Page:The Satire of Seneca on the Apotheosis of Claudius.djvu/154

 I have cleaned out much more filth. But since I want” —

“It’s no wonder you have made an assault upon the senate-house; nothing is closed to you. Only tell us what sort of a god you want him to be made. He cannot be an Epicurean god, neither having himself any care nor causing any to others. A Stoic? How can he be ‘round,’ as Varro says, ‘without head or prepuce’? Yet there is something in him of the Stoic god, now I see. He has neither heart nor head. By Hercules, though, if me had asked this favor of Saturn, whose festival month the Saturnalian prince kept going the whole year long, he wouldn’t have got it; and surely he wouldn’t of Jove, whom so far as he possibly could he convicted of incest. For he put to death Silanus his son-in-law, just because the man preferred that his sister, prettiest of all the girls, so that everybody called her Venus, should be called his Juno. ‘Why his sister?’ you say,—in fact, I ask it. Think, you blockhead. At Athens that sort of thing is halfway allowed; at Alexandria altogether. ‘But since at Rome,’ you say, ‘the mice live on dainties.’ He’s going to straighten our crooked ways! He doesn’t know what goes on in his own chamber, and now ‘he searches the regions of heaven.’ He wants to become a god.