We have now seen extensively how the city of Croton is mapped as an oertly poetic environment. In Petronius' dark restaging of an Ovidian landscape, the suppressed energy of Pythagoreanism erupts in a chaos of corporeal and literary flux. The impotent Encolpius comes to incarnate not just the metaphor of civil war (poetry), but also his own bloated and slippery corpus of literary knowledge: his is a fragile condition reflected back on an audience impotent to discover whether sexual failure is canny or farcical, seductive or repellent. We can only be sure that ‘soft’, ‘fluid’ flesh in the Satyricon is a prerequisite to creative output, the breeding ground for passionate poetry: as a choleric freedman yells in Trimalchio's Cena, in molli carne vermes nascuntur / ‘worms breed in soft flesh’ (57.3). Yet in another twist, it seems that the women of Croton's sexual frustration with the afflicted Encolpius is also an act, that their interest in his pulpy, disintegrating self threatens to reveal itself as a sexualised cannibalism, playing on the metaphor of eating as sexual intercourse which we can see traced throughout the Satyricon as a whole. In the Pythagorean cityscape of civil war, the way to a woman's heart is almost certainly through her stomach. In this chapter, I will explore in greater detail how the final scenes of the Satyricon as we have it sexualise the consumption of human/literary bodies, culminating in a rotten recycling of Philomela's myth which frames the ultimate exhibition of Eumolpus' poetic flesh.