearly are based on penetration, might well cause a reader to be thinking in terms of the penetrative hierarchy. But there are broader affective dynamics at issue as well. It is abundantly clear, regardless of what exact sexual conduct is at issue, that frater takes on a pointed sexual meaning here: there was a time when Ascyltos was to Encolpius as Giton is to Encolpius now, and the Encolpius–Giton relationship is saturated with overt sexuality. But Ascyltos’ comment here opens up the idea that there might be more than one way of being a brother: eadem ratione (‘the same way’) qualifies frater. Ascyltos ‘was’ Encolpius’ brother in a certain way in the past, but Ascyltos still considers him a ‘brother’ in the narrative present, frequently addressing him as such. Their sexual relationship was in the past, but their brotherhood endures into the present—at least for Ascyltos. Encolpius, however, does not reciprocate in referring to Ascyltos as a brother. It is difficult to know precisely how to interpret the rapid change in subject (to the events involving Agamemnon) that the quarrel takes after Ascyltos’ invocation of his sexual past with Encolpius, and whether the rapidity of this change indicates discomfort on Encolpius’ part, or simple indifference. Ascyltos is only pretending to be scandalized, and the whole thing ends up in laughter; the histrionic ‘insults’ apparently bruise neither of them.Footnote ²⁴ At any rate, there seems to be no paralyzing anxiety about the fact that a sexual relationship once existed between these ‘brothers’. They transition, apparently fluidly, from lovers to travelling buddies, remaining ‘brothers’, at least in Ascyltos’ eyes, the entire time. Brotherhood in the Satyrica has the potential to be remarkably flexible, apparently able to incorporate almost every kind of male intimacy, including explicit peer sexuality. But this is not always the way Encolpius, who wants to draw dividing lines and possess Giton exclusively, views the matter.

Giton seems to pick up on some of the ambivalence of brotherhood when, accusing Ascyltos of attempted rape, he disparagingly refers to Ascyltos as tuus iste frater seu comes (‘that brother or companion of yours’, 9.4). Giton affects not to know the valence of the relationship between Ascyltos and Encolpius: is it brotherhood or comradeship? Just how intimate is it? The use of iste marks Giton's remark as sarcastic, but what exactly is he getting at? His comment, coming so close to Ascyltos’ invocation of his brotherhood-inflected sexual encounter with Encolpius in the past, can be interpreted as playing on the sexual meaning of brotherhood by formulating a disjuncture between a frater and a comes rather than the smooth homosocial continuum that Ascyltos seems to see.Footnote ²⁵ During the post-Cena quarrel, Giton begs Encolpius and Ascyltos not to allow a ‘humble inn to witness a Theban duel’, that is, civil strife between Polynices and Eteocles (ne Thebanum par humilis taberna spectaret, 80.3): one wonders here whether the well-read Giton is picking up on Thebes’ notoriously incestuous nature and again hinting at the sexualization of the Encolpius–Ascyltos relationship. It is up to the reader to piece together from knowing references and insinuations on the part of Giton and Ascyltos what exactly ‘brotherhood’ means to them. It is certainly not transparent.

When Ascyltos claims, some time after the first quarrel but still on the same night, that he will go off tomorrow and ‘find a dwelling and another brother’ (habitationem mihi prospiciam et aliquem fratrem, 10.6), the ambivalence of brotherhood is again set in relief: when he says he will find another brother, does he mean another Encolpius or another Giton? Are they both brothers to him? Interpreters and translators of the Satyrica use phrases as divergent as ‘little friend’, ‘roommate’, and ‘boyfriend’ to render frater here;Footnote ²⁶ it has become a complex and multivalent term by this point in the text. If Encolpius were to say ‘I'll go in search of another brother’, we could be much more sure that he meant ‘another Giton’. Ascyltos is more opaque. Despite Encolpius’ retrospective presentation of Ascyltos as nothing but an obstacle between himself and his sole brother Giton, Ascyltos’ own valuation of his relationship with Encolpius seems rather different.

Indeed, the confrontation between Ascyltos and Encolpius over Giton is generated partially by competing interpretations of what ‘brotherhood’ means. Both Ascyltos and Encolpius claim they are entitled to a share of Giton, but each man deploys ‘fraternity’ in a different way in order to lay his claim. Encolpius feels that he is entitled to Giton because his association with him has forged a blood-bond, the likes of which Ascyltos does not have with the boy. To Ascyltos, however, it is the fraternal relationship that he feels he has with Encolpius, rather than with Giton, that is the basis for his claim: he and Encolpius are brothers, and brothers share. Encolpius’ brotherhood is exclusive and focused on his relationship with Giton; Ascyltos’ inclusive and focused on his relationship with Encolpius. Where Ascyltos feels Encolpius is threatening the bond of brotherhood, Encolpius sees Ascyltos’ betrayal in terms of friendship.Footnote ²⁷ Ascyltos’ view of brotherhood, then, is closer to Circe's than to Encolpius’.

The pre-Cena scene in which Ascyltos punishes Encolpius for failing to share Giton illustrates this dynamic:

When Ascyltos catches Encolpius in bed with Giton (cum fratre ludentem), whom Encolpius pointedly refers to as his own frater, he addresses Encolpius sarcastically as frater sanctissime, and proceeds to roll him out of bed and beat him heartily with a leather strap, railing at him for ‘not sharing with his frater’ (sic diuidere cum fratre nolito). The close juxtaposition of Encolpius’ use of frater for Giton and Ascyltos’ use of frater for Encolpius brings to the fore the question of the Encolpius–Ascyltos relationship and its sexualization. And as with Circe, there is perhaps lurking in the background here the spectre of multiple sexual relations or group sex. Whereas in the scene with Circe, the possibility of the presence of Giton as voyeur and equal participant ‘brother’ to both Encolpius and Circe is invoked only to be banished, Ascyltos actually is a voyeur, having ‘snuck up to the door’ (furtim se foribus admouit) at a moment where the text threatens to conflate the ‘brotherhood’ between Ascyltos and Encolpius with that between Giton and Encolpius, the latter of which is sexualized. Ascyltos wants Encolpius, as a brother, to share with his brother, but what precisely would this sharing consist of? diuidere can have the valence of sexual penetration;Footnote ²⁸ is there here even the faint, smutty suggestion of ‘dividing’ in the sense of penetrating and being penetrated at once, whoever is imagined to be in whichever position? Indeed, one could interpret Ascyltos’ beating of Encolpius as a displacement of Encolpius’ unfulfilled penetration of Giton, which could not take place because of Ascyltos’ arrival.Footnote ²⁹ The ideal of the impartial sharing of property between siblings is aggressively desublimated by the submerged possibility of an all-male threesome, made possible by the equalizing nature of brother terminology. A reading like this does not seem so outlandish in a text like the Satyrica, where group sex scenes occur more than once (compare the Quartilla and children-of-Philomela episodes). Seneca, indeed, thought something along these lines was going on with the arch-pervert Hostius Quadra, made notorious in the Natural Questions, although Hostius’ orgies involved both men and women.Footnote ³⁰

Considering this scene with the trio, it is possible to reread Ascyltos’ earlier invocation of the past sexual relationship between himself and Encolpius in a different light. Encolpius takes issue because Ascyltos tried to have sex with Giton, which results in Encolpius’ accusations of sexual passivity. Ascyltos responds by invoking Encolpius’ impotence, and the fact that he was Encolpius’ brother in the past the way Giton is now. Given that brotherhood, for Ascyltos, is a matter of ‘sharing’, he might be interpreted as saying something like, ‘fair's fair, brothers share, you had me, now I get to have Giton’. That is, if brotherhood implies sharing and non-hierarchical sexual relationships, he might be invoking a certain interchangeability of sexual relationships amongst the trio rather than necessarily making a statement about sexual penetration. How one reads his remark depends, among other things, on what one thinks ‘brotherhood’ means.

But what the modern world would call polyamory cannot eventuate in the Satyrica given Encolpius’ view of siblinghood, in which the jealous possessiveness of the lover overrides the idea of siblinghood as an equal relation of ‘share and share alike’ between multiple siblings. Encolpius wants to reformulate brotherhood as an exclusive love-relationship, almost a kind of conjugality (which nonetheless sometimes allows for the possibility of fleeting sexual encounters outside its bounds, just as, indeed, normative Roman marriage did in the case of the husband), whereas Ascyltos and Circe, in a sense, retain more of the original notion of blood brotherhood by allowing multiple siblings, rather than only two, to share an equal relationship—but in the latter case, it is the admission of sex into the sibling relationship, the tearing down of the ‘incest taboo’, that renders the resultant relationship radically non-normative. The idea of true ménages à trois in which everyone has sex with everyone lurks at the boundaries here, but never reaches full realization. And indeed, whether consisting of Giton–Encolpius–Circe or Ascyltos–Encolpius–Giton, these ‘households’ would be very queer indeed: configurations like one woman having two male lovers who themselves are sexually involved, where the woman is married to neither, or three men sharing a kind of household, each of them sexually involved with the other two, have no place whatsoever in the normative Roman imaginary.Footnote ³¹

It is not that such configurations are directly visible even in the queer world of the Satyrica, but they emerge briefly as almost-thinkable possibilities, annulled by the narrator's view of brotherhood which, although still queer, is differently queer. Different aspects of normativity are differently resignified, depending on who you ask. Queerness is not a singular thing, a unified resistance to a monolithic normativity, but a field of multiple potentialities, realizable in different ways.Footnote ³² It is not so much the case that Encolpius’ view of brotherhood, which views it as exclusive, constituted by association alone, and in practice somewhat analogous to a ‘standard’ jealous lover's relation to his beloved, is ‘less’ queer than the idea of sexualized siblinghood as the basis for non-exclusive sexual combinations; rather, each of these reformulations of brotherhood takes on different aspects of the ‘original’ to produce something that is both novel and familiar, a re-citation with a twist. But something must always be abjected even in the production of new forms of sociality: the abject outside of Encolpius’ brotherhood is the caring-and-sharing ménage à trois, which returns repeatedly to haunt him.

I hope to have pointed to some of the intriguing possibilities that result when one examines Petronian brotherhood closely, character by character, rather than merely dismissing it as an inferior copy of an authentic normative original. What might be termed a bottom-up, queer reading aims to seriously engage with non-normativity and its potentialities, as well as its ability to point to the limitations of normativity and exploit pre-existing fissures and contradictions in normative ideologies, rather than assuming in advance the integrity and authoritative status of those ideologies. Further, by looking beyond the genitality of the penetrator–penetrated paradigm and subversions thereof, my reading has attempted to integrate a broader consideration of sociality, kinship, and class into the study of Roman sexuality, in line with the inclusiveness of queerness as an anti-essentializing flexible relation rather than any fixed action or behaviour. Micro-debates about who penetrates whom certainly have their interest, but they risk overlooking the forest for the trees. An engagement with the marginality and non-normative sociality of the Petronian rogues aids in producing a fuller picture of the Satyrica's representation of sexuality in the context of a fictional universe that is very queer indeed.