The civil war that breaks out on board ship after Giton and Encolpius are recognised is short-lived. As order is restored and the decks ring out with songs, Eumolpus, in his new peacekeeping role as periclitantium advocatus et praesentis concordiae auctor / ‘spokesman in peril and author of our present peace’ (110.6) takes it upon himself to entertain the crowd with a story. All eyes and ears are fixed on him as he begins the tale of the widow of Ephesus, which is to exemplify female unpredictability (multa in muliebrem levitatem coepit iactare / ‘He began to rant at the flightiness of women’, 110.6).

The story of the widow of Ephesus seems to have been highly popular in antiquity, and has been equally popular with literary critics. As Frow writes, ‘narrative theorists have long had a predilection for this short tale: its peculiar effect of self-containment makes it possible and plausible to seek an equally self-contained point or a finite group of deep-structure categories’. Bakhtin's reading of the story has proved particularly authoritative, to the extent that classicists have either shied away from challenging and unpacking his analysis, or have steered clear altogether. The tale is left undiscussed in most recent book-length readings of the Satyricon, while McGlathery's recent attempt to fine-tune Bakhtin's thesis seems to take for granted the use of his work as a concrete foundation for further interpretation.