In reading the opening scenes of the Satyricon, we are reminded that acting is endemic in the learning, writing and performance of literary works. As many critics have recently explored, much of the challenge of learning (how to perform) literature in ancient Rome consists in walking the tightrope between the stages of orator and actor, figures at opposite ends of the social spectrum whose roles overlap in strategies of bodily masquerade for the entertainment of an audience. The rhetorical theorists, motivated to fuel their readers with doubts about the legibility of body language, continually flirt with comparing and contrasting orator and actor. As a privileged, educated young scholar, therefore, Encolpius is necessarily the consummate performer, and lives his ‘real life’ as a fiction. Yet his behaviour frequently lapses into pure novelistic theatre: at Sat.17.4, Quartilla is moved to ask, quaenam est haec audacia, aut ubi fabulas etiam antecessura latrocinia didicistis? / ‘What is this cheek? And where did you learn to rival the robbers of romance?’ The Satyricon as a whole, it almost goes without saying, is a highly theatrical text. As Panayotakis' exhaustive study has shown, it is not only preoccupied in general terms with the entertainment of pretence and masquerade, but also articulates its core scenes as if they were designed for the stage. Yet, as the preliminary exchange between Encolpius and Agamemnon shows, acting in the Satyricon is perhaps more disruptive than entertaining.