Narcissus, his freedman, had taken a shortcut to beat his employer to hell. One of them, when he saw Agatho’s bunch leaning on each other and weeping for their reverse of fortune, came and said to them, “I told you it won’t always be Saturnalia.” The rest of the lawyers, pale and emaciated, scarcely even having breath, staggered out of the dark exactly as if they had just recently been brought back from the dead. They were all happy, relieved even: the whole Roman populace walked around as if it’d been freed.Īgatho and a few other lawyers wept, but honestly this time. While they went down the sacred way, Mercury wondered what this concourse of humans meant-Claudius’ funeral? And it was all so fancy and expensive, you could plainly see that they were burying a god: trumpets, horns, a brass section for every genre in so big a jam, so great a symphony that even Claudius could hear it. Without delay, Mercury hauled him by the collar out of heaven down to hell. I move he be officially damned and not be given a stay of proceedings: first of all, he shall be deported, and then he shall leave heaven within thirty days and Olympus within three.”
Who would worship this god? Who would believe in him? To the rest of you, as long as you make men like these gods, no one will believe you are gods. “In summary, let him just say a couple things briefly and he can have me as his maid. Why, so they can pray to find a merciful moron like they would a penny on the ground? “And for what? ‘Because,’ you say, ‘in Rome the mice at least get to lick the millstone.’ He is going to be the one who makes it all add up? He doesn’t know what goes on in his own closet, and now he’s going to give the heavens an audit? He wants to be a god.
“Jesus Christ, if he asked Saturn for this favor he wouldn’t get it, even after celebrating Saturnalia all year-a real Prince of Saturn-nor from Jove, whom he judged for his incest… as it were. “Just say what kind of god you want Claudius to be,” said the deified Augustus to the gods in heaven, “An Epicurean one? Impossible, as the Greek goes, ‘They take no shit and give no shit.’ Stoic, then? But how could he be ‘Round,’ says Varro, ‘with no head, not even the smallest protrusion’? Ah, now I see it, there is something about him of a Stoic god: neither hide nor hair of a head or heart.
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