if only by inadvertence, he must have talked, and per- 
haps his revealing words had survived, their esoteric 
meaning hitherto unperceived. We embarked ona read- 
ing of all his extant writings. We began with his later 
works, composed after the death of the Emperor, and 
tried to orient each sentence toward that event. Suddenly 
one day we came upon the tell-tale phrase: it leaped at 
us from the page, fairly shouting at us. Yes, surely with 
sly intention Seneca had imparted the fateful secret to 
all knowing readers. And before us not a single com- 
mentator had ever caught the inner meaning of the 
simple words. 
We refer the reader to Letter XNCV that the old Stoic 
wrote to his friend Lucilius nine or ten years after the 
death of the Emperor and one or two years before he 
took his own life on Nero’s orders. In it he describes 
and deplores the excesses of the Roman upper class. He 
refers to the late Emperor's gluttony: 
Di boni, quantum hominum unus venter exercet! Quid? Tu illos 
boletos, voluptarium venenum, nihil occulti operis iudicas facere, 
etiam si praesentanei non fuerunt. 
Good gods! What a number of men does one belly employ! But 
can you think those mushrooms (a tasty poison) do not secretly 
and gradually operate, though no bad effect is immediately per- 
ceived from them? [Loeb translation | 
Here is proof that Seneca knew Amanita phalloides, that 
an intimate of Nero’s circle was privy to a secret shared 
by few even today. So far as we know, we are the first 
to link these lines with the death of Claudius. ‘To us the 
tell-tale sentence seems to be injected into the letter out 
of context, as though the writer were blurting out the 
secret with which he had been living all these years, per- 
haps blurting it out intentionally, for the benefit of those 
who could read between his lines. 
The period of silent invasion, that véritable signature 
of the lethal mushroom, was familiar to Seneca, and he 
{ 121 | 
