A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (20 page)

Of all the Emperors so far, Claudius was the most insecure. Augustus, who invented the role, accumulated the necessary powers but his titles, ‘Augustus’ and
‘Father of the Country’, had been voted to him and were expressions of his popularity, constantly renewed. Tiberius had been designated by Augustus, Caligula was nothing if not of the
imperial blood, but Claudius was almost an alien, a usurper inducted by a massively bribed Praetorian Guard, which he paid with gold coins, struck again and again, one depicting him shaking hands
with a guardsman and another with the barracks as a background. Nevertheless Claudius has been called by modern historians the ‘first Roman Emperor’ because for the first time the
public and private personae of the
princeps
were fused into one man – an Emperor. Tiberius referred to himself as: ‘master of his slaves,
imperator
of the armies and
princeps
among senators’ and observed these distinctions. In the reigns of Caligula and Claudius their power increased, and, worse, was increasingly unquestioned. ‘The Conscript
Fathers’, the senators, guardians of governmental propriety, had become obsequious, terrified and, because they had less and less to do, bored. The manner of the accession of Caligula and
Claudius had demonstrated that only the supreme post in Rome
had
to be filled. Any autocrat prefers his own creatures to do his bidding, so Emperors chose their own men, not their equals,
for positions of authority. A freedman was – this was the rule – dependent, therefore dependable, unlike knights and senators who might consider themselves, in their hearts, as
competent as an Emperor to rule.

At first a champion of the equestrian order, to which he had for so long belonged, Claudius quickly became alienated from them and, suspecting their ambitions, connived at or engineered their
executions. He was the paradigm of a man ‘willing to wound and yet afraid to strike’ – or to do the
striking himself. His final tot was chilling –
thirty-five senators and 321 knights. He was abetted in this grisly exercise in self-defence by his third wife, who started as a well-connected nymphet of fifteen and galloped into becoming a
bloodthirsty, power-crazy nymphomaniac, who finally had to be put down.

Messalina married Claudius in
AD
39, when he was fifty. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Augustus’ sister, the patient Octavia, and also his first cousin
once removed. Her mission in her (short) life was to ensure that her son, born Tiberius Claudius Caesar Germanicus, later Britannicus, should become Emperor. She had a good chance. Coins were
struck at his birth with the legend
spes augusta –
the hope of the dynasty – but because her husband might not survive for her child’s majority, she had to eliminate the
opposition; so she embarked on a policy of murder. Her first victim was Julia Livilla, exiled sister of Caligula, married to M. Vinicius, a candidate for the principate (so why not again?). She
then pursued another Julia, daughter of Tiberius’ son Drusus (poisoned by Sejanus), a blameless lady who nevertheless was guilty of having a son and was therefore a contender. She was accused
by Messalina of immorality (!). Then she destroyed a prefect of the guard who was about to report her sexual goings-on to Claudius and at the same time created a vacancy for one of her
favourites.

Because of her husband’s doubtful title to the throne, many were the claimants to Messalina’s vengeful and often lethal attention, not just from the family but from the descendants
of the famous names of the Republic, like Sulla, Pompey and Crassus, who, precisely because they were not related, imagined they could offer Rome a fresh start. At first Claudius tried to
conciliate them with high office but over the years these high-born grandees were destroyed, usually through
the indirect technique at which Claudius became so adept and his
wife so co-operative.

No conspiracy can have been so unreal, bizarre and revealing of this infernal couple as that of Appius Silanus. One night, Claudius revealed to the Senate, his freedman Narcissus burst into his
bedroom and announced he had just had a dream in which Silanus had decided to assassinate him. The distinguished nobleman, summoned to the palace in the early hours, admitted his intentions and had
been duly executed. Claudius presented Narcissus’ dream as cut-and-dried evidence of a plot. It was said that Messalina was piqued because Silanus had refused her sexual advances and had put
up Narcissus to this murderous farce. The episode shows the easy access of private, and therefore now public, servants to the Emperor, and that the closer they were to the royal person, like the
grooms of the bedchamber of Henry VIII or Louis XIV, the greater their influence. The secret and unjustifiable execution of Silanus provoked a revolt by the Governor of Dalmatia, put down in five
days but giving Messalina the opportunity of her most notorious killing, of the husband of her best friend in childhood, who had been an associate of Silanus, with the words: ‘It
doesn’t hurt, Paetus.’ Getting rid of her stepson-in-law, who had married Claudius’ daughter and was therefore a possible rival, was no problem. He was killed,
in flagrante
delicto
with a male lover.

Messalina’s most ambitious
coup
was to engineer the death of Valerius Asiaticus, the rich and bumptious Gaul
⁴⁵
who had married into the Roman
patriciate and considered himself to be imperial material. His wife had had an affair with Caligula
and her sister, famous for her emeralds, had briefly married him. Asiaticus
was quite a figure in Rome; his family had entertained every important Roman touring Gaul over the years, including the Emperor’s mother, which may be why Claudius was reluctant to execute
him. But Messalina was implacable. Asiaticus owned the gardens of Lucullus, the successful general and stylish gourmet, and she coveted them. Asiaticus was brought to the palace in chains and
charged with homosexuality, a charge invoked in the absence of any other. Claudius had a mind to acquit, so a compromise was reached. Asiaticus was allowed to choose the manner of his death.

The prefect who arrested him was given one and a half million
sesterces
and made up to
praetor.
Again, the trial had been
intra cubiculum,
behind closed doors in the privacy
of the palace, and the victim was not just a wealthy Gaul who was disliked for his extravagance – he spent too much on Games – but the son-in-law of a powerful family, one of whose
members was found at a morning levee with a sword hidden in his toga. Under torture, which Claudius had once forsworn, he revealed nothing, but his attempt showed the extent of the alienation of
Rome’s upper classes. Messalina’s downfall, according to Tacitus, was due to her own madness –
furor.
She fell in love – she was only in her early twenties –
with a handsome young consul-designate, Silius, swamped him with presents, and ‘married’ him at the
vendange
of
AD
48 in a bacchic ceremony. All Rome knew
and Narcissus and his clique of freedmen decided that so should the Emperor, both out of loyalty and because they thought Messalina capable of setting up her lover as
princeps,
and replacing
them.

The idea of such a
coup
might have entered her pretty head on noticing the popular favour shown to Agrippina,
Caligula’s surviving sister, and her charming
ten-year-old son, at the Trojan Games of
AD
47. Since the already socially dextrous lad became the Emperor Nero, she may have had a point, but it was not one she lived to
make. For once, Claudius reacted directly and fast. He saw the danger to his
dignitas –
we would say credibility – in his wife’s repudiation of himself and, since there
were few officials in Rome he could trust to arrest her, he rushed up from Ostia and conferred with Narcissus, who took command of the Praetorian Guard for one day. With him, Vitellius and a
consular who was a good friend of the Germanicus family, he proceeded to the house of Silius when Messalina intercepted their carriage. She played her ace – the children. Claudius trumped it
with a list of her lovers.
⁴⁶
The carriage rolled on. Then it was stopped by the senior Vestal Virgin, demanding, as Rome’s leading feminist, a hearing
for the Empress. Narcissus pushed her away with promises. The party checked out Silius’ house, was astohished by the number of imperial heirlooms Messalina had given her lover, and drove to
the Praetorian barracks, Claudius’ ultimate ‘safe house’, where a drumhead court martial was convened. Silius was brought in and asked only for a speedy death. Messalina was found
in the gardens of Lucullus and stabbed to death.

Claudius, for some reason, had told the Praetorians that they should kill him if he married again, but the execution of an Empress created a vacancy in the state which had to be filled. Factions
at court fought for their candidates. Narcissus proposed Aelia Paetina, who was harmless and had once before been married to Claudius; Callistus suggested Lollia Paullina, very rich and briefly one
of Caligula’s wives; but
the favourite, and the choice of Pallas, the rising star among the Emperor’s freedmen, was Agrippina, daughter of the fondly remembered
Germanicus and Vipsania, the beloved wife of Tiberius. That she was Claudius’ niece by blood, the daughter of his brother, was a modest drawback compared to the number of brownie points a
shaky Emperor could pick from such a splendid connection. Claudius’ friend Vitellius assured him the choice would be welcomed by the people and canvassed his fellow senators, who removed the
inhibition and recommended the match. The marriage, took place on 1 January
AD
49. Claudius had been a widower for three months.

Agrippina was thirty-three, more adroit politically than Messalina and equally ruthless and determined that
her
son should succeed as Emperor. She moved fast. Claudius agreed that her
ten-year-old Nero should be co-heir with his own son of seven, Britannicus; there were predecents. She wanted to marry her son to Octavia, Britannicus’ sister, his cousin; there were
predecents here, too. She detached Octavia from her betrothed by accusing him of incest. She had Seneca recalled from exile and made him Nero’s tutor. She procured for herself the title of
Augusta. All this within one year. By
AD
51 Agrippina appeared to be wearing the trousers, as it were, at the palace – actually it was a military cloak, threaded with
gold, in which she greeted ambassadors. Her face appeared on coins and, since she successfully advanced her own son at the expense of Britannicus, she was, as the mother of the future Emperor, the
most powerful woman Rome had ever known.

In the power games at court, played with such ferocity by his women, against whom he railed quietly as he grew older, Claudius appeared to be something of a patsy, but in the areas of justice
(where he was often eccentric), finance, legislation
and administration of his Empire, Claudius was conscientious, efficient, innovative and powerful. He was an intelligent
man who had studied Roman history and, when his own survival was not in question, he was just, tactful and considerate. His reforms were unpopular with his own class because he preferred
procurators, his own people, to prefects, the Senate’s. His contribution to the streamlining of the imperial administration was not recognized until well after his death, though he was
promptly deified. Because of his ailments he was interested in medicine and prone to give his subjects much homely advice, extolling the benefits, for instance, of farting. His almost daily
attendance at court was deplored by the legal profession because his judgements were capricious, emotional and inconsistent. Once an exasperated advocate threw a briefcase at him. He did not mind.
Then a superstitious orator, a knight from Gaul, let fall from his toga a snake’s egg, a Druidic good luck token. Claudius, terrified that the magic might affect him, waved him away to be
executed. He panicked easily but his decisions were always sound if there was time for consideration.

Juvenal invented the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ as the basic needs of the Roman populace, but it also expected public works from its rulers. Cicero distinguished between the useful
and the decorative, the docks, aqueducts and walls, and the theatres, colonnades and temples (preferred, of course, by Caligula). Claudius obliged in the useful categories and added another of his
own – maintenance – the
sine qua non
of civilization.

He turned Ostia, where he was working when the Messalina scandal broke, into a grain port with a lighthouse and a flood barrage. His most macro-economic project, still unfinished after eleven
years and 30,000 navvies, was the draining of the Fucine Lake to recover farmland eighty-five
kilometres from Rome. Like the Mahaveli Dam in Sri Lanka
⁴⁷
it was not a total success. He had trouble finding (doomed) players for the sea battle he wanted to stage, and the sluice gates the spectacle was designed to celebrate failed to
sluice. Claudius repaired the aqueduct of Agrippa, which still supplies the fountain of the Trevi, and built two aqueducts, one eighty-seven kilometres long.

He strove with these public works to become, early in his reign (and remain), a ‘populist’ Emperor. He practised ‘walkabouts’ and picnicked with the plebs; as we have
seen, he told them how to make vintage wine (a Roman skill which disappeared from Europe till the early eighteenth century) but he had not yet attempted the traditional imperial role, that of
conqueror, and Rome was surprised when their fifty-three-year-old Emperor, a scholar with a dragging foot, a trembling hand and a wobbly tongue, decided to go to war.

Ignoring the advice, respected by Tiberius, of the dying Augustus, that the frontiers of the Empire should not be extended, Claudius decided to invade Britain. The south-east of England was no
longer the foreign country it was for Julius Caesar 100 years before. Gaul, successfully Romanized (witness Asiaticus) had stronger tribal links with England than it has now. The Catuvellauni round
Herts were Belgic as were the Atrebates in Berks and Hants, centred on Silchester, founded by Caesar’s once favourite Gaul, Commius. These tribes had a king, Cunobelinus (Cymbeline), who paid
tribute to Rome, but when he died his sons did not, and one of them attacked a Roman ally who fled to Claudius for help. This was the excuse.