There is at least some visible support for the overeating charge. From the later centuries we have hundreds of reclining, obviously well-fed, fat Etruscan gentlemen in stone on the lids of cinerary urns and sarcophagi....Among the tens of thousands of Greeks and Romans depicted on pottery, in stone, and in bronze, fat men are very rare and they are always figures of comedy or of contempt.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Fat Men of Ancient Times
M.I. Finley (1912-1986), "Etruscheria," Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 99-109 (at 105):