‘You smile, Lucan,’ said Otho; ‘surely your uncle Seneca—that grave and stately philosopher—could not have written this sparkling farce?’
‘Seneca?’ said Vestinus; ‘what, he who grovelled at the feet of the freedman Polybius, and told him that the one supreme consolation to him for the loss of his wife would be the divine beneficence of the Pumpkinity whom here he paints as an imbecile slaverer?’
‘I think Seneca deserves to be brought up on a charge of treason, if he really wrote it,’ said Tigellinus.
‘Nonsense, Tigellinus,’ said Petronius; ‘you need not be so sanguinary. The thing is but a jest, after all. On the stage we allow the freest and broadest jokes against the twelve greater gods, and even the Capitoline Jupiter; why should not a wit jest harmlessly upon the deified Claudius, now that he has died of eating a mushroom?’
‘You are right,’ said Nero; ‘the author is too witty to be punished; and now I always call mushrooms “the food of the gods.” But was Seneca the writer?’ he asked, turning to Lucan.
‘I think I may say quite confidently that he was not,’ said Lucan, a little alarmed by the savage remark of Tigellinus. In point of fact, he believed that the brochure had been written by his own father, Marcus Annæus Mela, but he felt it desirable that the secret should be kept.
‘We all know that the Annæi are loyal,’ sneered Tigellinus.
‘As loyal, at any rate, as men who would sell their souls for an aureus,’ answered the Spaniard. He looked full at Tigellinus, who remembered the scene, and put it down in his note-book for the day of vengeance.
But Petronius loved elegance, and did not care for quarrels, and he tried to turn the conversation from unpleasant subjects. ‘Lucan,’ he asked, ‘have you written any verses about Nero? If so, pray let us have the pleasure of hearing them.’
Lucan was far from unwilling to show that he too could flatter, and he recited the lines of colossal adulation from the opening of the ‘Pharsalia.’Even the civil wars, he sang, with all their slaughter, were not too heavy a price to pay for the blessing of having obtained a Nero; and he begs him to be careful what part of Olympus he chooses for his future residence, lest the burden of his greatness should disturb the equilibrium of the world![39]