His End, Our Beginning

The Man, The Myth, The Pumpkin by Sophia Sarro

Episode notes

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?

Keywords
claudiusclassicssenecanerohistoryromedisabilitygenderintersectionality