ABSTRACT
Petronian criticism, however, has gone down avenues which are, prima facie, harder to parallel in the way literary authors have used this novelist. In particular, one notes a contemporary fascination with Petronius's ways of figuring intertextuality, and the uses to which he puts the imagery of corporeality and eating. Before Lovecraft wrote 'The Rats in the Walls', his interest in classical literature and its narratives of transformation was already well established. In his childhood, he wrote a translation of the first eighty-eight lines of Ovid's Metamorphoses into one hundred and sixteen pentameters, a work which still survives. As the story progresses, the true horror of Delapore's dreams, which goes beyond their repulsive iconography, slowly becomes evident. The swineherd's livestock are not loathsome pigs. They are, in fact, degenerate humans, raised by Delapore's ancestors as food animals. The significance of the reference to the Satyrica becomes clear.
