Of pumpkins and morning stars.

[uvula_fr_b4]

I've no doubt that I'm overlooking the blindingly obvious (d'accord: hence the adverb "blindingly"...), but I thought I'd state my confusion any way:

1. Why is Seneca's Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii translated into English as "The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius" if pumpkins are a New World fruit (that's most usually treated as a vegetable; that's a whole other ball of wax...) that Europeans didn't know about until at least the 1500s? Wouldn't "gourdification" make more sense in this context?
   
   
2. "Lucifer" is a Latinization of the Greek "eosphorus" or "phosphorus" and was used as a poetic appellation for the planet Venus; got it. But since the Romans at least paid lip-service to the gods, why did they assign Venus-the-planet a male gender? If they named the planet after their goddess of love, wouldn't the planet retain the goddess' gender? Or did the Romans consider all planets to be "male," and started calling Venus-the-planet "Lucifer" (as Seneca apparently did in his Apocolocyntosis) as a way of shutting up contemporaries who asked the same pesky question?

I only want to know....