Petronius Arbiter, in Trimalchio's Dinner Party, the third chapter of his book Satyricon, mocks the nature of slaves. He was a high official in Rome, notably the “judge of taste” at the court of Nero (129). Whatever responsibilities he had, he was an aristocrat. The history of Rome was written from an aristocratic perspective because they were the ones with the money, ambition, and free time to document history. Petronius believed that slaves belong to a lower class and that a slave who has been freed, that is, a freedman, is still a slave at heart, therefore worthless. It's not with all the money in the world that he could develop a taste for the upper class. In ancient times as in modern times, money cannot buy a good personality or social sophistication. While the free-born Roman boy went to school to learn rhetoric, mathematics, etc., the slave boy worked from a young age. Whether they worked physically, mathematically, or sexually, they always worked, which is a fundamental difference between them and the freeborn (even if the freeborn poor worked, they were often displaced by slaves because slaves were free labor ). Sarah Ruden, the translator of this edition of Satyricon, comments that freedmen were like immigrants in today's America. Only the most ambitious have won their freedom. This process has a modern equivalent in which only the most ambitious immigrants tend to make it onto American soil. This process of “self-selection” eliminates the lazy (155). The slaves who won their freedom had worked very hard from a young age and thus had the experience necessary to succeed and amass fortunes. However, what the freedmen could not have learned from this kind of experience was the behavior and manners of a respectful Roman aristocrat. Personality is instilled naturally by living among others of your social class. One can only fully learn a foreign culture if he or she is adopted early by a family of that culture. Although slaves lived in families, they performed completely different functions and therefore had completely different experiences and upbringings. Unfortunately for the freedmen who succeeded and became wealthy, they were still socially inferior to the freeborn. Petronius shows that the host of the dinner, Trimalchio is a rude freedman. He has no respectable virtues. He is cruel to his slaves despite the fact that he was... middle of paper ...... lying in the funeral procession, it was too loud and it sounded like a fire alarm. We take advantage of the agitation and they flee (60). At Trimalchio's dinner, the theme was drunk and disorderly as opposed to relaxed and pleasant, the nature of traditional Roman dinners (166). It is through this story that Petronius tells us the aristocracy's view of uneducated slaves and freedmen. Comparisons can be made with its modern equivalent of "new money". For example, when the last rapper from a ghetto makes an album and subsequently gets rich, there is no moral improvement. Money cannot buy a change in character. It cannot change behavior, improve social skills, or refine personality. Lacking a warm upbringing to adopt good manners, as well as protection from sexual predators, slaves never lived up to the behavior, values, virtues, morals and decency of the “good Roman citizen”. In this old equivalent of.