Claudius

• 1. Introduction

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  Claudius was born on the 1st of August 10 BC in Lugdunum, modern Lyon, making him the first Roman emperor born outside Italy. He came into the world with a limp, a stammer, and a tremor, physical signs that his own mother Antonia Minor called monstrous. She used him as a byword for stupidity and eventually handed him off to his grandmother Livia. A mule-driver was hired to keep him in line. The family's logic was blunt: his condition was laziness, not illness.

  For decades, Claudius was pushed to the edges of the imperial family, excluded from public office, humiliated by the Emperor Caligula, and largely ignored. Then, on the 24th of January 41, a knife changed everything. Caligula was assassinated in a palace corridor, and a Praetorian soldier found Claudius hiding behind a curtain. Within hours, the man his family had written off as a fool was proclaimed princeps. He would reign for thirteen years, conquer Britain, build aqueducts that still bear his name, and leave behind a library of books that none of his successors bothered to preserve. The questions worth asking are not whether Claudius was as weak as his enemies claimed, but how a man written off so completely managed to shape an empire.

• 2. The Scholar No One Wanted

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  In AD 7, the historian Livy was hired to tutor the young Claudius in history, with the assistance of Sulpicius Flavus. The boy who was kept away from public life spent his time instead with philosophers and writers, and Augustus himself was surprised, according to a surviving letter, at the clarity of his oratory.

  Claudius wrote prolifically from an early age. He began a history of the Civil Wars that his mother and grandmother quickly shut down, reportedly because it was either too truthful or too critical of the Emperor Augustus, who was also Claudius's great-uncle. The damage to his prospects was lasting. When the Arch of Pavia was erected in AD 8 to honour the Imperial family, Claudius's name appeared on the very edge of the inscription, positioned after even the deceased princes.

  His major scholarly works eventually ran to considerable scale. Tyrrhenika filled twenty books on Etruscan history. Carchedonica stretched across eight volumes on Carthage. He also compiled an Etruscan dictionary, wrote a defense of Cicero against the charges of Asinius Gallus, and penned a book on dice-playing. He proposed adding three new letters to the Latin alphabet and tried to revive the old practice of placing dots between words in written Latin. The letters were officially adopted during his censorship and disappeared the day he died.

  None of these works survived. Yet other writers preserved enough references to make Claudius one of the unseen sources behind the histories of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Suetonius quotes his autobiography directly. Tacitus drew on his arguments about orthographic reform. Pliny the Elder used him as a source throughout the Natural History. The scholar whom Rome refused to put in office turned out to be one of its most-quoted writers.

• 3. Hidden Behind a Curtain

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  Caligula was killed on the 24th of January 41 by a conspiracy that included Cassius Chaerea, a military tribune in the Praetorian Guard, along with several senators. Claudius was present in the palace that day and left the scene shortly before the murder. Whether he knew about the plot in advance has never been settled.

  After the assassination, the German guard that normally protected the emperor cut down several uninvolved noblemen in the chaos. Claudius fled and hid. A Praetorian soldier named Gratus found him behind a curtain and immediately declared him princeps. He was taken to the Praetorian camp under guard and protection.

  The Senate, meanwhile, assembled and debated a restoration of the Republic. The debate dissolved into argument over which senator should be named the new princeps. When news arrived that the Praetorians had already claimed Claudius, the senators demanded he be delivered to them. He refused. He had seen the German guard kill bystanders that morning. Josephus, in one account, credits the Judaean king Herod Agrippa with directing Claudius's decisions during this standoff, though an earlier version by the same author walks that claim back considerably.

  Eventually the Senate gave way. Claudius issued a general amnesty but had the actual assassins executed, including Cassius Chaerea and Julius Lupus, the man who had killed Caligula's wife and daughter. He rewarded the Praetorian soldiers who had declared him emperor with 15,000 sesterces each. Ancient commentators called this bribery and painted him as the first emperor to buy army loyalty. His defenders pointed out that both Augustus and Tiberius had left gifts to the military in their wills, and that soldiers would have expected payment regardless.

• 4. Building an Empire

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  In 43, Claudius sent Aulus Plautius with four legions to Britain after an appeal from an ousted tribal ally. The island was attractive for its mines, its potential for slave labor, and its role as a refuge for Gallic rebels. Claudius himself traveled to Britain after the initial offensives and stayed for sixteen days before returning to the provinces. The Senate granted him a triumph. He was offered the honorific "Britannicus" but accepted it only on behalf of his son, refusing to use the title himself.

  The Roman colony of Colonia Claudia Victricensis, established at Camulodunum as the provincial capital of Britannia, included a large temple dedicated in his honour. When the British general Caractacus was captured in 50, Claudius granted him clemency. Caractacus lived out his remaining days on land provided by the Roman state, which was an unusual outcome for a defeated enemy commander.

  The conquest of Britain was not the only expansion. The provinces of Thrace, Noricum, Lycia, and Judea were brought under direct Roman rule during his reign. The annexation of Mauretania, which Caligula had begun, was completed after rebel forces were defeated. A census conducted in 48 recorded 5,984,072 adult male Roman citizens, an increase of roughly a million since the count taken at Augustus's death.

  At home, Claudius finished two aqueducts, the Aqua Claudia and the Aqua Anio Novus, both of which entered Rome in 52 and met at the Porta Maggiore. He also restored a third, the Aqua Virgo. He built a navigable canal from the Tiber to Portus, a new port constructed north of Ostia in a semicircle with two moles and a lighthouse. The port was central to his plan for solving winter grain shortages: he insured the ships of merchants willing to sail to Egypt in the off-season and granted their sailors citizenship and exemption from the Lex Papia Poppaea, the law governing marriage.

• 5. Freedmen, Power, and Resentment

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  Narcissus served as secretary of correspondence. Pallas became secretary of the treasury. Callistus took charge of justice. A fourth bureau for miscellaneous matters went to Polybius until his execution for treason. These were former slaves, and the senators were appalled.

  Claudius had expanded the imperial bureaucracy by dividing it into named bureaus and placing a freedman at the head of each. He was not the first emperor to use freedmen in administration, but the scale and formality of the arrangement was new. The senators' concern was practical: men who controlled money, letters, and law could theoretically manipulate the emperor himself. Ancient sources made exactly that accusation, while simultaneously acknowledging that these same freedmen were loyal to Claudius and that he punished those who were not.

  Pliny the Elder described several of these freedmen as personally richer than Crassus, the wealthiest man of the Republican era. Their wealth came through their positions, and it fed the narrative that they were the real rulers. Modern historians have pushed back. There is no evidence that the character of Claudius's policies shifted as individual freedmen rose and fell, which suggests that policy was being set by the emperor and not by his secretariat.

  Narcissus's fate illustrates the limits of freedman power. Agrippina had him sent away before Claudius's death. His last act as secretary of letters was to burn all of Claudius's correspondence, most likely to protect himself and others in a new regime that was already hostile. With that fire, Claudius's own account of his policies and reasoning was erased from history.

• 6. Four Marriages, One Catastrophe

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  Claudius's first two betrothals ended before any marriage took place: one broken for political reasons, one ended by the sudden death of his fiancee Livia Medullina Camilla on their wedding day. He then married four times.

  His first wife, Plautia Urgulanilla, gave birth to a son, Claudius Drusus, who died by asphyxiation in his early teens shortly after becoming engaged to Junilla, the daughter of the Praetorian commander Sejanus. Claudius later divorced Urgulanilla for adultery. When she gave birth after the divorce, Claudius repudiated the child on the grounds that the father was one of his own freedmen, a decision his enemies later used against him. His second wife, Aelia Paetina, bore him a daughter, Claudia Antonia, before the marriage was ended, reportedly because of emotional and mental abuse.

  His third marriage, to Valeria Messalina, in 38 or early 39, produced two children: a daughter, Claudia Octavia, and a son born just after Claudius's accession who was initially named Tiberius Claudius Germanicus and later became known as Britannicus. In 48, while Claudius was at Ostia, Messalina publicly married her lover Gaius Silius. The historian Tacitus suggests that Claudius's ongoing duties as Censor may have distracted him from noticing the affair before it reached that point. After her execution, Claudius married his niece Agrippina the Younger, a move that ancient writers attributed to her feminine wiles but which almost certainly had a political logic: she was one of the few remaining descendants of Augustus, and her son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, the future Nero, was one of the last males of the Imperial family. Claudius formally adopted him, renamed him Nero Claudius Caesar, married him to Claudia Octavia, and named him joint heir with the still-young Britannicus.

• 7. Death and the Contested Record

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  Ancient historians agree that Claudius died in the early hours of the 13th of October 54. They do not agree on much else. The suspected method was poison, possibly delivered in mushrooms or on a feather used ostensibly to induce vomiting. Nearly all ancient sources point to Agrippina as the instigator. In the months before his death, Claudius had openly lamented his marriages and begun commenting on Britannicus's approaching manhood, which Agrippina would have understood as a threat to Nero's succession. She had motive.

  The suspects for the actual administration of the poison include his food-taster Halotus, his doctor Xenophon, and a professional poisoner named Locusta. Seneca the Younger, a near-contemporary, ascribed the death to natural causes. Josephus mentioned only rumors of poisoning. His taster Halotus went on to serve in the same role under Nero, which some historians have offered as evidence against the murder theory.

  Claudius had been seriously ill the year before his death, and the year 54 was notable for the deaths of sitting magistrates. He may have eaten a naturally poisonous mushroom, possibly Amanita muscaria, without anyone else's involvement. His ashes were interred in the Mausoleum of Augustus on the 24th of October 54, after a funeral modeled on that of Augustus forty years earlier.

  Nero had Claudius deified almost immediately, then spent the rest of his reign mocking the deceased emperor. Seneca's satirical work Apocolocyntosis parodied the deification. Many Claudian laws were dismissed under the claim that he had been too senile to mean them. His temple on the Caelian Hill was left unfinished and later swallowed by Nero's Golden House. It was the Flavian emperors, who owed their rise to Claudius, who finally completed the temple, issuing commemorative coins of Claudius and his son Britannicus, noting that Britannicus had been a personal friend of Emperor Titus.

• 8. How Posterity Remembered Him

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  The three main ancient historians of Claudius's reign, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, all wrote after the last of the Flavians had gone. All three were senators or equites. Suetonius lost access to the official imperial archives early in his research and was forced to rely on second-hand accounts for much of what he wrote about Claudius. He painted the emperor as a ridiculous figure. Tacitus cast him as a passive pawn except during the censorship of 47-48, when he allowed a brief glimpse of something more statesmanlike.

  Modern assessments of his physical condition have shifted considerably. Before the Second World War, infantile paralysis, or polio, was the standard explanation, and it was the diagnosis used by Robert Graves in his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, published in 1934 and 1935 respectively. More recent medical opinion has moved toward cerebral palsy, and Tourette syndrome has also been proposed. Claudius himself claimed, according to ancient sources, that he had exaggerated his ailments deliberately to make himself appear less threatening.

  The BBC television adaptation of Graves's novels, starring Derek Jacobi as Claudius, broadcast on BBC2 in 1976, won several BAFTA awards and later reached American audiences through Masterpiece Theatre in 1977. A radio adaptation by Robin Brooks, directed by Jonquil Panting, ran in six one-hour episodes on BBC Radio 4 beginning on the 4th of December 2010, with Tom Goodman-Hill in the title role and Derek Jacobi returning as Augustus. The 1979 film Caligula depicted Claudius as a genuine idiot, a direct contrast to Graves's portrait of a man who performed stupidity as a survival strategy. Claudius's state cult in Rome probably continued until Maximinus Thrax abolished all cults of dead emperors in 237-238, and ritual commemoration of his birthday likely persisted within the army until the Christianization of the legions in the late 4th century.