"Dies - inquit - nihil est" : humor és kétségbeesés Trimalchio lakomáján

In my study I would like to examine the discussion of the guests at the feast of Trimalchio, in Petronius’s Satyricon, and I concentrate mainly on Dama’s words. My purpose is to investigate the role of this speech. Is it an absolutely comic part of the novel? Does Petronius simply mock the ridiculous pseudo-philosophy and the banalities of his age, or can these words be interpreted as a tragic vision of human life? Does Petronius also express his own fears and sadness by creating Dama’s figure? Can we read Dama’s words not only as parody, but also as hidden, pure poetry of the author? Can Dama’s banalities be ostensible in a poetic sense? Can we interprete the strange and brief rhetoric, the fragmentary style of the speech as an exciting literary technology to express emotional complexity? In the first part of the study I examine Dama’s speech itself. In the second part I compare two Hungarian translations of the speech (the translations of Faludy György and Horváth István Károly) to see how it is interpreted by the two translators. In the last part I examine the role and the signification of this scene (or motive) in Fellini’s film, the FelliniSatyricon and in Szentkuthy Miklós’s novel, the Cicero’s Journeyman Years. The conclusion of my study is that Petronius’s intention is very complex: although Dama’s speech in that specific scene can really be interpreted as a parody of a social class and a kind of pseudo-philosophy, the words also have a beautiful, poetic meaning from the aspect of the whole known text, and they express the general fear and desperation of Petronius