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Chapter 7 Putting Your Mouth Where Your Money Is: Eumolpus’ Will, Pasta e Fagioli, and the Fate of the Soul in South Italian Thought from Pythagoras to Ennius R. Drew Griffith You will recall that near the end of the extant portion of Petronius’ Satyricon , the anti-hero Encolpius finds himself shipwrecked at Croton with his associates, Eumolpus the poetaster, their boy-toy Giton, and hired man Corax. Here the tireless grifters launch their final sting, Eumolpus posing as a wealthy magnate, conveniently both childless and moribund, with the others masquerading as his slaves. So styled, the foursome dines out on invitations from local captatores eager to fawn and wheedle their way into Eumolpus’ will (Tracy 1980). Finally, tired of the game and no doubt threatened with imminent exposure as the Felix Krull he is, in a breach of decorum worthy of Trimalchio himself (cf. Sat. 71.4), Eumolpus has his will read out to the assembled company of his heirs. It is an odd will, for it calls on them to eat his corpse in public as a precondition of coming into their inheritance (Sat. 141).The idea of cannibalism is not itself surprising, for though most Greeks and Romans may have balked at eating their dead, others as diverse as Diogenes the Cynic and the Stoics Zeno and Chrysippus were more open-minded (Diog. Laert. 6.73, 7.121).What is truly shocking is that the cannibalism be mandated in a will, for legal texts are usually against cannibalism.The Court of Queen’s Bench, London, for example, passed a landmark ruling in 1884 that sailors cannot legally kill cabin-boys for food, though it did not specifically forbid eating any who died of natural causes (Arens 1979; Simpson 1984). Only one Roman other than Eumolpus ordered his heirs to eat his body, and that case is more sensible than this, for the testator, M. Grunnius Corocotta, was quite literally a pig—I’m referring to the fourth-century CE schoolboy spoof in which a porker, summoned to execution by the household chef, arranges for the posthumous disposition of his various cuts of meat (Champlin 1987, with bibl.). 132 R. Drew Griffith Gareth Schmeling (1991: 376) has demonstrated that each intact section of the Satyricon ends with something outrageous, like the deflowering of the prepubescent Pannychis at the close of the Quartilla episode (25– 26), or the arrival of the fire brigade that ends the Cena Trimalchionis (78). If that pattern obtained for the now-fragmentary sections also, there is a good chance that our passage, shocking as it is—and its last words describe mothers clutching their half-eaten babies to their breasts (Sallmann 1999: 128)—was the original end of the whole novel. If so, we may suppose that it affords “the benefaction of significance in some concordant structure” (Kermode 2000: 148) that draws together thematic threads from disparate parts of the work. Certainly the theatricality motif, whose prominence Costas Panayotakis (1995) has recently shown, is given free reign with the Plautine-cum-Shakespearean shipwreck: Hell is empty and all the devils are here, including the faux riche Eumolpus and his trompe l’oeil servants. Theatrical, too, is the detail that this new-fangled testament requires the grotesque Eucharist (Bowersock 1994: 134–139) to be performed before a live audience. I would argue that two other recurrent themes that surface and intersect meaningfully at this point are parody of philosophic dialogue (Courtney 1962; Cameron 1969; Bessone 1993; Cucchiarelli 1996) and the play on significant names that Italian scholars have dubbed la poetica dei nomi (Schmeling 1969; Priuli 1975; Barchiesi 1984; Labate 1986). The point of intersection is the one heir not repelled by Eumolpus’ stipulation, who, citing impressively obscure precedents, mounts an erudite “defense of necessity” argument in favor of carrying it out (Sat. 141; Rankin 1969 = 1971: 100–101; Shey 1971). This man, presumably among those glumly chewing in the alfresco banquet that ends Fellini’s 1969 film version, is named Gorgias. This cannot fail to recall the “indefatigable stylist” (Dodds 1959: 8; Harrison 1964; McComiskey 2002, with bibl.) from Leontini, Sicily, who enthralled Athenians at the turn of the fourth century with his verbal pyrotechnics developed as “an analog of the culinary art” (Conte 1996: 134–135; cf. Aristoph. Av. 1695–1696; Dunbar 1995: 741)—remember that the connection between rhetoric and cuisine is drawn in the very first chapter of the Satyricon (1.3, 2.1, 2.8–9; Shey 1971: 81). His...

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