His flattery did not avail the sorrow-laden exile, but changes in the Roman court ended his banishment. The head of Polybius had fallen. Messalina had been executed. So stupid was Claudius, that he forgot the execution of his wife, and some days after asked at supper why Messalina did not come to table. Thus, all these horrors are dashed with the tragi-comic. The best of comforters, the Corsican bandit, returns. Agrippina, the new empress of Claudius, wishes him to educate her son Nero, now eleven years old. Can there be anything more tragi-comic than Seneca as tutor to Nero? He came, thanking the gods that they had laid upon him such a task as that of educating a boy to be Emperor of the world. He expected now to fill the whole earth with his own philosophy by infusing it into the young Nero. What an undertaking--at once tragical and ridiculous--to bring up a young tiger-cub on the principles of the Stoics! For the rest, Seneca found in his hopeful pupil the materials of the future man totally unspoiled by bungling scholastic methods; for he had grown up in a most divine ignorance, and, till his twelfth year, had enjoyed the tender friendship of a barber, a coachman, and a rope-dancer. From such hands did Seneca receive the boy who was destined to rule over gods and men. As Seneca was banished to Corsica in the first year of the reign of Claudius, and returned in the eighth, he was privileged to enjoy this "divinity and celestial star" for more than five years. One day, however, Claudius died, for Agrippina gave him poison in a pumpkin which served as drinking-cup. The notorious Locusta had mixed the potion. The death of Claudius furnished Seneca with the ardently longed for opportunity of venting his revenge. Terribly did the philosopher make the Emperor's memory suffer for that eight years' banishment; he wrote on the dead man the satire, called the Apokolokyntosis--a pasquil of astonishing wit and almost incredible coarseness, equalling the writings of Lucian in sparkle and cleverness. The title is happy. The word, invented for the nonce, parodies the notion of the apotheosis of the Emperors, or their reception among the gods; and would be literally translated Pumpkinification, or reception of Claudius among the pumpkins. This satire should be read. It is highly characteristic of the period of Roman history in which it was written--a period when an utterly limitless despotism nevertheless allowed of a man's using such daring freedom of speech, and when an Emperor just dead could be publicly ridiculed by his successor, his own family, and the people, as a jack-pudding, without compromising the imperial dignity. In this Roman world, all is ironic accident, fools' carnival, tragi-comic, and bizarre.