The Twelve Caesars (21 page)

Claudius ought to have been born for distinction. In the first instance, that role fell to his brother Germanicus, in time soldier and popular hero. His father Drusus,
Livia’s younger son, was a favourite of Augustus and also of the senate for the reason that ‘he made no secret of his intention of restoring the old-time form of government, whenever he
should have the power’; Augustus asked the gods to make Gaius and Lucius Caesar resemble Drusus. But Drusus died in 9
BC
, the year after the birth of his youngest
child, Tiberius Claudius Nero, known as Claudius. In place of power, he had to make do with posthumous glory, while the fortunes of his immediate family, lacking any trace of Julian blood, were
overshadowed for the next decade and a half by the careers of Tiberius and the sons of Julia and Agrippa. Claudius’ mother was Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and Augustus’ sister
Octavia, a woman of irreproachable reputation
whom we have witnessed intervene with Tiberius on behalf of Claudius’ nephew Gaius and, in doing so, play her part in the
inception of that troubled psychopath’s premiership, not to mention Sejanus’ downfall; Antonia successfully resisted Augustus’ pressure to remarry after Drusus’ death.
Claudius inherited from his family a share in the popularity of Drusus and Germanicus, which extended to a predisposition in his favour on the part of Rome’s legions independent of his own
lack of military prowess. By contrast, his record as emperor demonstrates little of Drusus’ overt Republicanism, while his private life falls short of Antonia’s faithful vigil.

Almost from birth, Claudius ‘suffered so severely from various obstinate disorders that the vigour of both his mind and his body was dulled’. Suetonius’ description has
troubled successive generations of readers, who have diagnosed Claudius’ complaint variously as congenital cerebral paralysis, prenatal encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, meningitis and
poliomyelitis;
³
his most recent biographer suggests a nervous disorder called dystonia.
⁴
Crucially, despite Claudius’ tottering walk, the single foot he may have dragged behind him, and his
difficulties in off-the-cuff speech with its attendant spluttering and drooling, the sources do not indicate physical deformities: it is a mistake to envisage an unnuanced portrait which conflates
this skilful administrator and enthusiastic fornicator with images of Quasimodo or the Richard III of Shakespearean amateur dramatics. The ancients may have accorded significance to the
circumstances of his birth: as Drusus dedicated an altar to Divus Augustus in Lugdunum, the first of its kind in Gaul, a Sicilian slave disguised as a waiter produced a dagger and flourished it
behind his neck. Terror jolted Antonia into premature labour. She appears never to have warmed to this child born of a moment of fear. First fears may also have impacted on Claudius: as emperor his
terror of
assassination and conspiracy was sufficiently acute to turn his thoughts on occasion to abdication.

To Claudius’ grandmother Livia Augustus wrote:

Careful in deliberation, that propagandist emperor would answer his own question. In
AD
12, acting jointly with Tiberius, Augustus decided to exclude
Claudius categorically from Roman public life. Given the limited significance both men later accorded Claudius in their wills and Tiberius’ refusal of Claudius’ request for a magistracy
in 14, it was evidently not a decision of which either repented. (Augustus’ prohibition extended to portraiture: in portrait schemes like the reliefs of the Ara Pacis Augustae, Claudius is a
shadowy presence, sketched in whispers in the background, present only to avoid the conspicuousness of absence.) For longer than usual Claudius remained in his mother’s house, under the
tutelage of a brutish guardian, a one-time mule-train commander, who abused him physically. If we accept Suetonius’ claim that the latter’s ‘express purpose’ was to
‘[punish] him with all possible severity for any cause whatever’, that programmatic bullying proceeded with Antonia’s consent. Such unmaternal harshness was a family-wide policy:
‘His grandmother [Livia] always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely speaking to him.’ She admonished him
in short, loveless missives, or, more
impersonally, through messengers. In a further act of indignity, Claudius’ coming-of-age ceremony, the public donning of the
toga virilis
, happened in clandestine fashion under cloak
of darkness with minimal trappings. It is little wonder that the object of this hole-in-the-corner indifference should immerse himself so thoroughly in the alternative reality of historical
research. On Claudius’ part, it was an acknowledgement of defeat and a retirement from the political mêlée which rejected him; both served him well. The illusion of incapacity
insulated him against conspiracy. Following Germanicus’ death in 19, Claudius appears to have successfully avoided declaring any public allegiance during the lengthy and dangerous antagonism
between Tiberius and his sister-in-law Agrippina: he is unlikely to have been canvassed for his opinion. Instead, that analysis which is central to the historian’s task replaced the
first-hand experience of Roman politics his family took pains to deny him. It also generated a lifelong interest in the esoterica of Republican convention and the mores of previous generations of
Romans. It is this period of research, part of the life he led after ‘[abandoning] all hope of advancement and [giving] himself up to idleness, living in obscurity now in his house and
gardens in the suburbs, and sometimes at a villa in Campania’, which afterwards inspired those aspects of his principate which suggest a conscious archaism, like Augustus’ revival of
lapsed cults and temple restorations. Claudius, for example, established a ‘Board of Soothsayers’. ‘The oldest Italian art,’ Tacitus reports him saying, ‘ought not to
die out through neglect.’ He looked less kindly on the (non-Italian) Druids, whose ‘cruel and inhuman’ cult in Gaul, prohibited by Augustus to Roman citizens, he outlawed
entirely. In the same period, restless in pursuit of diversion, he did not neglect the city’s drinking dens.

In the event, Claudius did attain the consulship. The year was 37, the term from 1 July until 31 August; Claudius was forty-six. The new emperor Gaius exploited family
loyalty to consolidate the legitimacy of his rule: Claudius was virtually a lone male relation. Two years later, Gaius forsook the illusion of a nephew’s affection, hurling Claudius into the
Rhine in response to his message of congratulation on the former’s detection of Gaetulicus’ conspiracy. Smarting with bludgeoned
amour propre
, Claudius may have held fast to a
portent of better things to come which Suetonius associates with his consulship: entering the Forum for the first time with the fasces of office in 37, he was singled out by a passing eagle which
landed on his shoulder. Certainly there was little else in his life to encourage ambitious hopes. He cannot have conceived of the consulship (with a promise of a second term in four years’
time) as a springboard to ultimate power; he lacked prestige, authority, even – as Dio indicated – any experience of having been tested at all in any noteworthy position. It was, as he
himself afterwards acknowledged, his trump card: only the appearance of dim-wittedness shielded Claudius throughout the purges of Tiberius, Sejanus and Gaius. There were those who did not believe
this assumed stupidity. One wrote a book,
The Elevation of Fools
. Its thesis, Suetonius tells us, was ‘that no one feigned folly’.

Alma-Tadema’s paintings hint only obliquely at the atmosphere in the immediate aftermath of Gaius’ murder. Despite the anxious facial expression of the youthful
Claudius of
Proclaiming Claudius Emperor
, the terrified grimace of the older Claudius in
A Roman Emperor,
AD
41
, those motionless bodies and the bloody
handprints of the same image, these paintings are
too decorous to conjure effectively the chaos compounded of terror and exhilaration which overtook Rome. A panic-stricken
populace converged on the Forum. In the Temple of Jupiter, senators gathered, their moment of decision – denied them for so long – come at last. Consuls transported the state treasury
to the Capitol for safe-keeping. In an atmosphere dizzy with possibilities, senators ‘resolved on maintaining the public liberty’ by abolishing the principate; others, like Gaius’
brother-in-law Marcus Vinicius, husband of Julia Livilla whom Claudius would recall to Rome, proposed their own candidacy. Dio’s image of a senate at odds with itself suggests that few of its
members had dared anticipate the eventuality in hand. ‘Many and diverse opinions were expressed; for some favoured a democracy, some a monarchy, and some were for choosing one man and some
another.’
⁶

Uncertainly, Claudius made his way from the imperial box. It was the last day of the Palatine Games. ‘He withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum,’ Suetonius tells us. ‘A
little later, in great terror at the news of the murder, he stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.’ What happened next has a quality as
anecdotal as historical. In Suetonius’ version, after a day and a night in the Praetorian camp, Claudius found himself emperor by dint of the senate’s vacillations – ‘the
tiresome bickering of those who held divergent views’ – and the calls of the entire city mob, whose chanting brooked no denial. In this version, the soldiers kill Gaius out of fury:
their support for Claudius is a later decision, perhaps swayed by the popular mood, certainly encouraged by Claudius’ own promise to them of a reward of 15,000 sesterces each for their
support (he afterwards made a smaller financial award every year on the anniversary of his accession).
⁷
An alternative version by Josephus has the Praetorians choosing
Claudius as Gaius’ successor in a hastily convened meeting following the murder on the Palatine. In this case, Claudius’ removal to the Praetorians’ camp is the
means of guaranteeing his safety until the senate can be called upon to ratify the soldiers’ choice.
⁸

The net result for Claudius, whatever the degree of his involvement in the process, was the same. By what Suetonius calls a ‘remarkable freak of fortune’, the fifty-year-old
Claudius, noted for his absent-mindedness and the political obscurity of his life to date, became Rome’s fifth Caesar through the armed support of the Praetorian Guard. The emperor’s
crack fighting force had demonstrated incontrovertibly that they could make – as well as unmake – their leader. In both versions of the story, the senate’s endorsement of
Claudius’ accession is laggardly. They hesitate... and falter in the face of bolder forces. It is a telling reservation and not tactful. It will linger in the memories of ruler and ruled.
Time will reveal the exact nature of senatorial acquiescence and the feelings inspired by the Guards’ irresistible initiative. The senate’s acceptance of Claudius as
princeps
in
41, despite his undoubted status as minority candidate, bespeaks a truth Augustus had been at pains to conceal. Impossible any longer to perpetuate that hoary fiction of a restored Republic. There
had been those that winter afternoon who dreamed of restoring the Republic – Suetonius and Dio agree. Soldiers thought otherwise. And Claudius – to the manner born, heredity his sole
distinction – did not resist the siren call of destiny.

The concerns of Rome’s newest
princeps
were twofold: the Empire’s wellbeing and his own safety. The measures he took to ensure the latter encompassed symbolic
acts intended to
bolster the legitimacy of his claim to power as well as active steps to protect him from assassins and conspirators. Suetonius describes his timidity and
suspicion as notorious: