The Empire of the Self: Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius

5. Soul, Speech, and Politics in the Apocolocyntosis and the Satyricon

The following quotation from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels highlights the parameters of this chapter: The good Woman with much Difficulty at last perceived what I would be at: and taking me up again in her Hand, walked into the Garden where she set me down. I went on one Side about two Hundred Yards; and beckoning to her not to look or to follow me, I hid my self between two Leaves of Sorrel, and there discharged the Necessities of Nature. I hope, the gentle Reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like Particulars; which however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar Minds, yet will certainly help a Philosopher to enlarge his Thoughts and Imagination , and apply them to the Benefit of publick as well as private Life; which was my sole Design in presenting this and other Accounts of my Travels to the World wherein I have been chiefly studious of Truth, without affecting any Ornaments of Learning, or of Style.1 Swift’s startling combination of excessively detailed satire on the “Necessities of Nature” with the elevated concerns of the philosopher demonstrates the chapter five Soul, Speech, and Politics in the Apocolocyntosis and the Satyricon Soul, Speech, and Politics in the Apocolocyntosis and the Satyricon 141 trajectory I will draw from Seneca’s political and philosophical thoughts on empire, soul, and language to the satire of the Apocolocyntosis and the Satyricon .2 At first glance, the Apocolocyntosis would appear to be at once the Senecan text closest to Petronius and the anomalous orphan of the philosopher’s corpus .3 Thus, my goal in this chapter is twofold: to draw Seneca’s satire even closer to the Satyricon and to show that it serves as the comic double to the roughly contemporary De clementia.4 My analysis reveals that despite the work’s “unofficial” and mocking content, it is right to consider the Apocolocyntosis as a relevant commentary on political judgment, as well as on the use of language as a means to reveal the emperor’s soul. These connections not only provide the necessary lens through which to view the various utterances of the emperor Claudius and their relation to Nero’s, but also offer a means for understanding Seneca’s ideas about the nature of the soul and its relationship to bodily materialism in general. Seneca’s account of Claudius’ death, which represents what the tyrant has done to the empire, is linked with Trimalchio’s warning to his dinner guests in the Satyricon concerning the deadly, internal “vapor,” or anathymiasis. I argue that this word can be interpreted in the context of Stoic psychology. I also contend that this focus on death-dealing, noxious “air” in the Apocolocyntosis and the Satyricon can be linked to works from late in Seneca’s career, the Epistles and the Natural Questions. The Apocolocyntosis ’ famous portrait of the dying fool Claudius struggling to breathe and gasping out his life’s breath provides a strangely prophetic precursor to Seneca’s later portrait of himself as the sickly, valetudinary old man afflicted by asthma and catarrh.5 When Seneca investigates inside the bowels of the earth, he discovers the same phenomenon: lethally foul and uncontrolled air and wind. On one level, reading the Apocolocyntosis together with De clementia and the Satyricon reveals a dichotomy between the praise of kings in the genre of political theory and the ridicule of tyrants with the bodily materialism of satire. Yet the links between the Apocolocyntosis, the Satyricon, and Seneca’s serious works of political, moral, and natural philosophy demonstrate satire’s dangerously infectious instability. The image of the world and of the self presented in satire spreads out and contaminates other “serious” texts.6 Claudius’ “Spirited Utterance” Twitching uncontrollably, limping, stammering—roughly two thousand years after his “apotheosis,” Claudius’ physical and linguistic disabilities continue 142 Soul-Revealing Speech to be remembered thanks to Robert Graves’ historical novel I, Claudius, as well as Derek Jacobi’s memorable performance in the BBC adaptation of the novel. For all the humanity of Graves’ and Jacobi’s Claudius, in Seneca’s text he is a monster of archetypal proportions. He breaks boundaries and unifies oppositions.7 Like Oedipus, he is the lame king, a liminal figure who is at once regally exalted and physically and socially debased. Also like Oedipus, Claudius was joined in an incestuous marriage that led to his...