I have argued that the writing and performance of the Bellum Civile reverberates throughout the ship voyage and march to Croton, as well as in Croton itself, the city which seems to mimic the conditions of civil war. Parallels and overlaps between apparently distinct episodes make it difficult to determine when the poem ends and where ‘real-life’ narrative begins, or vice versa, thus problematising distinctions between and definitions of fiction and reality, poetry and prose. When Eumolpus and his gang enter Croton, therefore, just as the Bellum Civile ends at Sat. 124, they seem to be entering into the landscape represented in the poem itself. The ‘invasion’ of Croton by the leader Eumolpus and his ‘army’ of ‘gladiator’ slaves, followed by their greedy exploitation of foreign luxuries (quotidie magis magisque superfluentibus bonis saginatum corpus impleveram / ‘every day I filled my stuffed body with an ever-growing supply of goodies’, Sat. 125.2), and Encolpius' fear of vengeful Fortuna (putabamque a custodia mei removisse vultum Fortunam / ‘I thought that Fortune had turned away her face from keeping a watch on me’) restage the scenes at the beginning of the Bellum Civile, where war is precipitated by insatiable imperialistic greed and directed by Fortuna. As critics have suggested, Eumolpus' descent into Croton is imaged as a repetition of Caesar's (and Hannibal's, and Hercules' …) crossing of the Alps in the Bellum Civile, a poem which, as Connors puts it, has already figured history as ‘a series of re-enactments’.