Note 34 — Chapter X

There is usually found among the writings of Seneca a most remarkable burlesque called Ludus de Morte Caesaris. As to its authorship opinions will always vary, but it is a work of such undoubted genius, so interesting, and so unique in its character, that I have thought it necessary to give in an Appendix a brief sketch of its argument. We may at least hope that this satire, which overflows with the deadliest contempt of Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote for Nero his funeral oration. It has, however, been supposed (without sufficient grounds) to be the lost [Greek: Apokolokuntoois] which Seneca is said to have written on the apotheosis of Claudius. The very name is a bitter satire. It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a God, but into a gourd--one of those "bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants." "The Senate decreed his divinity; Seneca translated it into pumpkinity" (Merivale, Rom. Emp. v. 601). The Ludus begins by spattering mud on the memory of the divine Claudius; it ends with a shower of poetic roses over the glory of the diviner Nero!