The gourd’s omnipresence today is a far cry from centuries past:
[P]umpkins have been associated with stupidity since the Roman philosopher Seneca auspicated the tradition of “pumpkinheads” in his rebuke of Emperor Claudius. And Falstaff, dum-dum par excellence, is characterized by Shakespeare as a “gross watery pumpion [pumpkin]” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Like Claudius (and sort of Falstaff), the anthropomorphic pumpkin is always foolish yet aggressive: Before there were scarecrows and jack-o’-lanterns, Americans traded folk tales about animated vines and pumpkins so huge they had to be harvested by teams of axe-wielders, only to find their faith belied by a family of pigs trapped inside. …
[P]umpkin was decidedly low class. New Englanders were called “Brother Jonathan and pumpkin pie” to signify their bumpkinhood and Puritans demeaned the pumpkin as callow and ill-restrained when they chastised—yes, chastised—Thanksgiving feasts as “St. Pompion’s Day.” Up until the 19th century, pumpkin was eaten primarily as slave and hog feed or as a poor man’s alternative to sugar cane, molasses, or malt.
Updates from a few readers:
Your post about pumpkins is interesting, except that the first paragraph has its facts all wrong.
There were no pumpkins for the Roman philosopher Seneca to compare Claudius or anyone else to; and likely but less certainly, there were no pumpkins in England in Shakespeare’s time. Pumpkins are a member of the squash (and melon) family: purely a New World crop. No European saw a pumpkin until the so-called Columbian Exchange, in which squash, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, most beans, and peppers from the chili family came to the Old Word; and wheat, rice, citrus, apples, cabbage and much more came to the New World. (Thus Italy was without tomato sauce, Ireland and England without chips, Thailand without most hot peppers and peanuts.) Pumpkins in particular appear not to have been grown in England until after 1700. It is a matter for speculation what sort of gourd-like crop Seneca and Falstaff (via Shakespeare) actually had in mind.
Another:
The notion that Claudius was compared to a pumpkin is the result of overly imaginative translation. The Apocolocyntosis Claudii, an anonymous text attributed to Seneca the Younger, was given its title by Dio Cassius. Roman emperors, of course, claimed that they became gods upon their deaths; the name for the process was “apotheosis”, the process of deification. Apocolocyntosis is a satirical pun on apotheosis. Latin trots dating at least as far back as Robert Graves popularized the translation of “apocolocyntosis” as “pumpkinification”, but a less anachronistic translation might be “gourdification”.
But the title doesn’t really have much to do with the work proper, in which Claudius winds up spending eternity as a law clerk in the underworld rather than a vegetable of any kind. Chris Young suggested a superb title for the work, “The Ascension of the Living Gourd”, inasmuch as Claudius was being mocked for his fat head rather than for actually becoming a fleshy fruit.
The Dish 