193: FAT CHANCE

(Dedicated to Billy Bunter, Mr Creosote, Andy Dalziel, Ken Clarke, and Eric Pickles)

“According to us the fat man is nearer godliness than is the thin man” – Fort, Books, p107.

Our fretting over fatties is nothing new. Both Old and New Testaments denounce gormandising: Proverbs 23. 2. 3; Ezekiel 16. 49; Daniel 1. 12; Romans 12. 1; 1 Corinthians 6. 19-20; Titus 1. 1. Jerome summed up: “A fat stomach never breeds fine thoughts” – did Fort know this aphorism?

Deuteronomy 21. 20 endorses the stoning of obese children – Britain might consider reestablishing this practice, less expensive than sending our Bunters to Fat Camps.

Hippocrates’s remedies are less extreme, generally in keeping with modern prescriptions. He was, though ( On Airs, Waters, Places, chs20-2), obsessed with the Scythian tendency to corpulence, blaming their embonpoint (also their trouser-wearing – what price the ‘Father of Medicine’ in a kilt?) for loss of sexual libido.

Roman poet Horace was one refutation of this. According to himself ( Epistles 1. 4. 15, 1. 20. 24), and to Suetonius’s mini-biography, Horace was stout (also prematurely grey and irascible – no jolly fat man, he), a “sleek pig from Epicurus’s sty”. Yet he was “excessively lustful”, both anticipating and out-reflecting Hugh Hefner in a bedroom “lined with mirrors and tarts so that whichever way he looked he could see the action.”

Suetonius describes (e.g.) Nero and Domitian as ‘paunchy’. No surprise to find rubicund Roman rulers. Fattest by far was the (as Gibbon dubbed him) ‘beastly’ Vitellius (pictured at right) with his four banquets a day and other trencherman exploits – albeit not including the claim (ubiquitous on the Internet) that he once consumed a thousand oysters at a sitting.

Another notorious Roman ostreophage was Montanus, who appears in Juvenal’s Fourth Satire as one of Domitian’s privy-councillors advising that emperor on how to cook a giant turbot. He was such an oyster-expert that one taste sufficed to identify from which bed it came. And, the intake of a fellow whose entrance is described as “Montanus’s belly came in followed by Montanus himself” must have been impressive – reminds me of Orson Wells, said in all seriousness to have been so incapacitated by obesity that he had to diet in order to play Falstaff.

Logically enough, the biggest collection of ancient fatties is provided by Athenæus, Learned Men at Dinner, bk12 paras 549-50. From “many such cases” he gives special attention (reproduced verbatim in Aelian, Historical Miscellany, bk9 ch13) to Dionysius, tyrant of Heracleia, whose flab was immune to pain from needles inserted by his doctors – though this might be seen as primitive acupuncture; cf. Claudio Bevegni & Gian Franco Adami, ‘Obesity and Obesity Surgery in Ancient Greece,’ Obesity Surgery 13 (2003), 808-9 (online) for the passage in full and their diagnosis. Also singled out are “the monstrously fat” Magas (another tyrant) who choked to death, the orator Python who boasted he could share a bed – presumably a double-double at least – with his even fatter missus, the matricide Ptolemy Alexander, and his father Ptolemy VII ‘Physkon’ (‘The Fat’) whose belly “you could not measure even with your arms.” This Ptolemaic gene apparently by-passed Cleopatra (last of the line; cf BBC’s ‘The Cleopatras’), only to resurface in Elizabeth Taylor, thus providing a corpulent inventory of fat jokes for Joan Rivers – Google has gaggles of giggles.

“Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in” – Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman.