lotus, the Emperor's _praegustator_--the slave whose office it was to
protect him from poison by tasting every dish before him--and to his
physician, Xenophon of Cos, she consulted Locusta, the Mrs. Turner of
the period of this classical King James, as to the poison best suited to
her purpose. Locusta was mistress of her art, in which long practice had
given her a consummate skill. The poison must not be too rapid, lest it
should cause suspicion; nor too slow, lest it should give the Emperor
time to consult for the interests of his son Britannicus; but it was to
be one which should disturb his intellect without causing immediate
death. Claudius was a glutton, and the poison was given him with all the
more ease because it was mixed with a dish of mushrooms, of which he was
extravagantly fond. Agrippina herself handed him the choicest mushroom
in the dish, and the poison at once reduced him to silence. As was too
frequently the case, Claudius was intoxicated at the time, and was
carried off to his bed as if nothing had happened. A violent colic
ensued, and it was feared that this, with a quantity of wine which he
had drunk, would render the poison innocuous. But Agrippina had gone too
far for retreat, and Xenophon, who knew that great crimes if frustrated
are perilous, if successful are rewarded, came to her assistance. Under
pretence of causing him to vomit, he tickled the throat of the Emperor
with a feather smeared with a swift and deadly poison. It did its work,
and before morning the Caesar was a corpse.[34]
[Footnote 34: 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
_divin
|