even took pains to mention how tasty the wicked mush- 
room was. How much guilty knowledge packed into a 
few words! Read in conjunction with the Empress 
Agrippina’s instructions to Locusta, we believe it 
clinches our case. The poison in the dish of Caesar's 
amanitas was the poison of the deadly amanita. ‘I'wo of 
our authors, Suetonius and ‘Tacitus, give us grounds for 
supposing that the administration of the poison was en- 
trusted to the eunuch Halotus, whose office it was to 
taste the Emperor’s food before serving it to him. Taci- 
tus says that a person unnamed (presumably Halotus) 
poured the poison into the dish of mushrooms. It would 
have been easy for Locusta to prepare a sauce from the 
deadly specimens, and by enlisting the aid of Halotus, 
no suspicion would be aroused by the failure to serve it 
to others at the feast. However, this is a detail, impor- 
tant at the time to the participants of course, but second- 
ary to the primary fact that the ancient writers are tell- 
ing us exactly how Locusta handled the assignment with 
which Agrippina charged her. We believe that the secret 
of those two fearless and wicked women is withheld from 
us no longer. (Latinists and mycologists will note that 
Seneca uses the word boletus for the deadly amanita: 
clearly it was the term for all amanitas, not merely 
Amanita caesarea. ) 
We rest our case on the knowledge shown by Seneca 
and the quoted passage from Tacitus, taken together. 
But there is additional circumstantial evidence compati- 
ble with our theory. The crime was committed on Octo- 
ber 12—in the season when the deadly amanita could be 
easily found around Rome. On the morrow after Claudius 
had eaten the mushrooms and while he was yet alive, 
comedians were introduced into his presence to solace 
and delight him, as Suetonius says. Since any such kind 
intention was foreign to Agrippina’s nature, and a for- 
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