Inside the Horn of Plenty

This is a disturbingly good, mocking caricature of Plato

and Xenophon's Symposiums ...
A super rich Roman freedman, Trimalchio,
organizes a feast on which
the main characters of Gaius Petronius' Satyricon1,
a Roman novel from the 1st century, appear.
(Evidently later this book gave wings to the writers
of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.)

The participants of the banquet,

mostly friends of the master of the house,
members of the middle class,
consume - lying around the tables, on bunk beds.

The dishes are exceptionally sumptuous,

extremely inventive, sometimes surprisingly playful.
Pork, venison, fowl dominate There is no lack of beef,
seafood, vegetables etc.; after desserts
the wine flows with streams -
an endless culinary spectacle takes place,
served by a flock of slaves, cooks, jugglers and flute players!

Obscenely rich Trimalchio, with his eschatological fixation,

is a parody of the minimalist Socrates.
His exaggerated and unbridled show of epicurean power
is depicted by Petronius with a good-hearted, sarcastic reserve.

This does not change the fact

that it is a free journey
to the interior of the horn of plenty.

MMXVII

1 Gaius Petronius Arbiter, reputed author of the Satyricon (Book of Satyrlike Adventures), a literary
portrait of Roman society of the 1st century. The longest and the best episode in the surviving portions of
the Satyricon is the Cena Trimalchionis, or Banquet of Trimalchio.