We begin reading the Satyricon in medias res. How random a point of entry Sat. 1 is we cannot know; and neither can we choose not to privilege it as a beginning. Yet accidental, constructed or not, our beginning of the Satyricon sets up key ideas and images which will penetrate the entire work: most importantly, the role of performance and body language in education and in public life, the repertoire of literary knowledge required to perform, read and understand, the slippage between fiction and reality, and the dynamic interdependency or confusion of orator/audience, author/narrator and narrator/reader.

The first thing we learn when we start reading the Satyricon is that we are always reading the narrator's account, Encolpius' words. Ironically, the plunge straight into direct speech means that we begin by acting Encolpius' act, performing his role as we read: num alio genere furiarum declamatores inquietantur, qui clamant …? / ‘Aren't the rhetoricians tortured by another tribe of Furies when they cry …?’ As Henderson reminds us, to experience the world according to Encolpius is always ‘to be trapped in his performance, to wallow with him in bad taste and bad verse’. Here, we are trapped not least because we cannot tell whether Encolpius' speech is meant to be self-mocking, whether its clumsiness cynically or unconsciously enacts the inadequacies of those it purports to attack, whether Encolpius is voicing his own opinions or is simply following a formula dictated to him by a teacher, who may or may not be Agamemnon.