Commentary on The Cena Trimalchionis

Our narrator, Encolpius, has been invited to attend a dinner party hosted by the ostentatiously wealthy freedman Trimalchio. We, as readers, become increasingly aware of the bizarre world that Trimalchio has created for himself as Encolpius describes more and more of the host’s brazen displays of wealth. Passage 48 comes after a series of spectacular dishes and entertainment, where extravagant food was disguised as other extravagant kinds of food and everything was not really as it seemed. The passage itself depicts Trimalchio having an altercation with Agamemnon and revealing how he saw the Sibyl of Cumae. 

The passage opens with Trimalchio boasting that if the wine he has chosen does not please his guests, they can choose another – and whichever one they pick, it will have been produced on one of his estates which he has never been to. This boast works on two levels for Trimalchio: first, he is seen as the generous host offering out his whole wine cellar to his guests should they be unsatisfied (of course, they would never dream of saying so in front of him), secondly, he slips in a comment which makes both his guests and us as readers wonder how many estates this man must have, if he owns some which he has never even been to?

The effect is that we are, again, left with an impression of Trimalchio’s overwhelming affluence, but we also see some more evidence of his love of independence. Previously we have seen how self-sufficient he is, with importing bees and mushrooms from foreign cities just so he could grow his own indulgences. This is not a classic example of “the phenomenon of elite self-sufficiency”, nor a wish to sustain oneself with basic homegrown necessities, but a desire to produce excessive and luxurious goods on his own property, to his own high standards. 

I would class this as just one aspect of Trimalchio’s ‘bubble’, his society within society, his own little stage in the theatre of the world. His desire to be self-sufficient, his need to surround himself with people who admire and applaud him (on command, if not by choice), his apparent inability to realise when he is making a fool of himself – these are all elements of the bubble of security and familiarity that he surrounds himself with. Evidence of this comes before we even meet Trimalchio himself – at the entrance to his house, we see a calendar marked with the entry “‘III. et pridie kalendas Ianuarias C. noster foras cenat,’” - he only leaves his house twice a month to dine out with friends.