Mr and Mrs R. Gordon Wasson's forthcoming treatise on mushrooms shows pretty conclusively that Claudius was poisoned by an edible boletus cooked in the sauce of a very similar poisonous variety; that he then vomited up the poison; that he was poisoned a second time with the juice of the Palestinian wild-gourd, or colocynth (2 Kings, iv. 40) administered both orally and by enema; and that he was finally smothered. Seneca seems to have been party to the plot.