ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the persistence of particular ideas about fat, both in ancient texts and artifacts, and in their contemporary interpretations. An analysis of fat figurines, like the Venus of Willendorf, underscores the current struggle to read ancient female fatness as representative of anything other than fertility. An examination of how ancient physiognomic texts are used to portray the lives of Roman emperors in text and artifact underscores how reading virtue and vice on fat bodies was as complex, multilayered, and conflicting in the past as it is now. How contemporary scholars interpret fat in the ancient world, and how fat was understood by ancient people, is as slippery and malleable as the substance of fat itself.
