Introduction
What mental picture does the phrase ‘vomit in Seneca’ conjure? A moralistic attack on the supposed excess of early Imperial Rome? Overstuffed banqueters vomiting in order to continue gorging themselves with imported luxury fish and birds? A nauseated feeling of disgust used in the promotion of Stoic moderation? Indeed, when Seneca mentions vomit in his prose philosophy, this is often the context: the use of an image familiar in upper-class Imperial Roman life deployed to decry contemporary excesses. Seneca’s focus on vomit as a vessel for cultural criticism is vivid and memorable, as when he likens a trendy seafood dish to vomit (Ep. 95.28), rejects the status of cooking (and by extension table vomiting) as a ‘liberal art’ (liberale studium, Ep. 88.18–19), and negatively contrasts the cycle of drinking and vomiting among contemporary gourmands with the heroic draught of Socrates (Prov. 3.12–13) or the vomit of enslavers with the silence of their enslaved people (Ep. 47.5).Footnote 1 As Christophe Badel argues, building on Michel Dubuisson, the pithiness of his famous statement about jaded gourmands ‘they vomit so that they can eat, they eat so that they can vomit’ (vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant, Helv. 10.3) proved an outsized influence on the modern image of Roman banqueters voluntarily vomiting at ‘orgies,’ and thus the spectre of Roman ‘decadence’ that haunts the modern thought-world of Ancient Rome.Footnote 2
But vomit is so much more than just a source of moral criticism. Medically, it is sometimes a necessary remedy for a disease, and is thus then warranted, or even welcomed; as Ian Goh points out, there is a certain uneasiness about vomit as both a symptom of disease and potential cure of the same disease.Footnote 3 Cultural taboos against vomit interpret it as matter out of place, in the sense with which Mary Douglas wrote about it: the eruption of the inside onto the outside, a clear transgression of bodily boundaries.Footnote 4 Julia Kristeva’s famous reading of bodily fluids goes even further and includes vomit in a list of bodily functions that can bring an individual to a state of abjection, a reminder of primeval and ineffable horror.Footnote 5 More recently, the aesthetic experience of disgust – often bound up with the symptom of vomit – has been analyzed in an edited volume by Lateiner and Spatharas as well as in a monograph by Korsmeyer, the latter of whom emphasizes the odd paradox of savouring disgust, moments when allure is ‘packaged with aversion’ and our dwelling on an encounter with disgust – such as seeing a dead body – can actually increase our appreciation for the aesthetic significance of its source.Footnote 6 Vomit can also be associated with the Roman concept of fastidium, often translated as ‘disgust’ but a term that more accurately refers to the feeling of aversion after too much exposure to a normally desirable thing, such as one’s favourite food.Footnote 7
But zooming out – and attempting to put aside any feelings we may have about the affective disgustingness of vomit – vomit is a creative product. When we vomit we make something that was not previously in existence. Vomit is not created ex nihilo, of course, but is the result of mixing and transformation within the body, yielding production outside the body. The food that goes in does not come out as a whole, unified substance: it is the product of renovation, of repurposing. Moreover, there is something inherently personal about vomit, which receives the transformative stamp of its expeller. This was common knowledge in Rome, as any reader of Cicero’s second Philippic, which famously attacks Antony for vomiting up his latest meal all over the tribunal (2.63), a man ‘for whom even belching would be disgraceful’. The knowledge of the contents of Antony’s meal, matter out of place in this sombre official setting, would be too personal for the reader.
Since vomit is both personal and creative, we see clear affinities between vomit and the process of literary production. These resemblances often do not have positive connotations – if I talk about ‘word vomit’, for instance, you might picture a panicked writer sweating and frantically typing to meet a deadline. The reconstruction of an author’s work as vomit may not be what Ennius envisages ‘flying out of the mouths of men’ as a sign of his eternal fame.Footnote 8 Victoria Rimell, in her monograph on Petronius, and Shadi Bartsch, in hers on Persius, both draw connections between vomit and literary output, but from a negative perspective: that the written product is debased because of the disgust caused by vomit, both to the vomiter and anyone in the immediate vicinity.Footnote 9 Petronius and Persius have a possible forebear in this regard in the painter Galaton, who had depicted Homer vomiting and other poets gathering it up.Footnote 10 One can of course be critical of derivative poets, but it is easy to be self-effacing when acknowledging one’s Homeric influence, as was Aeschylus with his famous characterization of his tragedies as ‘slices from the great banquets of Homer’.Footnote 11 A few cuts of meat may be a more appealing metaphor for reception, but the ejection, the making physical again, of the ‘food’ that we consume as fuel for our own work clearly has potential in this regard, whether it be used to signify disgust or appropriation.
It is this more positive, radical aspect of vomit that I focus on, since for Seneca it finds a place as a metaphor for literary production and, more specifically, the reception of canonical Latin authors. I examine allusive vomit and its remnants in three texts: the Apocolocyntosis, Ep. 108, and Ep. 84. The Apocolocyntosis, a text practically bursting with allusions, references, and quotations, establishes a clear parody of Aeneas’ katabasis in Aen. 6, when the recently departed Claudius and his freedman Narcissus easily travel to the underworld. Katabasis is itself an intertextually loaded phenomenon; consider, for example, Charon’s complaint in Aen. 6 about living heroes causing trouble in the underworld (388–97) and Tiresias’ exhortation before Laius’ ghost is resurrected, alia temptanda est via! – ‘We have to find another way!’ – in Seneca’s Oedipus (392), itself an allusion to Georgics 3.Footnote 12
The relevance of this katabasis to vomit will become clear in Ep. 108, when Seneca once again rewrites this hallowed moment in the history of Latin literature with a new metaphor: as the descent of oysters and mushrooms into the guts. In this locus Seneca thus takes the established trope of reception as katabasis and twists it into reception as vomiting. This is possible because of the ‘up and down’ movement of vomit, which is not just the outward rejection of what is inside but the upward movement of what is below. Katabasis (which itself can refer to any trip below from a higher position) can involve the downward journey of food, with its voyage back upwards one possible method of expulsion.
This repurposing of Vergil indicates that Seneca follows the model of literary reproduction which he famously theorizes in Ep. 84: the bees that digest various influences and then spit them up as a new product that retains traces of its originals. This theory of ‘textual digestion’, the incorporation of a source text with some expectation of its reuse into one’s own literary output, is illustrated within this letter by a quotation from Aen. 1. Any full-throttled embrace of the vomiting of literary influences as a corollary to eating them is somewhat speculative in this letter, given Seneca’s apparent reluctance to ascribe to the bees the same sort of bodily activity which he does to the human vomiters elsewhere in his corpus, but there are nonetheless connections that invite us to consider the viability of this emetic addendum to Seneca’s already-established textual digestion.
An easy descent: Apocolocyntosis
My textual starting point for recovering an emetic model of reception in Seneca is the Apocolocyntosis. By writing this ‘Gourdification’ of the recently deceased emperor Claudius, a humorous mock-deification in the tradition of prosimetric satire, Seneca takes advantage of an opportunity to settle a political score against a ruler with whom he had feuded, affirm his place in the good graces of his successor Nero, as well as write himself into the canon of Roman literature. The Apocol. is the intertextual text par excellence, with covert allusions and overt references to literary material from across the Greek and Roman canon. As I have argued elsewhere, a truly radical intertextual moment occurs when the god Diespiter, voting in favor of Claudius’ deification, suggests that the event be ‘added to Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (9.5).Footnote 13 This overt reference to the Met. comes amidst a plethora of allusions to other texts representing a variety of genres within Greek and Latin literature.
The most telling intertext for our purposes is the Aeneid. Following his death, Claudius initially ascends to heaven in an unsuccessful attempt to join the gods on Olympus, but after being denied deification in a humorous, mock-senatorial debate he is then cast down to the underworld, where his arrival is heralded by his infamous freedman Narcissus by means of his own katabasis: ‘Everything sloped downward; the descent was easy’ (omnia proclivia sunt, facile descenditur, 13.3).Footnote 14 This ‘easy’ katabasis paraphrases one of the best-known verses of the Aeneid, of course. The Cumaean Sibyl, warning Aeneas of the dangers of his journey to the underworld, tells him facilis descensus Averno, ‘the descent to Avernus is easy’ (6.126). The trip back up to earth is much more difficult and has been completed only in exceptional circumstances.
Though this ‘easy descent’ properly belongs to Narcissus, the reader of course knows that Claudius is considerably less graceful than his forefather Aeneas, a difference which is clear in light of Seneca’s constant mockery of his disabilities throughout the text.Footnote 15 Seneca had made the contrast explicit at the beginning of the Apocol., when the narrator claims that Livius Geminius, who had supposedly witnessed the ascent of Caligula’s sister Drusilla, would claim that Claudius made the same journey ‘with unequal steps’ (non passibus aequis, 1.2), an Aeneid quotation originally used of the young Ascanius’ slow movement when escaping the burning Troy with his father (2.724). After this downward slope, at the end of the text Claudius is served with an ironic punishment in the Sisyphean/Tantalean fashion.
Facile descenditur does quite a bit of work here. Not only does it add yet more allusive punch to a text positively filled with it – one in which Claudius is derided for his literary pretensions, to boot – but it puts an ironic stain on Vergil’s underworld. Claudius, the deformed buffoon, joins not only the parade of deifications in Ovid’s Metamorphoses but also the lifeless souls that reach out for underworld passage. Just as the addendum of Claudius’ deification to Ovid’s epic would highlight a progressive decline (descensus?) from Ovid’s apotheoses of Romulus and Julius Caesar, his awkward following of Aeneas to the underworld calls attention to the gap between the weight of myth and the disappointing frivolity of contemporary politics. Claudius does not belong in either of these texts, but Seneca follows Vergil in making his Claudius follow Aeneas.
This shuffling down to the underworld appears within a nexus of bodily signs dramatized within the derisive world of the Apocol. Early in the text, after the Three Fates agree to end Claudius’ life to make way for the glorious reign of Nero, Claudius’ death is written in unapologetically bodily terms: ‘And he indeed bubbled out his spirit and from that point seemed to stop living. Furthermore, he died while listening to comedic actors, so you know that I’m justified in fearing them. These were his last words heard on earth, after he let out a louder sound from that body part with which he used to speak more fluently: “Oh no, I think I shat myself.” I do not know whether or not he did, but he certainly shat up everything else’ (et ille quidem animam ebulliit, et ex eo desiit vivere videri. exspiravit autem dum comoedos audit, ut scias me non sine causa illos timere. ultima vox eius haec inter homines audita est, cum maiorem sonitum emisisset illa parte qua facilius loquebatur: ‘vae me, puto, concacavi me.’ quod an fecerit, nescio: omnia certe concacavit, Apocol. 4.2–3). Claudius’ last gift for the living world is then excrement, perhaps inspired also by the Greek and Roman literature he had so greedily devoured over the course of his life, which renders his authorial genius as faeces rather than vomit.Footnote 16 Although known for his vomiting elsewhere – according to Suetonius (Claud. 33.1), Claudius was notorious for binging and purging – in Seneca’s hands he is the inhabitant of a similarly vile body, but one marked more for its scatological than its emetic potential.
This crude humour might have played nicely at the Saturnalia in 54, if this was indeed the performance context of this text.Footnote 17 But Seneca’s attention to bodily matters is not limited to the carnivalesque playground of Menippean satire, as texts across the spectrum of his diverse corpus embrace the bodily in service of his Stoic pedagogical goal. It is with a reading of his Epistulae Morales, particularly the much-studied Ep. 108, that katabasis itself becomes bodily – that is, theorized in terms of food and vomit.
Appetizer katabasis: Ep. 108
A fascinatingly multi-faceted and wide-ranging letter, Ep. 108 is unified by the theme of nourishment, both of the body and mind, as Michael Von Albrecht has argued.Footnote 18 Often of interest for its discussion of Seneca’s youthful vegetarianism, abandoned at the urging of his father, Ep. 108 mentions some gustatory habits that followed its author into adulthood. Herein Seneca criticizes appetizers, oysters and mushrooms in particular, for the ease with which these foods enter and leave the body and thus do not provide their eater proper nourishment:
Inde mihi quaedam permansere, Lucili; magno enim in omnia impetu veneram, deinde ad civitatis vitam reductus ex bene coeptis pauca servavi. Inde ostreis boletisque in omnem vitam renuntiatum est; nec enim cibi sed oblectamenta sunt ad edendum saturos cogentia (quod gratissimum est edacibus et se ultra quam capiunt farcientibus), facile descensura, facile reditura. (108.15)
Certain things from then [sc. my adolescent training in philosophy] have stuck with me, Lucilius, since I had approached all my schooling with a great fervor, then once led back to civic life I kept a few things from those early lessons. Since then I have sworn off oysters and mushrooms for my entire life, since they are not foods but enticements that compel full people to continue eating – a thing most agreeable for gluttons and those who stuff themselves past their capacity! – easy to get down, easy to bring back up.
Just as these foods go down easily (facile descensura), they come back up easily (facile reditura), Seneca’s euphemism for vomit.Footnote 19 The reader is once again in Vergil’s underworld, in which these foods perform a mythological katabasis. It is easy for oysters and mushrooms to go down but, unlike for Aeneas, easy for them to return to the surface, where they breach the boundaries of the body just as the founding hero once again breathes earthly air.
In what way is this famous literary katabasis akin to the easy swallowing of appetizers? Does Seneca use Vergil to grant authority to his prohibition against oysters, or does Vergil’s presence in a passage designed to elicit disgust debase the influential Roman epic? Both may be true, and at any rate the Aeneid is useful for teaching Seneca’s reader lessons about proper eating, an important component of the philosophical training of the Stoic proficiens (‘progressor’) as set out in the Epistulae Morales. A unitarian purpose should never be assumed for Seneca’s engagement with other authors, and Vergil is no exception; as Francesca Romana Berno writes in her recent treatment of Aeneid quotations in the Ep., ‘…even though Seneca considers Virgil to be the greatest Roman poet, he does not treat him as a philosophical authority but rather as a rhetorical tool’.Footnote 20 Though the overall purpose of the Ep. is to help the proficiens along the path to Stoic virtue, Seneca is ‘a literary animal if there ever was one’ and surely engages with canonical authors with more subtlety and care than for what service they might have to Stoicism.Footnote 21 The message is only ever as effective as the medium, and the hellish creepiness of Vergil’s underworld captures Seneca’s imagination in the Ep., as he quotes Book 6 more than any of the other individual books of the Aeneid – including later in Ep. 108.Footnote 22
Facile descensura, facile reditura is an allusion, not a quotation, as it is not only unsignalled by author name (as some of Seneca’s quotations are anyway) but changed morphologically and embedded. It thus anticipates his later (signalled) quote pallentesque habitant Morbi tristisque Senectus (‘pale Diseases dwell there, and sad Old Age’, Aen. 6.275, Ep. 108.29), a use of the frightening monsters at the entrance to the underworld – or rather reuse, since he quotes the same passage in the preceding letter (107.3).Footnote 23 Philosophical progress is a struggle against evils, often shadowy ones that we must ‘go down’ to confront and root out.
So Aeneas’ katabasis, as an introspective journey down to one’s ancestors (i.e. Anchises) to seek truths (i.e. philosophy) has clear relevance to the proficiens, for whom Roman literary tradition can serve as a guide. But oysters and mushrooms are paired not only for their lack of alimentary substance, as appetizers that only encourage further eating beyond the point of fullness, but for their sliminess and possible toxicity. Oysters themselves have an uncomfortable affinity for bodily products, including vomit and even faeces.Footnote 24 The proverbial ‘bad oyster’ is an easy explanation for food poisoning, and mushrooms (whose texture is also often cited as a source of disgust) can be deadly if eaten without the endorsement of an experienced forager. The twentieth-century American food writer M. F. K. Fisher, an ardent defender of the oyster, pairs it with the mushroom: ‘Oysters can be bad, all right, if they are stale and full of bacteria that make for putrefaction. Mushrooms can be deadly, too. But mushrooms and oysters are alike in that they take the blame, because of superstition and something innately mysterious about their way of life, for countless pains that never are their fault.’Footnote 25 These ‘innately mysterious’ foods thus seem fit for an origin in (or perhaps return to?) an underworld as mysterious and shadowy as Vergil’s.
These mushrooms in particular provide other inroads to the Apocol., as Claudius famously died by eating mushrooms, a fact well known to his contemporaries and memorialized in later accounts of his death.Footnote 26 The nature and even the toxicity of these mushrooms has been called into question – as Aveline argues, the mushrooms may have been naturally poisonous and not even the instrument of a political assassinationFootnote 27 – but every major account of Claudius’ death mentions this mycological murder method.
Except, of course, the Apocol. The text is fragmentary, with passages of various lengths missing throughout. So while it seems possible that someone (one of the heaven-dwellers who debates Claudius’ fitness for Olympus, perhaps?) might have made light of this murder instrument, its exclusion from a text that consistently mocks Claudius’ grotesque body is unexpected. A mushroom joke could have been a slam dunk for Seneca, considering that even Nero (extolled in the Apocol.) had made one, and the literary and cultural associations of mushrooms, both generally as a route to a speedy death and specifically as Claudius’ last meal, would find a comfortable home within the allusive paradise of Menippean satire. Although an attempt to cover for the guilt of his assassins may be a possible reason for their omission, this Vergilian allusion suggests not their absence but concealed presence. It is easy to enter the underworld (facile descenditur) after eating a bad mushroom or two (facile descensura): the eater can ‘go down’ just as easily as the food does. Reading the katabasis of mushrooms back onto Seneca’s satirical Claudius yields an unexpected fruit (or fungus, in this case). Indeed, these are the only two clear allusions to facilis descensus in Seneca’s corpus.Footnote 28
At a subtler level, however, Seneca’s Vergilian allusion allows the philosopher to reshape the Aeneid and virtually insert not only Claudius but the gourmands stuffing themselves with appetizers. Since the reception of a text invariably creeps its way into our very perception of that text and informs the ways in which we read it, Footnote 29 the sight of Seneca’s easily swallowed oysters and mushrooms invades Vergil’s underworld. Fisher’s characterization of their innate mystery facilitates such an incursion. In this quotidian, early-Imperial Aeneid the iconic and moving appeals to Rome’s future presented in Book 6 – future from a dramatic perspective and past/present from an historical one, naturally – become uncomfortably stuck in the present, a time of not only excessive eating but excessive vomiting. All things bodily converge in Vergil’s famously ethereal and nightmarish underworld, which begins to resemble Seneca’s gluttonous text itself.
Seneca’s bees and the (re)production of Vergil: Ep. 84
The literally idiosyncratic – one’s own mixture – aspect of vomit relates to one of Seneca’s most famous images of reception, if not ‘antiquity’s most enduringly influential passage on the subject’: the digestive activity of bees in Ep. 84, one of the philosopher’s best-known and loved letters.Footnote 30 Here Seneca claims that reading and writing must be done in tandem, as ‘we shouldn’t only write and only read’ (nec scribere tantum nec tantum legere debemus, 84.2). Bees are the ideal models for this process because they ‘wander and cultivate the flowers suitable for making honey, then arrange whatever they have taken and distribute it throughout their honeycombs’ (vagantur et flores ad mel faciendum idoneos carpunt, deinde quidquid attulere disponunt ac per favos digerunt, 84.3). In other words, our reading activity, which Seneca later says should be varied (varia, 84.5), is ideally contained and blended into our own idiosyncratic writing, just as bees make honey. The bee image should be understood within the wider context of Seneca’s model of ‘textual digestion’ established throughout the Epistulae Morales, beginning in Ep. 2 (where the reader is advised to digest written lessons as protections against the vicissitudes of fortune), extended in Ep. 33 (where the use of quotations without the user’s own intervention is criticized), and arguably completed by Ep. 108, Seneca’s use of his own biography as a model for digesting lessons.
Authors as early as Macrobius – who quotes Seneca verbatim but does not mention him by name – have been captivated by these literary bees.Footnote 31 Seneca here works within a long-standing Greek and Roman tradition of using the apian as a stand-in for the anthropological, as the association of bees with the creative power of poets goes back at least as far as Plato (Ion 534a–b), with similar images earlier in Pindar (P. 10.53–4) and later in Horace (Od. 4.2.27–32). Honey is already an image in philosophy, as the Epicurean poet Lucretius had famously described his poetry as sweet honey that masks bitter philosophy (1.936–50). Ancient writers thought of the intricate class system of apian society as an effective metaphor for human society; one thinks of the household-managing bee in the misogynistic catalogue of Semonides 7, in addition to the intricacies of Vergil’s bees in Georgics 4, not to mention an Aeneid passage that Seneca quotes here. The birth of bees from cow heads in the mysterious process called bugonia fascinated ancient writers, a process which suggests an original association with creative inspiration. But as Berti points out, Seneca’s emphasis on the transformation of digested material represents an innovation on the image.Footnote 32 This helps account for its popularity and lasting impact; the bees stand out among the rich array of images in Seneca’s Epistulae Morales.Footnote 33
Seneca’s own affinity with his bees is emphasized by his use of a Vergil quotation to help characterize them; after describing their system of distribution of raw materials for making honey, Seneca writes: ‘As our Vergil says, “They press the flowing honey and make their cells swell with sweet nectar”’ (ut Vergilius noster ait, liquentia mella | stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, Aen. 1.432–3; Ep. 84.3). The quotation is from a simile describing the empire-building activities of the Carthaginians, who amaze the visiting Aeneas and for whom bees stand in to make the image more intelligible to the reader. As Christopher Trinacty points out, Seneca here quotes the Aeneid’s bees (and not the more famous bees from the Georgics) precisely because Vergil is reworking his earlier bees with this later simile; just as Vergil does, distributing and rearranging his (own, in this case) earlier source text, Seneca cleverly nests an example of his own advice inside his push for a normative literary process.Footnote 34 This sort of ‘honeybee reading’ (so Graver) both develops and instantiates one’s own ingenium in its meaning of both ‘natural character’ and ‘literary talent’.Footnote 35
These bees disponunt (arrange) and digerunt (distribute or ‘digest’) their discrete influences. But do they then vomit them back up? Although the transformation of digested material is – or can be, given the various bodily evacuation options – a prelude to vomit, the bees’ emetic potential is not strictly Seneca’s concern in this passage. He continues:
Sed ne ad aliud quam de quo agitur abducar, nos quoque has apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diversa lectione congessimus separare (melius enim distincta servantur), deinde adhibita ingenii nostri cura et facultate in unum saporem varia illa libamenta confundere, ut etiam si apparuerit unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat. Quod in corpore nostro videmus sine ulla opera nostra facere naturam (alimenta quae accepimus, quamdiu in sua qualitate perdurant et solida innatant stomacho, onera sunt; at cum ex eo quod erant mutata sunt, tunc demum in vires et in sanguinem transeunt), idem in his quibus aluntur ingenia praestemus, ut quaecumque hausimus non patiamur integra esse, ne aliena sint. Concoquamus illa; alioqui in memoriam ibunt, non in ingenium. (84.5–7)
But lest I be led off onto another topic than what we’re discussing, we too should imitate these bees and separate whatever we have heaped together from a diverse selection of reading – since it is better to keep these things distinct – then, with all the resources of our natural talent painstakingly summoned, we should blend those varied nibblings into one flavour, so that even if it is obvious where it has come from, it’s nonetheless obvious that it’s something different than this source. What we see nature do in our body, without any effort on our part (that is, the food we have consumed, as long as it maintains its own quality and swims around our stomach whole, is a burden, but once it has been changed from what it was, then it can finally pass into our strength and our blood), let us ensure that the same thing happens in these processes by which our talent is fed, so that whatever we have consumed we may not allow to be whole, lest it be alien to us. Let us digest those things; otherwise they will go into our memory, not into our talent.
As we can see, the verbs indicating the apian behaviour, to be aped by the reader-writer reading this writing, emphasize transformation via separation (separare), blending (confundere), and digestion (concoquamus, which picks up the earlier digerunt). In this way the bees model a normative process of literary reception. Like the bees, we consume (and really gulp down at that: hausimus) and transform, but the transformation happens via an elaborate digestive process, with any kind of physical reappearance (as must happen with the fruit of the bees’ labour) occluded here.
Perhaps the disturbing bodily corollary of eating lurks not too far behind the apian digestion, however. As Bartsch writes, ‘In fact, in focusing on bees, they [sc. Seneca and Quintilian, whom she discusses also] present the metaphor in the most positive light possible: bees make sweet honey out of what they “eat”, whereas human stomachs transform what they take in into something much less pleasant.’Footnote 36 Bees are naturally an imperfect analogy for human beings, exploited though they may be by ancient writers, since they are lacking in many of the qualities that make humans repulsive. This makes them attractive for the ‘positive light’ of digestion in Ep. 84, however; as Christopher Star writes, with this image ‘Seneca tries extremely hard to differentiate between body and soul, between psychic and physical nourishment and digestion.’Footnote 37 Star (following Bartsch) locates in Seneca a rejection of the body in favour of the soul, a deviation from orthodox Greek Stoicism.Footnote 38 Seneca often complains about the frailty and permeability of the human body, which is why bees remain in the realm of spiritual metaphor, being a model for ‘psychic’ digestion as they are. The relevance of bees’ activity to the history of vomit in Latin literature has thus been downplayed, as vomit is not only an obvious bodily product but a disgusting one at that, at odds with the rarefied metaphorical bees.
Despite the strong association between bees and vomit made by several other ancient authors,Footnote 39 I concede that it lies with the reader and their own conception of apian honey production to tease out the bodily in this passage. But I do want to draw attention to the specific Vergilian verses used by Seneca to intertextualize his bees, as a hint of Seneca’s vomiters may linger here. In the Aeneid, these bees ‘press the flowing honey and make their cells swell with sweet nectar’ (liquentia mella | stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, 1.432–3). Again, Vergil had recycled these lines nearly verbatim from Georgics 4.163–4. Seneca’s own bees disponunt and digerunt, while Vergil’s distendunt (‘make swell’). When Seneca uses forms of distendere in his prose, they usually signal disgusting bodily operations. In fact, save for two references in Naturales Quaestiones 2 to the spreading of tree branches and the activity of storm clouds swelling, this is always true: in De Ira being filled with food swells the mind along with the body (‘for their bodies will become distended and their minds will swell along with the body’, distendentur enim corpora et animi cum corpore tumescent, 2.20.2) and screaming swells (distendet) the neck as an ugly bodily symptom of anger (2.35.3); elsewhere in the Epistulae Morales the swollen belly (distentus venter) is a site of disgust, symptomatic of the inability of the stomach to perform its proper role of digestion (Ep. 47.2) or a symptom of disease (Ep. 95.16), and wine bloats (distendit) the vital organs (Ep. 83.21); in the QNat. we unphilosophically ‘swell’ with emotion (4a.pr.2) and the bodies of banqueters are stuffed with an overabundance of food (4b.13.6).Footnote 40
Seneca is, of course, hardly limited in the options he has in making his point about bees’ collection and reproduction habits. This simile from the Aeneid is brief, but Vergil goes on and on in Georgics 4. But something about these ‘swelling’ bees sticks with Seneca as he crafts his own mixers and producers. Perhaps it is only through this repurposing of Vergil that the usually bodily, repulsive activity of ‘distending’ (repulsive for Seneca, at least) can be renovated as part of a positive model of literary digestion.
Conclusion
To an extent, post-Vergilian literature has always vomited up Vergil. The critiques and parodies of the Eclogues and Georgics recorded by his biographer Donatus (Vit. Verg. 43) attest to an early creative repurposing of the poet, as well as Vergil’s own reply to his critics that ‘they think it would be easier to steal Hercules’ club than a line from Homer’ (Vit. Verg. 46). Centones such as that of Proba (fourth century CE) select and rearrange lines from Vergil for their own ideological (often Christian) purposes. Insofar as he is a standby of Great Books curricula, Vergil remains an author for consumption and regurgitation, often as a mouthpiece for or detractor of imperialism, depending on the tastes of the audience.
Given this rich history of reception, perhaps it should not be surprising that the Vergilian katabasis has sufficient cultural and literary currency for its repurposing as part of Seneca’s crusade against appetizers and verbal vengeance against Claudius. But more importantly, Seneca locates within it (and extracts from it) an ingenious method of creation. Aeneas, like the disgusting Claudius, like Seneca’s nauseating oysters and mushrooms, goes down easily – as does his eponymous epic, the Roman legend, the instantly canonical Latin poem. But Seneca does not merely, like Orpheus checking in on Eurydice, cast a backward glance at the underworld, to use Shane Butler’s phrase.Footnote 41 Through his intervention into the tradition of Vergilian reception, he manages to make Vergil’s own poetics emetic, the heroic katabasis yielding a mess of contemporary gustatory excess. Claudius’ poisonous mushrooms go down just as easily as he does, but in his case they will never come back up. All these nods to Vergil help reinforce the creative process: eat one’s influences, digest and transform them, and finally vomit them back up. It is an easy enough thing to do, after all.
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