Satyricon

A sprawling prose narrative mixing verse with prose, surviving only in fragments, chiefly the famous Cena Trimalchionis, the dinner party of a grotesquely wealthy former slave named Trimalchio, that follows the narrator Encolpius and his companions through a picaresque string of sexual, criminal, and social misadventures in southern Italy. Traditionally attributed to the Petronius who served as Nero's arbiter of taste before being forced to suicide in AD 66, the work satirizes nouveau-riche vulgarity and moral hypocrisy with an amused, unmoralizing detachment unusual in ancient literature. Often called the earliest surviving example of a prose novel in Western literature, its blend of realism and comic self-awareness had no real ancient successor but became newly influential once rediscovered and printed in the Renaissance.