Claudius has been immortalized in the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves (novels brought to life in a masterful television portrayal of Claudius by Derek Jacobi). He may have been born with cerebral palsy. He was unable to control his limbs properly and faltered when he had to speak in public, though his mind was unaffected by these physical problems. In an age where public appearance was so important he had been kept by his family in the shadows and in compensation had developed a range of scholarly interests. He knew better than any emperor before him how the Roman state had evolved and seems to have acquired the conviction that he could do better than his immediate predecessors. (A fine biography is by Barbara Levick, Claudius, New Haven and London, 1990.)
Claudius’ weakness was that he had no centre of support, either in the senate, which felt that he had been foisted on it, or in the army, which had never seen him in command. He was to do his best to repair the position with the senators, speaking to them on frequent occasions, but he mistrusted their competence and the more traditional senators resented it when he proposed, as one of his more far-seeing policies, that leading provincials from Gaul should be admitted to the house. The uneasy relationship sometimes broke down into hostility and there were several conspiracies against him. Altogether thirty-five senators are known to have been executed during his reign.
The army offered a more satisfying opportunity. It could be used for a conquest for which Claudius, as emperor, could then take credit. An invasion of Britain had been talked of for decades. Caesar’s experience had shown that undertaking the empire’s first conquest across the ocean attracted all the prestige later given to launching into space. There were also more practical reasons for an invasion. Although many British tribal leaders had diplomatic relationships with the Romans, and even copied their coins from Roman models, continuing power struggles between British tribes threatened the trade routes along which grain, hides, and iron were conveyed across the Channel to the armies of the Rhine. There was always the fear that one chieftain might unite Britain and confront the empire from the west. A Roman conquest would secure southern Britain, stabilize it, and provide plunder to refill the imperial treasury depleted by the extravagances of Gaius. Everything, not least Claudius’ political needs, combined to make the invasion attractive.
The conquest of southern Britain was efficiently done. Forty thousand troops were ferried over the Channel in ad 43 and soon the southern part of the country was under Roman control. (Despite his own military inexperience Claudius had a talent for appointing competent commanders.) The emperor came from Rome, his presence made more impressive by a troop of elephants he took with him, and was in time to lead his men into Camulodonum, the capital of the Catuvellaunian tribe (the modern Colchester). He accepted the homage of eleven defeated chieftains. Claudius, like Tiberius, had no particular enthusiasm for being portrayed as a god but he did allow a temple in his honour to be built at Colchester to provide a focus for the emotions and loyalties of a people shattered by their defeat. Its foundations are still intact under Colchester’s later Norman castle.
The surrender of the tribes was enough to allow Claudius to return to Rome to throw an extravagant triumph. His small son, born in 41, was renamed Britannicus in the exultation of a victory which was proclaimed on coins throughout the empire. Meanwhile in Britain the process of pacification went on. A famous excavation by the British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler at Maiden Castle in Dorset in the 1930s claimed to trace the progress of the final battle for a Celtic stronghold from the hastily dug graves of those killed in the Roman assault.
Claudius was in power for thirteen years. The business of the empire was gradually becoming more complex. In addition to Britain, two more provinces in Mauretania, as well as Thrace and Lycia, were added to the empire in his reign. The emperors themselves were becoming men of vast wealth. It had become the custom for those without heirs to leave their possessions to the emperor, particularly if they had been given any patronage. Maecenas and Horace both left property to Augustus, who claimed in his will that his inheritances had totalled 1,400 million sestertii. Claudius was not greedy for more wealth and he forbade those with surviving relatives to make him their heir, but he continued nevertheless to accumulate property. So evolved the imperial patrimonium, the vast quantity of land that passed from one emperor to another, even if there was a coup d’etat. It could not be alienated, in contrast to an emperor’s ratio privata, his personal wealth, which he could deal with freely. The patrimonium included an array of estates, forests, and mines, often so extensive that they formed a state within a state, controlled by the imperial procurators and outside the aegis of the provincial governors.
These developments, added to the failure of the senate to participate in public business, led Claudius to develop his own imperial bureaucracy. Although there is some dispute as to how exactly this worked, it seems that there were four departments, each under a freedman (whose loyalty to Claudius as their emancipator would be guaranteed). One dealt with the emperor’s correspondence, one with his personal finances, and another with petitions and legal matters. The fourth was an archivist. From ad 53 imperial procurators, appointed independently of the governors and subject only to the emperor, oversaw the imperial estates. ‘Good’ emperors increasingly saw their wealth as there to be used for the benefit of the state as a whole. Gradually, through a process that remains obscure, the funds of the republican treasury, the aerarium, became merged with the private wealth of the emperor, the fiscus.
The consolidation of an imperial bureaucracy further diminished the role of the senate. Senators found it humiliating to have to do their business with the emperor through freedmen, especially when it became clear that these were making fortunes in the process. Narcissus, the chief secretary, reputedly ended up 400 million sestertii richer, the largest fortune recorded for any single Roman. As a further blow to senatorial prestige Claudius transferred other responsibilities, such as the regulation of the grain supply and the care of roads in Rome, to himself, continuing a trend of imperial involvement set by Augustus, but relying on equestrians rather than senators to oversee the work.
One of Claudius’ concerns was the more efficient administration of Rome. By the first century Rome was a crowded, bustling, and often dangerous city with a population of perhaps a million. A city of this size was unable to support itself from a pre-industrial economy and the empire’s economy and state administration was distorted to keep Rome alive and politically quiescent. It is estimated that 200,000 tonnes of grain had to be imported a year, with much of it distributed free to the poorer citizens of the city. Some of it came from the wealthier parts of Italy such as Campania but the main sources were Sicily, Sardinia, the province of Africa, and, after 30 Bc, Egypt. Increasingly the emperors provided some of the grain from their own estates. The emperors took responsibility for the provision of corn through an official, the praefectus annonae (annona, the corn supply). Transport to Rome was provided by private merchants and, to induce them to provide for the city, Claudius offered privileges, including that of citizenship, to those with large ships who would sign a contract to deliver grain to Rome over six years.
These achievements have been overshadowed by the popular image of Claudius, drawn from the pages of Suetonius. This is of a man at the mercy of his unscrupulous and scheming wives. Intrigue was probably inevitable in the imperial household. Claudius was 50 when he became emperor so that succession was bound to be a live issue. His own son, Britannicus, had been born only in 41, leaving the throne open to many older cousins. His mother, Messalina, the emperor’s third wife, knew that if Britannicus was pushed aside she would be as well. She freely used her sexuality to maintain her influence. (There were few alternatives for ambitious women in the male-dominated world of Roman politics.) However, in 48 she went too far and entered into some form of marriage ceremony with a young senator, Gaius Silius. This could only be seen as a blatant attempt to depose Claudius and it failed utterly. She was exposed and executed.
Claudius’ next wife was Agrippina, his own niece and the daughter of his popular brother Germanicus. In political terms the marriage was a shrewd move as it consolidated the unity of the family against rivals for power. On the other hand, Agrippina had her own son who was three years older than Britannicus and thus an obvious rival for the succession. He took the all-encompassing name Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar. Agrippina seems to have consolidated her position quickly, perhaps because Claudius’ powers were failing. She had herself proclaimed Augusta, appeared as an important figure on public occasions, was represented on coins, and gave her name to at least one new Roman colony. Her main aim was to
Install Nero as successor. In 52 he was awarded the toga virilis, the mark of mature adulthood, at 13 a year early. Theoretically he could now become emperor. Britan-nicus would not achieve the same status until the year 55 and so it was important for Agrippina to act fast. In October 54 Claudius died, the victim, it was said, of a dish of poisonous mushrooms fed to him by Agrippina. Nero, still aged only 16, was proclaimed emperor. Britannicus, four months under age, could not succeed with him, but the day before he reached the required age of 14 he died at a banquet. Nero passed off the cause of death as an epileptic fit.
World History
