Horace's Tiresias tells Ulysses to court rich old men's wills, and Petronius's Eumolpus wills his body to be eaten by his heirs

These are works of fiction. In Horace's fifth satire of Book II, Ulysses, back in Ithaca poor, asks the prophet Tiresias how to rebuild his fortune. Tiresias tells him to hunt the wills of rich old men: send them the best produce, praise them, take up the lawsuits of rich men without heirs, and if necessary offer Penelope to an old man who wants her. He tells of a wicked old woman at Thebes whose will made her heir carry her corpse, anointed with oil, on his naked shoulders. In the Satyricon, a local warns the travellers that the people of Croton are either legacy hunters or their targets, and that no one with heirs is invited to dinner. The poet Eumolpus poses as a grieving rich man who has lost a son and keeps rewriting his will. The hunters court him. His will then requires every legatee except his freedmen to cut up his body and eat it in public. One of them, Gorgias, says he will do it if he need not wait too long. Eumolpus cites sieges where people ate the dead. The surviving text breaks off at that point. Some printed translations add later supplements in which the Crotonians kill Eumolpus; those endings are not part of the ancient text.