The Satyricon is a hybrid text, depicting a hybrid world. In this chapter, I aim to look in greater detail at the Cena Trimalchionis and surrounding scenes to explore how loosening corporeal boundaries in the spirit of metamorphosis is played out as a fusion or interaction of human and animal bodies. Arguably all extended texts, ancient and modern, concern themselves in some way with human/animal metaphorics, and this familiar, organising imagery is undoubtedly one of the ways in which the Satyricon sets itself (mischievously or not) within recognisable frames for reading. Yet I will argue that this fiction takes such idioms to an extreme to explore their deeply threatening implications (for reading), not least their disruption of civilised hierarchies between eater and eaten. In the Cena especially, a dramatic awareness and confusion of what eats and what in turn gets eaten is manifested in a vacillating characterisation of humans as animals, animals as humans. Here, the myth that the consumption of food involves an aggression and hence the complete control of eater over eaten is repeatedly debunked by Petronius' unhealthy ‘you are what you eat’ mantra, which, we will see, gives rise to some beastly metaphors for digestion.

We first encounter such imagery in the programmatic speeches of Encolpius and Agamemnon: after the feeding frenzy of the rhetorical school described by Encolpius in Sat. 1, Agamemnon defends his role as purveyor of junk food by playing victim to his ravenous but faddy pupils, who will be fed only the finest canapés: they are fish he must bait from his lonely rock (Sat. 3.4).