Apocolocyntosis | Page 3

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 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 7 stop playing the fool.
You have come to the place where the mice nibble iron. [Footnote: A
proverb, found also in Herondas iii, 76: apparently fairy-land, the land
of Nowhere.] 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 ofttimes 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