Poetry is integral to Petronius' Satyricon: reminiscences of poetic motifs and models are in evidence throughout its narrative, a professional poet is a leading character, and some thirty short poems and two long poems are performed by the narrator and others. Why did Petronius spend so much time being a poet while writing this novel? Why do the poems take up so much space in the narrative?

At one level, the reason may be simply the looseness of the generic boundaries of ancient prose fiction. Though certain features recur (or indeed are parodied) from novel to novel, ancient novelists invent, rather than retell, their stories and, as far as we can tell, neither Greeks nor Romans used a generic name for what we call novels. This critical vacuum is probably partly due to a sense that prose fiction operated under fewer constraints than the “named” genres. Novelists can arrange words at will, poets work within the remembered limits of verse. Genre is memory, and novelists' memories can be playfully selective.

Yet the generic looseness of ancient prose fiction is not the only answer. Petronius practices novelistic fiction in a distinctive way: as we shall see in more detail below, there is more poetry in the Satyricon than in the other novels which survive. By evoking particular genres or poems, the Satyricon exploits and contests the apparatus of literary memory.