The Historians' History of the World 06

The traveller who has visited modern Rome in the autumn season has remarked the numbers of unwieldy and bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies before the doors, to form a favourite condiment to the food of the poorer classes. When Claudius expired in the month of October, his soul, according to the satirist, long lodged in the inflated emptiness of his own swollen carcass, migrated by an easy transition into a kindred pumpkin. The senate declared that he had become a god; but Seneca knew that he was only transformed into a gourd. The senate decreed his divinity, Seneca translated it into pumpkinity; and proceeded to give a burlesque account of what may be supposed to have happened in heaven on the appearance of the new aspirant to celestial honours. A tall gray-haired figure has arrived halting at the gates of Olympus; he mops and mows, and shakes his palsied head, and when asked whence he comes and what is his business, mutters an uncouth jargon in reply which none can understand. Jupiter sends Hercules to interrogate the creature, for Hercules is a travelled god, and knows many languages; but Hercules himself, bold and valiant as he is, shudders at the sight of a strange unearthly monster, with the hoarse inarticulate moanings of a seal or sea-calf. He fancied that he saw his thirteenth labour before him. Presently, on a nearer view, he discovers that it is a sort of man. Accordingly he takes courage to address him with a verse from Homer, the common interpreter of gods and men; and Claudius, rejoicing at the sound of Greek, and auguring that his own histories will be understood in heaven, replies with an apt quotation.

To pass over various incidents which are next related, and the gibes of the satirist on the Gaulish origin of Claudius, and his zeal in lavishing the franchise on Gauls and other barbarians, we find the gods assembled in conclave to deliberate on the pretensions of their unexpected visitor. Certain of the deities rise in their places, and express themselves with divers exquisite reasons in his favour; and his admission is about to be carried with acclamation, when Augustus starts to his feet (for the first time, as he calls them all to witness, since he became a god himself—for Augustus in heaven is reserved and silent, and keeps strictly to his own affairs), and recounts the crimes and horrors of his grandchild’s career. He mentions the murder of his father-in-law Silanus, and his two sons-in-law Silanus and Pompeius, and the father-in-law of his daughter, and the mother-in-law of the same, of his wife Messallina, and of others more than can be named.

The gods are struck with amazement and indignation. Claudius is repelled from the threshold of Olympus, and led by Mercury to the shades below. As he passes along the Via Sacra he witnesses the pageant of his own obsequies, and then first apprehends the fact of his decease. He hears the funeral dirge in which his actions are celebrated in most grandiloquent sing-song, descending at last to the abruptest bathos. But the satirist can strike a higher note; the advent of the ghost to the infernal regions is described with a sublime irony. “Claudius is come!” shout the spirits of the dead, and at once a vast multitude assemble around him, exclaiming, with the chant of the priests of Apis, “We have found him, we have found him; rejoice and be glad!”[17] Among them was Silius the consul and Junius the prætor and Traulus and Trogus and Cotta, Vectius, and Fabius, Roman knights, whom Narcissus had done to death. Then came the freedmen Polybius and Myron, Harpocras, Amphæus, and Pheronactes, whom Claudius had despatched to hell before him, that he might have his ministers below. Next advanced Catonius and Rufus, the prefects, and his friends Lusius and Pedo, and Lupus and Celer, consulars, and finally a number of his own kindred, his wife and cousins and son-in-law. “Friends everywhere!” simpered the fool; “pray how came you all here?” “How came we here?” thundered Pompeius Pedo: “who sent us here but thou, O murderer of all thy friends?” And thereupon the newcomer is hurried away before the judgment seat of Æacus. An old boon companion offers to plead for him; Æacus, most just of men, forbids, and condemns the criminal, one side only heard. “As he hath done,” he exclaims, “so shall he be done by.” The shades are astounded at the novelty of the judgment; to Claudius it seems rather unjust than novel. Then the nature of his punishment is considered. Some would relieve Tantalus or Ixion from their torments and make the imperial culprit take their place; but no, that would still leave him the hope of being himself in the course of ages relieved. His pains must be never ending, still beginning; eternal trifler and bungler that he was, he shall play for ever and ever with a bottomless dice-box.