ministered by mouth or clyster or both. This explains 
the name that Seneca gave to his satire. Claudius’s last 
words, as attributed to him by Seneca, were: Vae me! 
puto concacavt me—‘There now! I say, I have fouled 
myself!’, which would be apt for either colocynth or 
the deadly amanita.”* 
If then our reading of the text is right, Claudius was 
done in with a one-two knock-out, first a dose of the 
deadly amanita, and then a dose of colocynth. As a pun 
on ‘apotheosis’, the name of Seneca’s satire 4 pocolocyn- 
tosis at last becomes clothed with wit: the deification of 
an emperor is reduced to a repulsive scatological meta- 
morphosis. When, later, Agrippina did away with Mar- 
cus Junius Silanus (as Dio Cassius tells us), it was the 
deadly amanita that she used, and not colocynth; for 
colocynth proclaims its presence by its bitterness, and 
an intended victim would spew it out forthwith. 
At noon on October 18 the gates of the imperial pal- 
ace in Rome swung open, and Nero, then a youth of 17, 
emerged and presented himself as the new emperor to 
the army detachment that was on guard there. The 
Emperor Claudius was dead, or in extremis. There could 
have been no reason, only danger, in prolonging the in- 
terval between the death of the old emperor and the 
assumption of authority by the new. 
And so we bring our review of Claudius’s death to an 
end. The three ancient historians who tell us the story 
were not clinicians. Their accounts, differing sharply in 
the unessential details, give us a surprisingly clear and 
consistent overall clinical picture. This is circumstantial 
evidence of virtually conclusive weight that they were 
telling the truth. They could not severally have invented 
° For information concerning the early use of colocynth in Rome, 
the best source is Wilhelm Schonack’s scholarly study Die Rezept- 
sammlung des Scribonius Largus, published in Jena in 1912. 
[ 127] 
