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.).
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 (2526), 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 encounter with Socrates inspired the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, which hinges on a spirited encomium of the “natural justice” wherein Might is right, citing Pindar’s poem, “Custom, king of all …” (Gorg. 482c-484c, fr. 169a Maehler). This poem has special relevance for us, for Plato was not the first to quote it. Two generations earlier, Herodotus invoked the very same text (3.38; Rankin 1969: 383) to sum up the strange case of the Callatiae, an Indian tribe who refused Darius’ inducement to adopt a novel funeral-rite. They begged the Great King never again to mention in their hearing anything so horrible as cremation, and to allow them instead to go on, as their forebears had always done, laying their dear departed to rest by eating their flesh.
The echo of the Callatiae episode is so apt to our passage that it would by itself have justified Petronius’ choice of name for the greedy heir, the more so since we have tended to see Encolpius as an impoverished Socrates since, with the curse of Priapus, he was forced to sleep with Giton as chastely as the sage with Alcibiades (Sat. 128; Sommariva 1984). Yet there is more. Gorgias was not just a literary character, but also an author in his own right. One of his most notorious turns of phrase—one copied by Ennius (Annales fr. 138 Vahlen = 125 Skutsch) and the atomist Lucretius (5.993; Meurig Davies 1949: 73)—was his γρῖφος or kenning for vultures, ἔμψυχοι τάφοι (82B.5a D-K; Waern 1951 [who does not discuss this example]). The idea of “living” (or, more literally, “ensouled”) tombs recalls the doctrine that everyone’s body (σῶμα) is the tomb (σῆμα) in which his or her own soul is imprisoned (Philolaus 44B.14 D-K; Pl. Phd. 81e; Crat. 400c, etc.).
This σῶμα σῆμα notion was popularized by Socrates, and is the sort of thing that might indeed lead a dying man to offer a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing (Pl. Phd. 118a, with Damascius apud Schol. ad loc.; Most 1993: 100), but the Athenian philosopher himself associated it with Italy (Gorg. 493a), and if it was not first espoused by Pythagoras—most famous citizen of where else but Croton? — he seems most fully to have explored its philosophical implications (Dobrochotov 1992). Though ascetic, the doctrine was not all doom and gloom, for it accompanied the belief in transmigration of souls. Pythagoras in turn must have acquired this idea from somewhere (Keith 1909: 605), and Cicero (Tusc. 1.38) says that he learned it at the knee of the Samian, Pherecydes. Herbert Long (1948: 14), however, convincingly dismisses this as an instance of the ancients’ habit of reading all pupils’ teachings back into the work of their masters. In fact, the idea seems totally foreign to Greeks—“a drop of alien blood in [their] veins,” as Erwin Rohde put it (Dodds 1951: 139). Sensing this, Herodotus (2.123) claims that Greeks derived it from Egypt; but there is a fly in this ointment as well, for Egyptians never believed any such thing, though their tomb-paintings may have led Herodotus to think they did (Zabkar 1963). It is curious that, if we join Long in doubting that Pherecydes taught it, every Greco-Roman writer to espouse reincarnation prior to the Church father Origen is associated in some way with Magna Graecia. Apart from Pythagoras himself, there is the Theban Pindar—but apparently only when working for Theron of Acragas (O. 2.57-80; cf. fr. 133 Maehler); the Acragantine Empedocles (31B.115 D-K = 107 Wright = 11 Inwood); Plato, who spent his formative years in Syracuse (Epistle 7, which mentions metempsychosis at 335b-c, Phdr. 249a, etc.); and the Calabrian Ennius (Annales fr. 15 Vahlen = 11 Skutsch). Even Vergil set his account of reincarnation (Aen. 6.724-751) in the underworld, which Aeneas enters via Cumae. The conclusion most economically drawn from these data is that Greeks acquired the doctrine of reincarnation from southern Italy, just as it has been argued (R. D. Griffith 2008, with bibl.) that they borrowed the equally alien, though very different, doctrine of Elysium from Egypt.
If I am right that it is Italian in origin, it will come as no surprise that belief in rebirth affects one’s diet, for Italians live to eat. After all, what other people’s words for “to be” and “to eat” (Latin esse and ēsse, Quintilian 11.3.136; Juvenal 15.102) are one and the same? Indeed, Pythagoras believed in rebirth not on theoretical grounds, but from personal experience, recalling his prior incarnation as Euphorbus (Hor. Odes 1.28.9-15; cf. Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 327-328). Euphorbus was the Trojan who in a cameo role in the Iliad (16.805-815) changed literary history by wounding Patroclus, making him vulnerable to Hector’s death-blow. That Pythagoras should have believed himself a reincarnation of just this person, rather than, say, a shrubbery, as Empedocles claimed to have been in an earlier life, or a peacock, as Ennius once was (Annales fr. 15 Vahlen = 11 Skutsch), may be no accident. Euphorbus’ Homeric credentials give Pythagoras a kind of aristocratic prestige, and the Trojan connection must have played well in his adopted homeland of Italy, since Romans thought themselves offspring of the Trojan Aeneas (Dionys. Halic. 1.49-53, 55-60; Livy 1.1-3; Lucretius 1.1;cf. Ogilvie 1965: 32-35). But above all, as Otto Skutsch (1959) notes, Euphorbus’ name means “well-fed.” Naturally it is comforting to think one was fed well in a previous life, but Pythagoras would have interpreted good eating in the specific sense of having abstained from improper foods, for he promulgated a number of dietary taboos.
You might think a philosopher’s rules for living could be explained logically. After all, lest one offend a transmigrated human soul, one must abstain from harming animals, as Pythagoras scolded a man for whipping a puppy in whose bark he recognized the voice of a dead friend (Xenophanes 21B.7 D-K). This can hardly be done without being vegetarian, so it is not surprising that meat was verboten among Pythagoreans, as with Empedocles and the devotees of the Cretan Zeus (31B.128 D-K; Eur. fr. 472.16-19 TrGF; cf. Demand 1975: 352-353). (It is true that human souls might also be reborn in plants, but apparently just inedible ones, like Em-pedocles’ shrub.)
There is a problem with this logical explanation, however. The problem is beans. Pythagoras decreed them, too, taboo, and not just as food. He barred his followers even from walking in fields where they were growing. This notorious prohibition, merely weird to us, verged on blasphemy in antiquity, for the “Baked Bean Festival” (Pyanopsia) was so important in the liturgical calendar that it gave its name to an Athenian month (Harrison 1927: 320). The prohibition has sparked various explanations. Walter Burkert (1972: 184) thinks beans were shunned due to an aesthetic aversion to their intestinal after-effects, disturbing as these must be to sensitive urban shamans. But perhaps, as Pliny thought, the opposite is true, and beans are so irresistible that they can never be sampled without inducing gluttony (NH 18.118). Or again, perhaps Pythagoreans had a tragic propensity for the rare, devastating bean-allergy known to medical science as “favism” (Scarborough 1982, with bibl.). For my part, I incline rather to think that Pythagoreans avoided beans for symbolic reasons.
Beans are seeds, as Greeks well knew, for they perhaps correctly derived their word for “bean” (κύαμος) from κύω, “conceive,” or κυέω, “be pregnant” (Onians 1951: 112 n. 2; Chantraine 1970: 593). Seeds are obvious symbols of rebirth. So, in an argument shared by St. Paul, Rabbi Meïr explained resurrection to Ptolemy V’s wife, Cleopatra, as a kind of sowing wherein the seed, buried in the earth, comes to life again in new and different form (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 90b; 1 Corinthians 15:35-44; cf. Riesenfeld 1970: 171-186). Reincarnation is not resurrection, to be sure, but the farming analogy works just as well to describe it. That is why pomegranate seeds are the food of the dead in the Proserpina story (Hymn Dem. 372, 411-413), which had wide currency in Sicily, given that, as Cicero tells us, the whole island is sacred to Ceres and Liber (Verr. 2.4.48 [106]; cf. Diod. Sic. 5.2.3, and the comment by Zuntz 1971: 70-75). It is also why, as the same myth shows, it can be dangerous to eat even a single seed, if one hopes ever to get free of the underworld. Moreover, this might also explain why Aristotle (fr. 195 Rose) darkly says beans resemble the gates of Hades and why Pliny reports them to contain the souls of the dead (NH 18.118). As with beans, so with meat: I would argue that Pythagorean vegetarianism is fundamentally symbolic, serving above all as an act of religious faith to proclaim “the kinship of all types of living things and life in general with the ultimate principle of the Universe,” (Anton 1992: 32), or, to put it in Petronian terms, the belief that “our region is so full of present divinities that you can easier run across a god than a man” (Sat. 17).
The nuances of the Pythagorean diet seem far removed from Eumolpus’ will, but Paolo Fedeli (1987: 20-21) has shown that Petronius has them very much in mind. It was when interrupted while shelling beans that Polyaenus (as Encolpius now calls himself) killed Priapus’ sacred goose, which Oenothea promptly turned into paté de foie gras (Sat. 135-137). This breaks so many taboos of Croton’s most famous citizen at once that it brings them all forcibly to mind. And then, just four chapters later, we have Eumolpus’ will. It is for this reason that I would argue that the will, which on the face of it rides roughshod over all religious norms, whether those of the traditional Olympian faith or of the (I have been arguing) native Italian eschatology of metempsychosis, does not in fact ignore the doctrine of rebirth, but rather deconstructs it. In one sense, Eumolpus lives up to his billing as philosopher manqué, for he compels his would-be heirs to pursue their materialism beyond mere crassness to its logical conclusion as a guiding ontological and ethical principle, collapsing in the process the space between legal testator and property, owner and owned, body and self. If Gorgias, impervious to any chastising effect of this reductio ad absurdum, indeed makes himself a vivum bustum by carrying out the terms of the will, as he seems inclined to do, Eumolpus will transmigrate into his body, but atom by atom in a way that Lucretius would have approved of and not at all in the spiritual sense intended by Pythagoras. In this process, Eumolpus will have successfully posited himself as coextensive with his own flesh. Like Jeremy Bentham, still sitting in the south cloister of University College 170 years after his death (Marmoy 1958; Richardson and Hurwitz 1987; Collings 2000; Crimmins 2002), or Lenin in his tomb on Red Square, he is his body. With him, what you see is what you get, or—if we may express this from Gorgias’ point of view—you are whom you eat.