The princeps is dead, long live the princeps.

The year is 54 C.E. The emperor Claudius has just died, and a new Claudius has come to take his place - a fictional Claudius straight from the pages of Seneca the Younger's Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii, whose boundless cruelty is rivalled only by his own mind-numbing obliviousness.

What is Seneca trying to achieve? How does this reflect on Nero? And most bafflingly of all, what's with all the gourds?