tiort at the dreadful moment that we are considering, we 
may assume that her purpose was different: the comic 
actors were to bear witness in the public market-place 
that the Emperor had not been killed but was in truth 
desperately ill, and the Hippocratic facies that we know 
he must have manifested gave them full warranty for 
such a report. Immediately after Claudius’s death, he 
was proclaimed a god—a posthumous honor for emperors 
to which Romans were accustomed. Afterwards, when 
Nero was in secure possession of his imperial office, he 
was present at a certain banquet where mushrooms were 
brought in, and someone alluded to the saying common 
at that time that mushrooms were ‘the food of the gods’, 
cibus deorum, Jew Bpopa. To this Nero is said to have 
replied: ‘True enough: my father was made a god by 
eating a mushroom.” (This story is told by Suetonius, 
Dio Cassius, and Petrus Patricius.) Nero’s remark is 
clothed with wit if he was referring to the deadly ama- 
nita, and not merely to a dish of edible mushrooms that 
had been poisoned; and Nero was in a position to know. 
In spite of Locusta’s artistry, we know that her bold 
stroke was botched, and this leads us to the second part 
of the crime. The time schedule alone tells us that some- 
thing went awry. Claudius sat down to his fatal banquet 
around 2:30 p.m. on October 12. At or shortly after 
noon the next day he was dead. The lethal amanitas do 
not kill so quickly. We do not know at what stage in 
the lengthy banquet he ate his mushrooms, but probably 
not at the beginning. His seizure could not have taken 
place before 9 p.m., and probably not before midnight 
or later, which would mean that his agony lasted only 
twelve hours. On its face this is impossible. We pointed 
out earlier that, for a murderer, Amanita phalloides labors 
under one shortcoming: occasionally a victim recovers. 
Agrippina could not afford this risk, and even if we had 
[ 1238 | 
