Apocolocyntosis | Page 3

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 end 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 5
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 well set up, pretty 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?"
[Sidenote: Od. i, 17]

Claudius was delighted to find literary men up there, 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."
[Sidenote: Od. ix, 39]

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 6
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. [Footnote:
Reference unknown.] 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
[Footnote: A Gallic slave, appointed by Augustus Procurator of Gallia
Lugudunensis, when he made himself notorious by his extortions. See Dion
Cass. liv, 21.] 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