Epilogue

In Juvenal's fifteenth satire satiric humour reaches its limits. The kernel of J. 15 is a narrative about how two feuding Egyptian villages engage in a fierce battle which ends with one tribe catching a man from the other village, and eating him in their fury. Before coming to its end, Juvenalian humour flashes a final burst of grotesque funniness, a rush of what modern jargon would call ‘sick humour’, in the detailed description of a man torn to pieces and eaten without time-consuming culinary preparation: One man tripped as he rushed along in exceeding panic, and was caught. But the victorious mob chopped him up in many bits and pieces so that this single dead body would be enough for many. Then they ate him, gnawing his bones, not bothering to boil him in a brass cauldron, or roast him on spits. They found it such a drag and such a bore to wait for the fire to take, so they made do with a raw corpse.

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