Page:The Satire of Seneca on the Apotheosis of Claudius.djvu/158

 whether in a bad case, and one which is certainly your own, you are going to be just. Tell me, divine Claudius, why you condemned any one of the men and women whom you put to death before you understood their cases, or even listened to them. Where is this kind of thing customary?

It’s not the way in heaven. Here is Jupiter, now, who has been ruling for so many years. One person’s leg he has broken, Vulcan’s whom

Snatching him by the foot, he hurled from the heavenly threshold;

and he got angry at his wife and hung her up, but he didn’t kill her, did he? But you have put to death Messalina, to whom I was as much a great-uncle as I was to you. ‘I don’t know,’ you say? May the gods be hard on you! It is more shameful that you didn’t know it than that you killed her. He has never ceased to follow up the dead-and-gone C. Caesar. The latter had killed his father-in-law; Claudius here, his son-in-law besides. Gaius forbade the sons of Crassus to be called Magnus; this man returned him the name, but took off his head. He killed in one household Crassus, Magnus, Scribonia, the Tristionias, and Assario; and they were aristocrats too, and Crassus besides so stupid that he was even qualified to reign. Now do you want to make this man a god? Look at his body, born when the gods were angry. And finally, if he can say three consecutive words together,