Apocolocintose

Overview & Synopsis

An unreliable narrator relates the death of Claudius on 13 October (54 AD, I would add) by intervention of Mercury and Clotho, one of the Fates. Apollo compares Nero to himself, and Lachesis, another of the Fates, grant many years of life to the new princeps, bearer of the Golden Age. The work does not describe the journey to Olympus. When the arrival of a strange figure (Claudius) is announced to him, Jupiter sends Hercules, who, fearful at first sight of a possible thirteenth work, discovers that he is a kind of man, who, according to the Fever (who had always accompanied him and traveled with him to Olympus), was a native of Gaul. There follows a gap, after which a council of the gods is described, where Diespiter defends the admission of Claudius among the Olympian gods, and an unidentified character, Janus and Augustus deny Claudius his claims. Mercury drags Claudius to Rome, where he attends his funeral, and from there to the underworld, where, initially condemned by Aeacus to play dice with a bottomless dice-box, he ends up as the freedman Menander’s secretary for petitions and law-clerk.