061 - What, me Claudius

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Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. Episode 61, What? Me Claudius? I feel like I could pitch the story of Claudius to studio executives and get them to invest in my slapstick period comedy about the bumbling, stuttering black sheep of the family, who, when his crazy nephew is assassinated and no other viable candidates can be found, suddenly finds himself proclaimed emperor of the Roman Empire. Of course, our sympathetic hero is not really the idiot everyone thinks he is. He's just misunderstood. And as he navigates his way through the treacherous and often hilarious world of Roman power politics, from the heart of the capital to the far-off island of Britain, he emerges as a just, wise, but still physically clumsy ruler trying to do right in a world gone horribly and hilariously wrong. Starring Ricky Gervais as Claudius and Rowan Atkinson as the freedman's secretary Narcissus, trying in vain to hold everything together. Co-starring Brit and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords as the brothers who lead the resistance to Claudius' invasion of Britain. And, of course, Leslie Nielsen will get a cameo as the ghost of Caesar Augustus. This, my friends, is pure comedy gold. And the thing is, I wouldn't have to stray too far from the historical record to write the script. Maybe add a few more pratfalls. But other than that, the true story of Claudius' improbable rise to power looks and feels enough like the premise of a comedy that we wouldn't have to touch the underlying story at all. It's a weird thing that Claudius became emperor. Weirder, still, that he turned out to be a good one.

Tiberius Claudius Jerusalem was born in 10 BC in Gaul, the youngest of the three surviving children of Jerusalem and Antonia. His older brother was the great Germanicus, and his older sister was the cunning Lovilla. From the start, though, young Claudius was neither great nor cunning. In fact, for his entire childhood, there are zero examples of anything resembling a positive adjective being attached to his name. Young Claudius, it seems, suffered from some sort of nervous tick that led to a pronounced stutter throughout his youth, which earned him nothing but scorn and exasperation from the extended imperial family. Theories abound about what his affliction actually was, ranging from cerebral palsy to polio to Tourette's, but nobody knows for sure what it was. What we do know is that his mother Antonia appears to have been horrified by him, and showed nothing but disdain for her youngest son. When not referring to him as a monster, she used him as the benchmark for stupidity, as in, why, that man is as dumb as my son Claudius. Unable, I guess, to even stand the sight of him, Antonia dumped Claudius off on Livia, who herself had nothing but contempt for this stuttering embarrassment of a boy. Livia had no time to deal with him, so she hired a, quote, tutor to look after him. The tutor, who legend holds was a former mule driver, used severe discipline to try to break Claudius of his witless ways, which everyone assumed was simply caused by laziness and bad moral fiber.

Claudius survived his childhood, and when he emerged into his teens, he showed some signs that he was not actually an idiot, just that he had difficulty communicating his ideas to other people verbally. He expressed an interest in studying history, and encouraged that there may be hope for the little monster after all, Augustus hired Livia to tutor his step-grandson in 7 AD. This opened up a brief window of time, during which Claudius appears to have climbed out of the family doghouse. In a letter to Livia, Augustus even expressed amazement after hearing Claudius deliver a fine oration, that the young man was even capable of such a thing. Apparently finding the formal rules of oratory to be some kind of mental crutch, Claudius turned out to be quite a capable public speaker. It was only in private conversation that his mouth kept hiccuping on him. This brief spell of acceptance was broken when Claudius decided to write a history of the civil wars. The finished draft was read by Livia, who deemed the work far too critical, read, accurate, a telling of Augustus' rise to power. The work was suppressed, and the family henceforth decided that Claudius could not be trusted with the family secrets, and must never be allowed anywhere near power.

After Augustus died, 23-year-old Claudius petitioned Tiberius to allow him to enter the cursus honorum, but Tiberius refused his nephew's request. Claudius was not to be allowed a public career, he would have to settle for a private life of scholarship. Throughout the 20s AD, Claudius tried to stay below the radar as Sejanus rose to power and targeted anyone he thought might be a threat. It is a testament to how insignificant a political figure Claudius was at this point, that he survived the purges and counter-purges of Sejanus and Tiberius, even as they swallowed his brother, sister, and various nephews, nieces, and cousins. The small role Claudius did play in the drama of Tiberius' reign was as a husband of convenience for Sejanus, who married his adopted sister to the imperial family's black sheep in order to strengthen his own ties to the ruling clan. The marriage ended in a quick divorce after Sejanus fell from power, and Claudius couldn't afford any connections to the disgraced and executed former prefect of the guard.

Over the course of Tiberius' reign, as politically insignificant as he was, Claudius did make a respectable name for himself as an author and a scholar. After getting burned early for writing about topics that hit too close to home, Claudius branched out and wrote a history of the Etruscans and later produced an eight-volume series on the Carthaginians. So while he got no love from his family, the wider Roman world seems to have grown well disposed towards the one member of the imperial family who didn't seem to be lusting after power. When Augustus died, the upper-class equestrians actually chose Claudius to head their delegation during the funeral procession, and during Tiberius' reign, the Senate voted to allow Claudius the right to join in the body's debates, though this latter bill was vetoed by the emperor. After Tiberius' son Drusus died, Claudius was even championed as a possible new heir apparent, though Claudius hastily and smartly declared that he had no interest in the job.

After Tiberius died and Caligula became emperor, Claudius suddenly found himself thrust into the public career he had long since given up on. Upon his ascension, Caligula decided to serve as consul and chose, of all people, Claudius to serve as his colleague. This was not out of any great love or respect for Uncle Claudius, though. Mostly, Caligula just wanted to remind people of Germanicus and so elevated his dead father's brother to the consulship. Far from respect, Caligula actually seems to have gone out of his way to torture his uncle, turning Claudius into a sort of de facto court jester, kept around mostly to be the butt of the emperor's jokes. But it wasn't all just, ha-ha, I put a whoopee cushion on Claudius' chair kind of jokes. Caligula also extorted huge sums of money from his uncle, at one point inventing a new priesthood and then forcing Claudius and a few other wealthy targets to pony up ridiculous fees to join. Non-compliance would have surely meant death, and by the time Caligula's short reign was over, this and other events like it caused Claudius to be deep in debt.

Legend has it that when Caligula was assassinated, Claudius was found hiding behind a curtain in the imperial palace. Quite reasonably assuming that he was about to be killed, Claudius was shocked when the members of the guard who found him knelt and proclaimed him emperor. That's the legend, anyway. Other, probably more reliable accounts have Claudius being hustled back to the Praetorian camp, unsure of his fate, only later being proclaimed emperor. I said last week that this happened on the night of the assassination, but alert listener Claude was kind enough to remind me that Gibbon says that at least 48 hours passed before Claudius was declared emperor. During the interval, the Senate argued with itself over who should be the next princeps, but when they were unable to unify behind a single candidate, the Praetorians seized the initiative and called it for Claudius, who they hoped to be able to control. It speaks volumes about how entrenched the new imperial system had become that when the Senate found itself briefly without an emperor lording over them, they dissolved into arguments not about how best to reassert the Senate's authority, but rather who among them should rule. The bickering in the Senate was finally shut down when word came that the Praetorian guard had in fact settled the matter and named Uncle Claudius princeps. Too factionalized to resist, the Senate found itself accepting the guard's decision. Foolish, clumsy, embarrassing Claudius was now the absolute ruler of the Roman Empire.

But the Senate still had some pull, and they extracted a promise that Claudius would not prosecute Caligula's assassins or anyone who may have been involved in the wider conspiracy, which a number of the senators were. Claudius agreed, but he refused to spare the lead assassin Caria, who was eventually tried and convicted for the murder of Caligula. Yes, it was a very good thing that Caligula was dead, but it would set a very bad precedent for there to be no punishment whatsoever for the high crime of assassinating an emperor. Not that anyone paid attention to the message Claudius was trying to send, as he spent most of his reign dodging murderous plots of every shape and size, and in the end was very likely done in by one hatched by his wife Agrippina. It appears that while everyone outwardly accepted Claudius, behind every back was a knife, or a bottle of poison, or the legions stationed in Dalmatia.

On that last point, Claudius was wise to make one of his first moves after taking office be the payment of cash bribes to the army to ensure their loyalty, because in 42, a plot was cooked up between an ambitious senator in Rome and the governor of Dalmatia, who just so happened to be an ex-brother-in-law of Claudius. Their plan was relatively simple, the governor was going to march his legions on Rome, and then depose Claudius. The only problem was that when it came time to actually launch the rebellion, the troops decided they were better off staying put rather than joining in a dangerous scheme to take control of the empire. The planned coup fell apart, and the governor, publicly exposed, committed suicide.

So, while Claudius did his best to maintain good relations with the senate and anyone else who might conceivably want him dead, it got him nowhere. With his reputation as a bumbling fool, everyone seems to have thought that killing Claudius would not only be easy, but that it was necessary for the good of the empire. After all, how long could Rome last with an idiot in charge? But the thing is, Claudius wasn't an idiot, and far from running the empire into the ground, or doing what everybody thought he was going to do, which was like embarrass Rome at parties, Claudius proved to be one of the more capable emperors Rome ever saw. He took an active interest in governance, which is something Rome had not really seen since Augustus had died 25 years earlier. He further strengthened the imperial bureaucracy, ordered targeted reforms be made to the legal system, and every day issued dozens of edicts on a wide range of topics. Rome, in short, had a competent executive again.

But the Romans weren't quite ready to accept the notion that Claudius actually knew what he was doing, and most attributed anything halfway intelligent that came out of the imperial palace to be from one of his various freedmen advisers, who were said to have the pliable emperor completely under their thumb. The extent to which Claudius relied on his advisers is probably exaggerated, but there is no denying that the power and influence of freedmen bureaucrats did rise precipitously during the reign of Rome's fourth emperor. It should be noted, though, that the growing power of the bureaucracy was more of a reaction to circumstance than anything Claudius was actively planning to do from the start. Like his predecessors, Claudius had a difficult time getting the senate to help share in the burdens of government, so he was forced to do everything for himself. But unlike his predecessors, except for Augustus, he actually had an interest in getting things done, so he reorganized the state to make it more responsive and efficient. He created the equivalent of a governmental cabinet and appointed capable freedmen to head the new departments he created. There was a secretary of correspondence, the aforementioned Narcissus, who was probably the closest to Claudius and the most influential. A secretary of justice, Gaius Julius Callistus, who had been an important cog in the plot to kill Caligula. A secretary of the treasury, Marcus Antonius Pallas, who was said to have grown richer than even Crassus by the time of his death. And a secretary of miscellany, Gaius Iulius Polybius, who would eventually be executed for plotting against the emperor. These men acted as the eyes, ears, mouths, and brains of Claudius' administration, and were instrumental in making his reign a successful one. Pallas, for example, apparently did such a good job nursing the empire's finances back to health after Caligula wrecked everything, that the senate voted him a big family man.

In most respects, Claudius did his best to emulate Augustus, and he tried mightily to associate himself with the original princeps. Ascending to the throne, he added the names Caesar and Augustus to his own, and even revived the long-forgotten rumor that his father, Drusus, was actually the son of Augustus rather than Tiberius Claudius Nero. For the most part, Claudius did a pretty good job copying Augustus, from the stable to the palace, from the stable and patient public administration, right down to the hectic and distracting personal life, which we'll get more into next week. But to really establish himself as an emperor worthy of the same respect that Augustus had enjoyed, Claudius would have to stray from Augustus' injunction not to expand the empire, because if he was ever going to be taken seriously, Claudius needed some impressive military victories and legal reforms.

After surveying the map, it quickly became obvious that the only territory ripe for conquest was the far-flung island of Britannia. The double bonus Britannia offered Claudius image-wise was that he would be following in the footsteps of the great Julius Caesar, who had tried unsuccessfully to bring the island into the Roman fold 100 years before. If Claudius could succeed where Caesar had, in essence, failed, that would be a pretty big feather in the new emperor's cap. But it wasn't just about optics and glory. Britannia was also rich with mineral deposits that the Romans had long coveted, and the island was becoming a safe haven for rebellious Gauls who were forever making trouble for Roman administrators in the north. So Claudius looked at Britain and saw an opportunity to a. do what Julius Caesar couldn't do, b. make the empire richer, c. make the empire safer. Invasion plans were drawn up immediately.

The excuse Claudius needed to invade came in 43, when the king of a Roman allied tribe on the island was ousted from power by an expanding rival tribe. Claudius ordered Aulus Plaudius to lead four legions across the English Channel and punish the tribes who had messed with a Roman ally. Probably regathering the same legions that had been raised by Caligula just a few years before, Claudius massed his invasion force, which in addition to the four legions included some 20,000 auxiliaries, on the north coast of Gaul. But as they prepared to sail, a mutiny broke out when the men realized that this time around they weren't just going to be picking up seashells for the emperor. Terrified of what lay on the uncivilized island that, in addition to being populated with monsters, the men refused to budge. Narcissus, who had been sent to keep an eye on things for Claudius, managed to get things back on track by addressing the men and reminding them of their duty. Apparently it wasn't his words that actually worked on them, they were just tickled by the spectacle of this former slave addressing them as if he was their leader, as it reminded them of the traditional role switching games that are played during Saturnalia. The troops agreed to stand down their mutiny.

Now the only really good account we have of the invasion comes from Cassius Dio, who was writing 150 years after the fact, so no one is really sure exactly what happened next. Even simple things like where the fleet took off from and where they landed are in dispute, and it seems like every historian has their own pet theory about whether the Romans landed in Kent, as the traditional accounting goes, or whether it was down by the Isle of Wight, or just one big one, or one big one with two smaller detachments. I am not going to get bogged down with these controversies, so I'm just going to say that the Romans were in Gaul, then they got on some transport ships, then they were in Britain. Whatever route they took, and wherever they landed, the Roman invasion of Britain had begun.

Now the locals weren't just going to stand by while their land was conquered by these foreign invaders. Two brothers, named Tuggedumnus and Caraticus, who led the tribe that had ousted the Roman allied king in the first place, gathered up a resistance force and set themselves on the banks of the river Medway to prevent the Romans from penetrating into the interior of the island. But as was so often the case, when it came to set-piece battles, the Romans were second to none. Not that they had an easy go of it, the battle that was fought beside the Medway allegedly lasted for two days, just that, in the end, as usual, the Romans simply wore their opponents out. The British were forced to retreat to the Thames. The Romans pursued, and a second battle was fought alongside that river, with the Romans again winning. Having secured a safe crossing point on the Thames, which appears to have been the initial strategic goal of the invasion, Claudius sent word to Claudius to join him so the emperor could get in on the action before it was too late. Arriving with reinforcements, including 16 war elephants, Claudius met up with Plotius, and together, they pushed into the home tribal territory of Togedumnus and Caratacus, though at some point, between the battle on the Thames and the final surrender, Togedumnus appears to have died. Though Caratacus refused to give up, 11 other local kings decided further resistance was suicidal and surrendered en masse to Claudius. Southeast Britain was now in Roman hands, and the occupying force set up a base of operations in a site that they named, and there's no way I'm pronouncing this correctly, Camulodunum, which is today the site of Colchester in Essex County. There is a map of all this posted on this week's episode, so be sure to go to thehistoryofrome.tipad.com and download that.

Staying just long enough to bask in the glow of victory, Claudius returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph. While he certainly did more than Caligula had done to earn his triumph, Claudius was no military man, and didn't really contribute anything to the victory. It would be a few years yet before Rome would see another emperor who had a respectable military record, as Nero would prove as Ineptus' immediate predecessors at military affairs. In fact, the man who will emerge from the chaos of 69 AD was actually building his respectable military record in Britain as we speak. The future emperor Vespasian commanded one of the invading legions, and after the Romans set up a base in Essex, he led his army west all the way to Exeter, extending Roman control over the southern coast of Britain. Another force was sent north, and within four years of arriving, the Romans were firmly in command of roughly the territory southeast of an imaginary line you draw between the Severn and Humber estuaries. It's all on the map.

With his reforms of the state bureaucracy paying off, and his quest to add a valuable new province to the empire's success, Claudius was off and running. Next week, though, we'll get into the one area where Claudius really was a complete disaster, his personal life. Married a total of four times, Claudius was always struggling with the women in his life. The wife he came into office with actually wound up secretly marrying another man behind Claudius' back, so he had to dump her, and then he wound up married to his niece, and she probably killed him. All through his marital problems, Claudius was forced to fend off constant assassination plots, leading him to try and execute more than 300 equestrians and senators during his years in power. It is amazing he managed to last as long as he did. Thanks for watching!