THE ANCIENT WORLD DIVINE COMEDY

The godlike aspirations and all too human last moments of Roman emperors.

- MARY BEARD

One of the funniest works of Roman literature to survive—and the only one that has ever made me laugh out loud—is a skit, written by the philosopher Seneca, about the Emperor Claudius’ adventures on his way to Mt. Olympus after his death. Titled “Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii” (“The ‘Pumpkinification’ of the Deified Claudius”), it recounts how the Roman Senate declared that the dead Emperor was now a god, complete with his own temple, priests, and official rites of worship. The deification of emperors was fairly standard practice at the time, and the spoof claimed to lift the lid on what really happened during the process.

It was an inside joke. Seneca was the tutor of Nero, who was Claudius’ successor and his stepson. The idea is that the befuddled old Emperor—who was rumored to have been finished off with some poisoned mushrooms by his wife, Agrippina—is not really fit to be divine. As Claudius climbs up Mt. Olympus, word comes to the “real” gods that a stranger has arrived, and that he is muttering incomprehensibly. But, when Hercules is sent to investigate, the two of them swap a few lines of Homer’s poetry. (“Thank goodness there are some scholars in Heaven,” Claudius enthuses.) The gods meet in private to decide whether to allow Claudius to join their ranks. “Opinions were mixed, but were coming down generally in Claudius’ favor,” Seneca writes, until the Emperor Augustus, who was deified forty years earlier, swings the vote decisively against him. Claudius, one of his successors, has been such a monster, Augustus points out, that he shouldn’t be allowed to become a god. “He may look as if he couldn’t startle a fly, but he used to kill people as easily as a dog has a shit,” Augustus says.