Seneca the Satirist

Extract

The fame of Seneca rests on his work as a philosopher and a writer of tragedies on the Greek model. But he can also lay claim to be a humorist. For in what perhaps was an unguarded moment he wrote an amusing satire on the emperor Claudius with the strange title Apocolocyntosis.

The piece is so inconsistent with the high tone of his philosophical writings that it has received from critics almost universal reprobation. Seneca's admirers would be better pleased if his authorship could be questioned. But there is no ground for supposing that the satire is by another pen.

It might be thought that the writer who composed the funeral oration on Claudius could not be so base as to switch so quickly from eulogy to satire. But the formality of a graveside encomium need not preclude more honest sentiments when the funeral is over. It may well be that even in the panegyric Seneca had his tongue in his cheek, for Tacitus remarks that when the speaker (it was Nero) referred to the wisdom and foresight of the dead prince no one could refrain from laughter.

The title presents a problem, for there is no mention in the satire of the transformation of Claudius into a gourd or pumpkin. This has led some to the view that the work is incomplete. Others hold, with the support of Lewis and Short, that the word for a gourd, cucurbita, was used in the metaphorical sense of ‘fathead’ or ‘blockhead’, like the German Kürbiskopf, and thus it is assumed that the witticism is limited to the title.