Apocolocyntosis (1-7)

I wish to place on record the proceedings in heaven October 13 last, of the new year which begins this auspicious age. It shall be done without malice or favour. This is the truth. Ask if you like how I know it? To begin with, I am not bound to please you with my answer. Who will compel me? I know the same day made me free, which was the last day for him who made the proverb true—One must be born either a Pharaoh or a fool. If I choose to answer, I will say whatever trips off my tongue. Who. has ever made the historian produce witness to swear for him? But if an authority must be produced, ask of the man who saw Drusilla translated to heaven: the same man will aver he saw Claudius on the road,[*] dot and carry one. Will he nill he, all that happens in heaven he needs must see. He is the custodian of the Appian Way; by that route, you know, both Tiberius and Augustus went up to the gods. Question him, he will tell you the tale when you are alone; before company he is dumb. You see lie swore in the Senate that he beheld Drusilla mounting heavenwards, and all he got for his good news was that everybody gave him the lie: since when he solemnly swears he will never bear witness again to what he has seen, not even if he had seen a man murdered in open market. What

he told me I report plain and clear, as I hope for his health and happiness.

2

Now had the sun with shorter course drawn in his risen light,

And by equivalent degrees grew the dark hours of night:

Victorious Cynthia now held sway over a wider space,

Grim winter drove rich autumn out, and now usurped his place;

And now the fiat had gone forth that Bacchus must grow old,

The few last clusters of the vine were gathered ere the cold:

I shall make myself better understood, if I say the month was October, the day was the thirteenth. What hour it was I cannot certainly tell; philosophers will agree more often than clocks; but it was between midday and one after noon.

Clumsy creature!

you say.

The poets are not content to describe sunrise and sunset, and now they even disturb the midday siesta. Will you thus neglect so good an hour?

Now the sun's chariot had gone by the middle of his way;

Half wearily he shook the reins, nearer to night than day,

And led the light along the slope that down before him lay.

Claudius began to breathe his last, and could not make an end of the matter. Then Mercury, who had always been much pleased with his wit, drew aside one of the three Fates, and said: "Cruel beldame, why do you let the poor wretch be tormented? After

all this torture cannot he have a rest? Four and sixty years it is now since he began to pant for breath. What grudge is this you bear against him and the whole empire? Do let the astrologers tell the truth for once; since he became emperor, they have never let a year pass, never a month, without laying him out for his burial. Yet it is no wonder if they are wrong, and no one knows his hour. Nobody ever believed he was really quite born.[*] Do what has to be done:

Kill him, and let a better man rule in his[*] empty court.

Clotho replied: 'Upon my word, I did wish to give him another hour or two, until he should make Roman citizens of the half dozen who are still outsiders. (He made up his mind, you know, to see the whole world in the toga, Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, and all.) But since it is your pleasure to leave a few foreigners for seed, and since you command me, so be it." She opened her box and out came three spindles. One was for Augurinus, one for Baba, one for Claudius.[*]

These three,

she says,

I will cause to die within one year and at no great distance apart, and I will not dismiss him unattended. Think of all the thousands of men he was wont to see following after him, thousands going before, thousands all crowding about him; and it would never do to leave him alone on a sudden. These boon companions will satisfy him for the nonce.

This said, she twists the thread around his ugly spindle once,

Snaps off the last bit of the life of that Imperial dunce.

p.377

But Lachesis, her hair adorned, her tresses neatly bound,

Pierian laurel on her locks, her brows with garlands crowned,

Plucks me from out the snowy wool new threads as white as snow,

Which handled with a happy touch change colour as they go,

Not common wool, but golden wire; the Sisters wondering gaze,

As age by age the pretty thread runs down the golden days.

World without end they spin away, the happy fleeces pull;

What joy they take to fill their hands with that delightful wool!

Indeed, the task performs itself: no toil the spinners know:

Down drops the soft and silken thread as round the spindles go;

Fewer than these are Tithon's years, not Nestor's life so long.

Phoebus is present: glad he is to sing a merry song;

Now helps the work, now full of hope upon the harp doth play;

The Sisters listen to the song that charms their toil away.

They praise their brother's melodies, and still the spindles run,

Till more than man's allotted span the busy hands have spun.

Then Phoebus says, "O sister Fates! I pray take none away,

But suffer this one life to be longer than mortal day.

p.379

Like me in face and lovely grace, like me in voice and song,

He'll bid the laws at length speak out that have been dumb so long,

Will give unto the weary world years prosperous and bright.

Like as the daystar from on high scatters the stars of night,

As, when the stars return again, clear Hesper brings his light,

Or as the ruddy dawn drives out the dark, and brings the day,

As the bright sun looks on the world, and speeds along its way

His rising car from morning's gates: so Caesar doth arise,

So Nero shows his face to Rome before the people's eyes;

His bright and shining countenance illumines all the air,

While down upon his graceful neck fall rippling waves of hair."

Thus Apollo. But Lachesis, quite as ready to cast a favourable eye on a handsome man, spins away by the handful, and bestows years and years upon Nero out of her own pocket. As for Claudius, they tell everybody

to speed him on his way

With cries of joy and solemn litany.

At once he bubbled up the ghost, and there was an end to that shadow of a life. He was listening to a troupe of comedians when he died, so you see I have reason to fear those gentry. The last words he was heard to speak in this world were these. When he had made a great noise with that part of him which talked easiest, he cried out,

Oh dear, oh dear! I think I have made a mess of myself.

Whether he did or no, I cannot say, but certain it is he always did make a mess of everything.

What happened next on earth it is mere waste of time to tell, for you know it all well enough, and there is no fear of your ever forgetting the impression which that public rejoicing made on your memory. No one forgets his own happiness. What happened in heaven you shall hear: for proof please apply to my informant. Word comes to Jupiter that a stranger had arrived, a man of fair height and hair well sprinkled with grey; he seemed to be threatening something, for he wagged his head ceaselessly; he dragged the right foot. They asked him what nation he was of; he answered something in a confused mumbling voice: his language they did not understand. He was no Greek and no Roman, nor of any known race. On this Jupiter bids Hercules go and find out what country he comes from; you see Hercules had travelled over the whole world, and might be expected to know all the nations in it. But Hercules, the first glimpse he got, was really much taken aback, although not all the monsters in the world could frighten him; when he saw this new kind of object, with its extraordinary gait, and the voice of no terrestrial beast, but such as you might hear in the leviathans of the deep, hoarse and inarticulate, he thought his thirteenth labour had come upon him. When he looked closer, the thing seemed to be a kind of man. Up he goes, then, and says what your Greek finds readiest to his tongue:

Who art thou, and what thy people? Who thy[*] parents, where thy home?

Claudius was delighted to find literary men in that place, and began to hope there might be some corner for his own historical works. So he caps him with another Homeric verse, explaining that he was Caesar:

Breezes wafted me from Ilion unto the Ciconian[*] land.

But the next verse was more true, and no less Homeric:

Thither come, I sacked a city, slew the people every one.

He would have taken in poor simple Hercules, but that Our Lady of Malaria was there, who left her temple and came alone with him: all the other gods he had left at Rome. Quoth she,

The fellow's tale is nothing but lies. I have lived with him all these years, and I tell you, he was born at Lyons. You behold a fellow-burgess of Marcus.[*] As I say, he was born at the sixteenth milestone from Vienne, a native Gaul. So of course he took Rome, as a good Gaul ought to do. I pledge you my word that in Lyons he was born, where Licinus[*] was king so many years. But you that have trudged over more roads than any muleteer that plies for hire, you must have come across the people of Lyons, and you must know that it is a far cry from Xanthus to the Rhone.

At this point Claudius flared up, and expressed his wrath with as big a growl as he could manage. What he said nobody understood; as a matter of fact, he was ordering my lady of Fever to be taken away, and making that sign with his trembling hand (which was always steady enough for that, if for nothing else) by which he used to decapitate men. He had ordered her head to be chopped off. For all the notice the others took of him, they might have been his own freedmen.

Then Hercules said,

You just listen to me, and stop playing the fool. You have come to the place where the mice nibble iron.[*] Out with the truth, and look sharp, or I'll knock your quips and quiddities out of you.

Then to make himself all the more awful, he strikes an attitude and proceeds in his most tragic vein:

"Declare with speed what spot you claim by birth,

Or with this club fall stricken to the earth!

This club hath oft times slaughtered haughty kings!

Why mumble unintelligible things?

What land, what tribe produced that shaking head?

Declare it! On my journey when I sped

Far to the Kingdom of the triple King,

And from the Main Hesperian did bring

The goodly cattle to the Argive town,

There I beheld a mountain looking down

Upon two rivers: this the Sun espies

Right opposite each day he doth arise.

Hence, mighty Rhone, thy rapid torrents flow,

And Arar, much in doubt which way to go,

Ripples along the banks with shallow roll.

Say, is this land the nurse that bred thy soul?"

These lines he delivered with much spirit and a bold front. All the same, he was not quite master of his wits, and had some fear of a blow from the fool.[*] Claudius, seeing a mighty man before him, forgot his trifling and understood that here he had not quite the same pre-eminence as at Rome, where no one was his equal: the Gallic cock[*] was worth most on his own dunghill. So this is what he was thought to say, as far as could be made out:

I did hope, Hercules, bravest of all the gods, that you would take my part with the rest, and if I should need a voucher, that I might name you who know me so well. Do but call it to mind, how it was I used to sit in judgment before your temple whole days together during July and August. You know what miseries I endured there, in hearing the lawyers plead day and night. If you had fallen amongst these, you may think yourself very strong, but you would have found it worse than the sewers of Augeas: I drained out more filth than you did. But since I want. . .

(Some pages have fallen out, in which Hercules must have been persuaded. The gods are now discussing what Hercules tells them).