Caligula had left the Empire in a dangerous condition: the Treasury empty, the Senate decimated, the people alienated, Mauretania in rebellion, Judea in arms at his insistence on placing his cult statue in the Temple of Jerusalem. No one knew where to find a ruler fit to face these problems. The Praetorians, coming upon the apparently imbecile Claudius hiding in a corner, proclaimed him imperator. The Senate, in terror of the army, and perhaps relieved by the prospect of dealing with a harmless pedant instead of a reckless lunatic, confirmed the choice of the Guard; and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus hesitantly mounted the throne.
He was the son of Antonia and Drusus, the brother of Germanicus and Livilla, the grandson of Octavia and Antony, of Livia and Tiberius Claudius Nero. He had been born at Lugdunum (Lyons) in the year 10 B.C.. and was now fifty years old. He was tall and stout, with white hair and an amiable face; but infantile paralysis and other diseases had weakened his frame. His legs were precariously thin and gave him a shambling gait; his head wobbled as he walked. He loved good wines and rich food and suffered from gout. He stuttered a bit, and his laughter seemed too boisterous for an emperor. In anger, says the merciless gossiper, “he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose.”43 He had been brought up by women and freedmen, had developed a timidity and sensitivity hardly advantageous to a ruler, and had had few opportunities to practice government. His relatives had looked upon him as a feeble-minded invalid; his mother, who had inherited Octavia’s gentleness, called him “an unfinished monster,” and when she wished to stress a man’s dullness she would term him “a bigger fool than my Claudius.” Scorned by all, he lived in safe obscurity, absorbed in gambling, books, and drink. He became a philologist and antiquarian, learned in “ancient” art, religion, science, philosophy, and law. He wrote histories of Etruria, Carthage, and Rome, treatises on dice and the alphabet, a Greek comedy, and an autobiography. Scientists and savants corresponded with him and dedicated their tomes to him; Pliny the Elder cites him four times as an authority. As Emperor he told his people how to cure snakebite, and forestalled superstitious fears by predicting a solar eclipse on his birthday and explaining its cause. He spoke Greek well, and wrote several of his works in that language. He had a good mind; perhaps he was sincere when he told the Senate that he had pretended stupidity in order to save his head.
His first act as Emperor was to reward with a donative of 15,000 sesterces every soldier of that Guard which had raised him to the throne. Caligula had given such gifts, but not so clearly in payment for the Empire; now Claudius acknowledged the sovereignty of the army, while canceling again the power of the Assembly to choose the magistrates. With wiser generosity he ended accusations de maiestate, released persons imprisoned on such charges, recalled all exiles, restored confiscated property, returned to Greece the statues that Gaius had stolen, and abolished the taxes that Gaius had introduced. But he put to death Caligula’s assassins, on the theory that it was unsafe to condone the murder of an emperor. He ended the practice of prostration, and announced simply that he was not to be worshiped as a god. Like Augustus he repaired the temples and with antiquarian fervor sought to reanimate the old religion. He applied himself personally and conscientiously to public affairs; he even “made the rounds of those who sold goods and let buildings, and corrected whatever he deemed to be abuses.”44 But in truth, though he emulated the moderation of Augustus, his actual policies went beyond that cautious conservatism to the bold and varied plans of Caesar: the reform of government and law, the construction of public works and services, the elevation of the provinces, the enfranchisement of Gaul, and the conquest and Romanization of Britain.
He surprised everyone by showing will and character as well as learning and intellect. Like Caesar and Augustus, he was convinced that the local magistrates were too few and untrained, the Senate too proud and impatient to do the complex work of municipal and imperial administration. He bowed to the Senate, and left it many powers and more dignities; but the real labor of government was performed by himself, a cabinet of his appointees, and a civil service gradually organized, as under Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius, out of the freedmen of the Emperor’s household, and using “public” slaves for clerical and minor tasks. Four cabinet members headed this bureaucracy: a secretary of state (ab epistulis—“for communications”), a treasurer (a rationibus—“for accounts”), another secretary (a libellis—for petitions), and an attorney general (a cognitionibus—“for actions at law”). Able freedmen—Narcissus, Pallas, and Callistus—held the first three posts. Their rise to power and wealth was the symbol of a wide elevation of the freedman class, which had been going on for centuries and reached a new height in Claudius’ reign. When the aristocracy protested against the empowerment of these parvenus, Claudius revived the office of censor, had himself chosen to it, revised the list of persons eligible to the Senate, eliminated the chief opponents of his policies, and added new members from the knights and the provinces.
Equipped with these administrative organs, he set himself an ambitious program of construction and reform. He improved the procedure of the courts, decreed penalties for the law’s delays, sat patiently as judge many hours every week, and forbade the application of torture to any citizen. To prevent the floods that endangered Rome all the more frequently as the Apennines were being denuded of timber, he had an additional channel dug for the lower course of the Tiber. To expedite the import of grain he had a new harbor (Portus) built near Ostia, with commodious warehouses and docks, two great moles to break the fury of the sea, and a channel connecting the harbor with the Tiber above the river’s silted mouth. He finished the “Claudian” aqueduct begun by Caligula, and constructed another, the Anio Novus, both immense works and notable for the beauty of their lofty arches. Observing that the lands of the Marsians were periodically swamped by the overflow of Lake Fucinus, he provided state funds for the labor of 30,000 men during eleven years, digging a three-mile tunnel from the lake through a mountain to the river Ciris. Before releasing the waters of the lake he staged on it a sham naval battle between two fleets manned by 19,000 condemned criminals, before spectators gathered from all Italy upon the slopes of the surrounding hills. The combatants saluted the Emperor with a historic phrase: Ave Caesar! morituri salutamus te—“Hail Caesar! we who are about to die salute you.”45
The provinces prospered under him as in Augustan days. He punished decisively the malfeasance of officials, except in the case of Felix, procurator of Judea, whose misrule was concealed from him by Pallas, brother of Saint Paul’s inquisitor. He busied himself with every phase of provincial affairs; his edicts and inscriptions, found throughout the Empire, are marked by his characteristic fussiness and prolixity, but they show a mind and will intelligently devoted to the public good. He labored to improve communication and transport, to protect travelers from brigandage, and to reduce the cost of the official post to the communities it served. Like Caesar he wished to raise the provinces to the level of Italy in a Roman commonwealth. He carried out Caesar’s design in granting full citizenship to Transalpine Gaul; if he had had his way he would have enfranchised all freemen in the Empire.46 A bronze tablet unearthed at Lyons in 1524 has preserved for us part of the rambling speech in which he persuaded the Senate to admit to its membership and to imperial office those Gauls who held the Roman franchise. Meanwhile he did not allow the army to deteriorate or the frontiers to be infringed; his legions were kept busy and fit, and great generals like Corbulo, Vespasian, and Paulinus developed under his choice and encouragement. Again deciding to complete Caesar’s plans, he invaded Britain in 43, conquered it, and was back in Rome within six months of setting out. In the triumph accorded him he violated precedent by pardoning the captured British king, Caractacus. The people of Rome laughed at their strange Emperor, but loved him; and when, on one of his absences from the capital, a false rumor spread that he had been killed, so great a turmoil of sorrow swept the city that the Senate had to issue official assurances that Claudius was safe and would soon be in Rome.
From that great height he fell because he had built a government too complex for his personal supervision, and because his amiable spirit was too easily deceived by his freedmen and his family. The bureaucracy had improved administration and had made a thousand new openings for corruption. Narcissus and Pallas were excellent executives, who considered their salaries unequal to their merits. To make up the difference they sold offices, extorted bribes by threats, and brought charges against men whose estates they wished to confiscate. They ended by being the richest individuals in all antiquity. Narcissus had 400,000,000 sesterces ($60,000,000); Pallas was miserable because he had only 300,000,000.47 When Claudius complained of a deficit in the imperial Treasury, Roman wags remarked that he would have enough and to spare if he would take his two freedmen into partnership.48 The old aristocratic families, now comparatively poor, looked with horror upon these accumulations and powers, and burned with anger when they had to court ex-slaves to obtain a word with the Emperor.
Claudius was busy writing to appointees and scholars, preparing edicts and speeches, and attending to the needs of his wife. Such a man should have lived like a monk and barricaded himself against love; his wives proved a ruinous distraction, and his domestic policy was not as successful as his foreign. Like Caligula he married four times. His first wife died on her wedding day, the next two he divorced; then, aged forty-eight, he married Valeria Messalina, sixteen. She was not unusually pretty: her head was flat, her face florid, her chest malformed;49 but a woman need not be beautiful to commit adultery. When Claudius became Emperor she assumed the rights and manners of a queen, rode in his triumph, and had her birthday celebrated throughout the Empire. She fell in love with the dancer Mnester; when he rejected her advances she begged her husband to bid him to be more obedient to her requests; Claudius complied, whereupon the dancer yielded to her patriotically. Messalina rejoiced at the simplicity of her formula, and adopted it with other men; those who still refused her were accused of invented crimes by officials pliant to her influence, and found themselves deprived of their property and their liberty, sometimes of their lives.50
Perhaps the Emperor tolerated these irregularities to secure indulgence for his own. “He was immoderate in his passion for women,” says Suetonius, who adds, as a startling distinction, that Claudius “was wholly free from unnatural vice.”51 Messalina, says Dio, “gave him some attractive housemaids for bedfellows.”52 Needing funds for her escapades, the Empress sold offices, recommendations, and contracts. Juvenal has handed down the story that she would disguise herself, enter a brothel, receive all comers, and gladly pocket their fees; the tale was probably taken from the lost memoirs of Messalina’s successor and foe, the younger Agrippina. While Claudius, says Tacitus, “devoted all his time to the duties of his censorial office”53—including the supervision and improvement of Roman morals—Messalina “gave a loose to love,” and at last, while her husband was in Ostia, formally married a handsome youth, Caius Silius, “with pomp and all accustomed rites.”54 Narcissus informed the Emperor through the latter’s concubines55 and told him that an uprising was being planned to kill him and put Silius on the throne. Claudius rushed back to Rome, summoned the Praetorian Guard, had Silius and other lovers of Messalina slain, and then retired in nervous exhaustion to his rooms. The Empress hid herself in those gardens of Lucullus which she had confiscated for her pleasure. Claudius sent her a message inviting her to come and plead her cause. Fearing that the Emperor would forgive her and turn against him, Narcissus dispatched some soldiers with instructions to kill her. They found her alone with her mother, slew her with one blow, and left her corpse in her mother’s arms (48). Claudius told the Praetorian Guard that if he should every marry again they would be justified in killing him. He never mentioned Messalina again.IV
Within a year he was hesitating whether to marry Lollia Paulina or the younger Agrippina. Lollia, ex-wife of Caligula, was rich; sometimes, we are told, she wore jewelry worth 40,000,000 sesterces;59 perhaps Claudius admired her money more than her taste. Agrippina was the daughter of the elder Agrippina and Germanicus; she too, had in her the unreconciled blood of Octavian and Antony, and had succeeded to the beauty, ability, resolution, and unscrupulous vindictiveness of her mother. She was already twice a widow. By her first husband, Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, she had a son Nero, whose enthronement became the ruling passion of her life; and from her second husband Caius Crispus, whom rumor accused her of poisoning, she inherited the wealth that sinewed her aims. Her problem was to become the wife of Claudius, to get rid of his son Britannicus, and make Nero, by adoption, heir to the Empire. The fact that she was Claudius’ niece did not deter her, but gave her opportunities for fond intimacies that stirred the aging ruler in no avuncular way. Suddenly he appeared before the Senate and asked it to bid him marry again for the good of the state. The Senate complied, the Praetorians laughed, and Agrippina reached the throne (48).
She was thirty-two, Claudius fifty-seven. His energies were failing; hers were at their height. Playing upon him with all her charms, she persuaded him to adopt Nero as his son, and to give his thirteen-year-old daughter Octavia to the sixteen-year-old youth in marriage (53). She assumed more and more political power with each year, and finally sat beside him on the imperial dais. She recalled the philosopher Seneca from the exile to which Claudius had condemned him, and made him the tutor of her son (49); and she had her friend Burrus appointed prefect of the Praetorian Guard. So poised, she ruled with a virile hand and established order and economy in the imperial household. Her ascendancy might have been a boon to Rome had she not indulged her avarice and her revenge. She had Lollia Paulina put to death because Claudius, in a careless moment which no wife forgives, remarked on the elegance of Lollia’s figure. She had Marcus Silanus poisoned because she feared that Claudius might name him his heir. She conspired with Pallas to overthrow Narcissus, and this moneyed potentate, as faithful as he was corrupt, ended his career in a dungeon. The Emperor, weakened by ill-health, many labors, and sexual enterprise, allowed Pallas and Agrippina to establish another reign of terror. Men were accused, exiled, or killed because the Treasury was exhausted by public works and games and needed replenishment by confiscated wealth. Thirty-five senators and 300 knights were condemned to death in the thirteen years of Claudius’ reign. Some of these executions may have been justified by actual conspiracy or crime; we do not know. Nero later claimed that he had examined all the papers of Claudius, and that from these it appeared that not one prosecution had been set on foot by the Emperor’s order.60
After five years of his fifth marriage Claudius awakened to what Agrippina was doing. He resolved to put an end to her power, and circumvent her plans for Nero, by naming Britannicus his heir. But Agrippina had more determination and less scruple. Perceiving the Emperor’s intentions she risked everything: she fed Claudius poisonous mushrooms, and he died after twelve hours of agony, without being able to utter a word (54). When the Senate deified him, Nero, already enthroned, remarked that mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since by eating them Claudius had become divine.61