The apotheosis of the Divine Claudius: on the Emperor's lethal meal of mushrooms
Ruck, Carl
Genov, Anton; Spasova, Dimitriya
The Latin satire known as the Apocolocyntosis Divi Caludii, with several variant designations, is attributed to Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman and dramatist of the first century CE. It is a prose and verse satire upon the entrance of the Emperor Claudius into the netherworld, after his wife poisoned him with a fatal meal of mushrooms. In the afterlife, he is condemned to play a futile endless game of dice. The title is a pun upon his deifying apotheosis as a pumpkin, an event surprisingly not narrated in the satire. The pun enlists his aristocratic Etruscan heritage of the knobby crown of the haruspex diviner and his coronation as deified pharaoh of Egypt with the triple mushroom hemhem crown in a parody of his final meal upon the mistaken toxic sacrament of shamanism, plausibly traceable back to the original Anatolian homeland of the Etruscans and their migration through Thrace. Claudius’ apotheosized metamorphosis into the pumpkin gourd is more precisely as the squirting cucumber, a plant that is a pun upon the name of the Egyptian united kingdoms, and notorious for the sudden ejaculation of its seeds like a penis. Botticelli renewed the old joke in his portrayal of Giuliano de’ Medici defied as a Roman god in this painting of Venus and Mars.
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