Thus far, I have argued that in the course of the sea voyage, Lichas' ship becomes a metaphorical vessel in which Eumolpus rehearses poetic scenarios in the process of creating the Bellum Civile poem. I now want to look more closely at the scenes at Sat. 101–8, in which the gang of stowaways experiments with physical disguise as a means of escaping from the ship-cave. I will suggest that all the scenes on board ship are, as it were, preparatory jottings for the final flurry of writing as the ship sinks in Sat. 115. In stage-managing versions and revisions of the Odyssey's ‘escape from the cave’ plot, Eumolpus is preoccupied with textual possibilities, with the (Satyricon's) basic question of how to rework and transform epic narrative in new contexts: moreover, as befits the Bellum Civile's obsession with metaphors of physicality (the diseased body of war, the ruptured body of a war-torn landscape) in a poem etched onto animal skin (membrana), Eumolpus' creative experiments for the poem are actually written on the bodies of his students.

Encolpius is the first to suggest at 102 that, being a writer, Eumolpus must have some ink with which they can dye their skin and hair: