Claudius – A Personal View

It is 41AD, and the bizarrely brutal emperor Caligula has just been brazenly stabbed to death in public, his wife and daughter being butchered at the same time. There are very few surviving members of the Julio-Claudian family left alive that could conceivably replace him; most having been eliminated by the two previous emperors. There is, though, one notable exception; the fifty-year-old, stammering, physically deformed uncle Claudius. Considered an imbecile and thus ineligible for high office, he is in fact very far from stupid. He is also, for the moment, nowhere to be found. Later that same day, a terrified Claudius would be discovered cowering behind a curtain deep within the belly of the imperial palace. As the unnamed soldier drew that fateful curtain, the revealed Claudius fully expected that his last moments had come, that the assassins meant to end the Augustan dynasty in its entirety, once and for all. Not so. If anything, they were desperately searching for a successor. By bedtime, the Praetorian Guard had proclaimed Claudius imperator, the senate had been forced to retrospectively recognise that decision, and Claudius was elevated to the position of a Caesar. One more nail in the practically complete coffin of the Republic. The monarchy had been saved from the very brink of destruction, for now. But how long would it last, and what type of government could the Roman world expect from the rumoured buffoon, Claudius?

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus—Claudius—was not actually a buffoon, however. Far from it; he was a scholar. He was an accomplished historian and jurist. He was extremely well-read, the first emperor to be able to claim such an accolade. And though he was significantly less murderous and mendacious than Tiberius, and massively less so than Caligula, he was still far from benevolent or benign. As I have mentioned in previous articles in this mini-series, my perception of the first Caesars was terribly clouded and distorted in childhood by the TV adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels, I Claudius, and Claudius The God. Graves chooses to depict Claudius as completely sympathetic, as an entirely innocent party who just happened to be surrounded by monsters. Claudius is played wonderfully by Sir Derek Jacobi, and is utterly convincing as an endearing, lovable grandfather figure. The problem with that, is that the ancient sources do not support it.

Claudius seems to have demonstrated a strange and eclectic array of qualities. He does not fit neatly into a single archetype. On occasion he was painfully measured and fair-minded, on others, he could be cruel and unnecessarily violent. The Graves/Jacobi portrayal makes Claudius seem like an all-around good egg. This, I’m afraid, is not accurate.

So convincing is Graves’ writing and Jacobi’s acting that, to this day, I usually have to actively remind myself of Claudius’ crimes and follies, lest I default into thinking of him as a kindly grandpa. When I first learned the actual details of Claudius’ reign, I was shocked and appalled to realise the degree to which Graves departed from history and made his Claudius a thing of near-total fiction.

To the ancient sources!... Unfortunately the first years of Claudius’s reign in Tacitus are lost. Such a pity. We do have the latter years of his reign though. We have Suetonius’ ‘Life’, we have Cassius Dio, we have the letters of Pliny, and we have various other pieces of literary evidence; we even have a handful of partial transcripts of Claudius’ speeches which have miraculously survived the millennia. We have, then, a reasonable amount of evidence to work with; our view could certainly be darker. Claudius himself was supposed to have published many well-regarded volumes during his own lifetime—histories and biographies mostly—all of which are now, frustratingly, completely lost to us.

Tacitus and all the ancient sources seem to be in more or less agreement that Claudius was timid by nature. His caution and timidity get mentioned and stressed again and again. It seems to have been a caution and timidity born out of paranoia. A rightly justified paranoia about being usurped or assassinated. If he was on occasion cruel and arbitrary, it was out of a fear that his life might be extinguished at any given moment. And indeed there were many plots and conspiracies against his regime; plots and conspiracies which were met and countered by a broad culture of informants, widespread censorship and repression, and a merciless military wing stationed in Rome ready to snuff out all perceived opposition. While Claudius’ particular brand of terror never blossomed into something utterly nightmarish, (like that of Tiberius or Stalin) it is still a stain on his historical memory. It certainly disbars him, in my opinion, from being memorialised as a type of well-meaning and entirely harmless grandpa.

Along with a number of notable successes during his reign—economic and judicial reforms, a shoring up of the German frontiers, and a blinding conquest of southern Britain—Claudius’ primary weakness could be said to be the women in his life. More accurately, his last two wives. Claudius Caesar’s penultimate wife was Messalina, and she seems to have been a lady of loose morals. Indeed, if the accounts are to be believed, she appears to have been highly promiscuous. Absurdly promiscuous. Almost comically promiscuous. The level and degree of her sexual depravity and excess are so extreme that even Tacitus himself feels the need to interrupt his narrative to assure his reader that he is aware that the details strain brief. Tacitus tells us that had he not personally done the research and spoken with survivors and eyewitnesses, he might not have believed it himself. For example, Messalina was supposed to have had an insatiable sexual appetite. She is supposed to have bedded any and all men who took her fancy. She was supposed to have regularly slipped out of the imperial palace once Claudius had fallen asleep, made her way to a well-known brothel, and promptly pimped herself out to all and sundry. She was supposed to have conducted a competition with Rome’s most prolific prostitute to see who would sleep with more clients in a single day: Messalina won the contest.

Messalina proved to be a headache for Claudius and Rome far beyond merely her whoring. She carefully manoeuvred and manipulated Claudius in order to convince him to exile and execute many of his own family, usually nieces. In the end, it seems, she grew tired of even having to manipulate an aged emperor, and harboured designs of usurping the imperial authority itself. Thus, one day when Claudius was visiting the coast at Ostia, Messalina married her favourite suitor, Gaius Silius, and apparently intended to depose Claudius and install herself and her lover as the new masters of Rome.

As desperate and crazy as that scheme sounds, as much of a long shot as it appears to us now, Messalina and her faction must have thought that it had at least a chance of success. It proved to be a catastrophe. Claudius’ most powerful freedmen, particularly Narcissus, nipped it in the bud. The Praetorian Guard saw to it that the conspirators were all rounded up and disposed of without delay; Messalina and Silius themselves cut down by centurions.

Apparently Claudius never really recovered from this humiliation and shock. He allowed his wife to be killed, effectively disinherited their son, Britannicus, then hardly ever spoke of the whole sordid affair ever again. Historians both ancient and modern say that from this point forward the aged Claudius took less and less interest in the affairs of state and the business of running an empire. His will to continue the struggle seems to have taken a severe blow at this point in his life, a blow from which he would never recover.

There were still nearly six years of Claudius’ reign left to play out however, and the endlessly lecherous Claudius decided he needed yet another wife. Strangely, though, he decided to marry perhaps one of the least appropriate women he could have found. For after the deposition and death of Messalina, Claudius married his own niece Julia Agrippina, known to history as Agrippina the Younger.

It might have been a reasonable assumption that, at the time, the sixty-year-old Claudius might have liked to enjoy some of his twilight years unencumbered by yet another vicious and ambitious consort. Had he not had a belly full of ruthless and deceitful imperial ladies bringing havoc and misery to his life? Apparently not. Agrippina the Younger—the mother of the next emperor, Nero—was arguably the most maniacal and monstrous of all the Julio-Claudian women. She brought in a reign of oppression and political killings which had not been seen since the proscriptions of Augustus. Her strange and terrible machinations seem to have broken what was left of Claudius’ will. He basically allowed Agrippina to wear the trousers, both in their relationship and in terms of their respective positions within the state.

How Claudius met his end is shrouded in a thin gossamer of uncertainty. Though most of the ancient sources are reluctant to explicitly and definitively lay a pang of murderous guilt at the feet of Agrippina, they do nearly all agree that the preponderance of evidence hints that she did indeed poison him. Poisoned mushrooms are usually evoked. Tacitus suggests that Claudius may have been contemplating a rehabilitation for his own son Britannicus, thus pushing Nero aside. Perhaps it was this that forced Agrippina’s hand. We do not know for sure.

Historians have often asked the question: why would Claudius marry such a dangerous viper like Agrippina the Younger? Why would he favour her son, Nero, over his own, Britannicus? Why might he even have allowed himself to be poisoned, if he highly suspected something of that nature was afoot? All valid and interesting points of query. Robert Graves answers all of these questions by depicting Claudius as completely exhausted and utterly jaded by the burdensome mantle of power. That Claudius somehow knew that Roman politics was inherently evil or had at least been degraded and perverted by the Julio-Claudian monarchy, and so that as a type of revenge, as a final and posthumous poke in the eye to all of Roman politics, he would allow beasts such as Nero and his mother to hold the reins of power. Graves typifies this view by having his character Claudius say that he wishes to “Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.” Though this is quite a poetic idea—and a superb literary device—it doesn’t really hold up under any scrutiny. It doesn’t really make sense. So the memory of Claudius Caesar, to this day, retains an air of puzzling and fascinating ambiguity.

Next time we’ll take a look at the tyranny and despotism of Agrippina, her fall and murder, and the reign of the most notorious man ever to be called Roman emperor, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; the man known to history as Nero.