God-given mushrooms

Abstract When Lucius Vitellius died in 51 CE, his elder son had already achieved as much as his family had expected of him and more. Aulus was 39, a courtier who was also a former consul and senator. His father had been three times consul. This was a record which Aulus showed no wish to match. He did not live in the past, even the very recent past. He did not ape his older senate colleagues in distant nostalgia. Aulus lived in the present, with a survivor’s eye on the near future. He was a large and genial man with a limp, a low-slung belly and a long experience of watching his superiors. When Claudius died of mushroom-poisoning and Nero became emperor, he knew what the newly powerful boy wanted. In that respect, if not in intellectual range and subtlety, he was his father’s son.