Trimalchio

plural Trimalchios · plural Trimalchiones

1. rareA nouveau riche.

   Eliot's epigraph is spoken by a Trimalchio, a dinner party host who is fond of pranks, careless of accuracy, and generally undependable.

   2015, Allyson Booth, Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up, Springer, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   To name living examples of him would be actionable; besides, you are old enough, surely, to remember the Great War against Germany, and the host of Trimalchiones and Fortunatæ whom it enknighted and endamed.

   1923, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, “On Reading Petronius; An Open Letter to a Young Gentleman”, in The Satyricon of T. Petronius Arbiter

   It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.

   1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chapter 7, in The Great Gatsby

   Pliny and his circle would have favored the former, but the Trimalchios of his time without question would have accepted the volatility and riskiness of the latter in the hope of dazzling short-term profits.

   2001, Stuart James Fleming, Vinum: The Story of Roman Wine, Art Flair, →ISBN, page 33