“Convolvens stamina fuso”: the contexture of the threads of life in Seneca’s "Apocolocyntosis"

Abstract

Seneca is generally remembered for his philosophical and tragic works. However, along with those texts characterized by a stoic rigidity, the Latin writer composed a Menippean satire that has become known as Apocolocyntosis, whose argument is the failed apotheosis of the recently deceased emperor Claudius. Throughout this article, we intend to go over the origins and the meaning of the work’s title, the imitation of the satiric poet Lucilius in it, the aspects that define this text as a Menippean satire, and the use of citations by Seneca, all of which are elements that seem to make up the portrait of the mobile caput (“unstable head”) (VII, 2) that was the emperor Claudius. We study, at last, the hexametrical poem declared by Apollo, in which we have possibly found a metaphor for the contexture of Nero’s threads of life as successor to Claudius. This metaphor is set up by means of terms repeated in strategic positions in such a way that they mimetically simulate the contexture of the threads of life made by the Parcae.