Tag Archives: Petronius Satyricon

petronius redux

Petronius’s Satyricon and Fellini’s film version. Two versions of a pagan world as it was in Nero’s time and may be in ours… For Fellini, Satyricon is not crude melodrama or pure fantasy, but a view of paganism as it … Continue reading

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satyricon: fellini and creative crudeness

Fellini’s Satyricon- a pagan spectacle as it was in Nero’s time and certainly may be in our own… All the scenes of Fellini’s Satyricon possess a nightmarish vividness. Fellini took Petronius’s account and gave it a suitably phantasmgoric story line, … Continue reading

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“give me life”

Living for what is livelier in the flesh. Saint Thomas Aquinas’s law of the Church: suppress all sensual feelings by force of reason. It is the antithesis of comedy which is the triumph of la forza di natura, the force … Continue reading

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nature over intellect

The essence of comedy is the triumph of nature over intellect. The human comedy where hedonism replaces heroism. Tragic heroes die for what is nobler in the mind, comic heroes live for what is livelier in the flesh. The tragic … Continue reading

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beginning with the happy ending

The essence of comedy is the triumph of “la forza di natura,” nature over intellect. And the happies tale of all is the odyssey that ends with…Laughter in the house… …Homer’s Iliad concludes with a funeral, the initial event in … Continue reading

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laughter in the house

The essence of comedy is the triumph of “la forza di natura/- nature over intellect. And the happiest tale of all is the odyssey that ends with…laughter in the house. To begin with, the Happy Ending. Aristotle calls it the … Continue reading

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