We may at least _hope_ that this satire, which overflows with the deadliest contempt of Claudius, is not from the same pen which wrote for Nero his funeral oration.

It has, however, been supposed (without sufficient grounds) to be the lost [Greek: Apokolokuntoois] which Seneca is said to have written on the apotheosis of Claudius.

The very name is a bitter satire.

It imagines the Emperor transformed, not into a God, but into a gourd--one of those "bloated gourds which sun their speckled bellies before the doors of the Roman peasants." "The Senate decreed his _divinity_; Seneca translated it into _pumpkinity_" (Merivale, _Rom.
Emp_.v.

601).