Since ancient times human beings have gathered together for social purposes. And since not very long after that writers have written about these occasions. The party is a useful literary device, not only for social comment and satire, but as an occasion where characters can meet, fall in love, fall out or even get murdered. A Curious Invitation features forty of the greatest fictional festivities. Some of these parties are depictions of real events, like the Duchess of Richmond's Ball on the eve of battle with Napoleon in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; others draw on the author's experience of the society they lived in, such as Lady Metroland's party in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies; while yet others come straight from the writer's bizarre imagination, like Douglas Adams' flying party above an unknown planet from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Suzette Field offers you the chance to gatecrash these parties, spanning most of the history of human civilization, seen through the eyes of the world's greatest writers.

Theatrum Arbitri is a literary study dealing with the possible influence of Roman comic drama (comedies of Plautus and Terence, theatre of the Greek and Roman mimes, and fabula Atellana) on the surviving fragments of Petronius' Satyrica. The theatrical assessment of this novel is carried out at the levels of plot-construction, characterization, language, and reading of the text as if it were the narrative equivalent of a farcical staged piece with the theatrical structure of a play produced before an audience. The analysis follows the order of each of the scenes in the novel. The reader will also find a brief general commentary on the less discussed scenes of the Satyrica, and a comprehensive account of the theatre of the mimes and its main features.

Of all the stories narrated, "Trimalchio" tells the story from beginning to end, though in bits and pieces; that is, in the fragments that have survived. When readers think of a dinner banquet in ancient times, what comes to mind is Plato's Symposium, in which Plato treats his readers to a discussion of the most delicious intellectual delicacies, such as the theme of love. In contrast what one finds in "Trimalchio," is a dinner of the most delicious culinary delicacies, and a dearth of intellectual discussion. The guests at the dinner table consist of gabby table-talkers who delight in conversing about the most trivial themes-supernatural tales- which they cap with obscene and vulgar behavior, such as the mistreatment of slaves and women. The nouveau riche Trimalchio, holds the dinner party at his grossly expensive estate, where a retinue of slaves, cooks, and servants, serve the guests with exotic, abundant, extravagant, and wasteful dishes. Given that F. Scott Fitzgerald's recreates such extravagant parties in his novel The Great Gatsby, he initially named the novel, Trimalchio. While both, Petronius and Fitzgerald, appear to have been concerned with portraying the moral decay that accompanies the noveau riche, Petronius' book manages to capture the spirit of ancient Rome, through its low characters; Fitzgerald fails to capture the spirit of New York in the 1920s. This selection presents only one story of the Satyricon: "Dinner at Trimalchio's." The reader should not expect all the stories of the Satyricon.