Implicit in memento mori—the injunction to remember that we all must die—is an acknowledgment that our default is to forget. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just as people who refuse to die become undead monsters that feed on the living, zombie concepts, whose verbal husks endure even after their animating insights have flamed out, curdle into platitudes that smother genuine thought. We see that cycle play out in early Imperial Rome, when Stoic philosophers like Seneca advocated “rehearsing your death” as a means of cultivating independence and moral courage. Within a generation, that austere precept had metastasized into a cultural vibe, a pre-Goth gothicism that delighted in funereal imagery. In a masterful takedown—the Cena Trimalchionis (Dinner at Trimalchio’s)—the satirist Petronius reveals how this fixation on dying had itself become a denial of death. This illustrated talk will explore this fascinating and largely forgotten historical moment.