Petronius

Gaius Petronius, called Arbiter, was a courtier of the emperor Nero and the author of the Satyricon, a comic prose novel mixed with verse. Tacitus, who tells his story in the Annals, describes a man who gave his days to sleep and his nights to business and pleasure, and who was so refined in his tastes that Nero made him his arbiter of elegance.

Accused of treason in AD 66, Petronius was forced to take his own life, and he is said to have died slowly, opening and closing his veins while he talked with friends and listened to light verse. Only portions of the Satyricon survive, among them the long banquet at the house of the freedman Trimalchio; the archive gives it in Michael Heseltine's English version of 1913.