This study has attempted to map out the intricate ways in which the act of reading Petronius' hyperactive fiction is always implicated in and tricked by its paradoxical, corporeal visions. We began, in chapter one, with the opening speeches outside rhetorical school, where the environments of learning and the relationship between teacher and pupil, poet and patron/audience, were imagined in terms of geating and cannibalisation, and more specifically in terms of the ultimate instability of hierarchies positioning eater over eaten: everyone is part of a food-chain, unable ultimately to escape their corporeality. Moreover, the intensity of such environments of learning, together with the overpowering tang of contemporary literature, dampen the physical senses and render them useless, so that nobody, it seems, really knows what they are eating: students are trapped as if in a culina (‘kitchen’), where they not only smell bad, but implicitly lose their ability to smell at all (2.1). From the very beginning of the Satyricon, these environments of learning are set up as caricatures of worlds of fiction (students ‘think they have been transported into another world’, 1.2) and, by implication of this text, a satura which aims to overload its readers with flavours until they cannot distinguish one from another, and are rendered blind to the ‘outside’ world (not least our looming, ‘exterior’ author).