The Twelve Caesars (20 page)

Claudius
: 18th Century Engraving of Claudius © Chris Hellier / Corbis

H
istorian turned history-maker, Claudius struggled with speech but wrote Greek with cumbersome prolixity. With the voice of
a sea creature, throaty and raucous, he was virtually unintelligible, Seneca claimed; Pliny the Elder counted him among the hundred most scholarly authors of the day. Disgraced by ‘a horrible
habit under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth and running at the nose, a stammer, and a persistent nervous tic’, Claudius devoted the wastelands of his youth, when Rome ignored
him, to an activity which took no account of his physical shortcomings and which Dio praises as suitable training for the principate: writing history. (He also devoted his time to taverns and
tarts.) A scion of the imperial house, his tutors were appropriately eminent: Livy and Sulpicius Flavus. He possessed from birth an exceptional memory, from exceptional circumstances the time and
leisure for solitary study. The result was twenty volumes on the history of Etruria, homeland of his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla (granddaughter of a confidante of Livia); an account of the old
enemy Carthage written in eight volumes; and forty-three volumes in Latin devoted to the recent history of Rome, with tactful omissions concerning the civil war, the Proscriptions and the roots of
Augustus’ settlement. (This last was read by Tacitus.) More remarkably, this limping master of ‘feeble and far-fetched jokes’
spun out his autobiography to
eight volumes. Length took no account of paucity of incident. His contemporaries rubbished the undertaking for its poor taste.

Pedant and thinker, while harvests failed, the emperor Claudius spearheaded the introduction of three new letters to the Roman alphabet (two corresponded to the modern letters W and Y); it was a
short-term innovation which did not survive him. Like so many in his high-living family in this period of excess, he was lustful, gluttonous and hard-drinking, ‘impatient of celibacy’,
driven to a point of bodily suffering by the need to satisfy urges that were in equal measure libidinous and greedy. (So extreme were the attacks of heartburn which succeeded his overindulgence
that he confessed to having considered suicide frequently.) More than sex and alcohol, his passion was the schoolmaster’s weakness for instruction. He bombarded Romans with pithy edicts on
subjects from grape harvests to cures for snakebites (the sap of yew trees, apparently): his proposals included a decision to legitimize farting at dinner-parties, after he heard about a man who
had endangered his health by attempting to restrain himself. Despite the public readings of his books sponsored during his reign, his only written work to gain wide circulation was a treatise on
dicing. It hardly mattered. Despite Gaius’ posturing with wig or caduceus, the ‘Clau-Clau-Claudius’ of Robert Graves’s popular fictions was to become the first of
Rome’s Caesars who was openly worshipped in his own lifetime. This ‘monster whom Mother Nature had begun to work upon but then flung aside’ (his mother’s disillusioned
assessment) alone among his siblings became a living god.

His Cinderella story includes, famously, his discovery by soldiers behind a curtain and subsequent acclamation as emperor; in the conquest of Britain in 43, completing what Julius Caesar had
begun, shaking head and buckling knees did
not prevent his appearance at Camulodunum (Colchester) in the guise of conqueror mounted on an elephant. Indeed, this physical
wreck, dismissed by one doctor as ‘a very battleground of diseases’, would allow the troops to salute him in the manner of a victorious general as
imperator
no fewer than
twenty-seven times; in his role of
princeps
, by contrast, he accepted only the titles ‘Augustus’ and ‘Caesar’ and never became officially
imperator
of Rome.
‘He possessed majesty and dignity of appearance,’ Suetonius allows, ‘but only when he was standing still or sitting, and especially when he was lying down.’ Among surviving
portraits is a statue of a seated Claudius discovered in the theatre of the Etruscan city of Caere, today housed in Rome’s Vatican Museums. The greater part of that image consists of an
improbably muscular torso worthy of the
Ignudi
of Michelangelo. The emperor compelled to immobility was a novel form of heroism.

‘When [Claudius’] sister Livilla heard that he would one day be emperor, she openly and loudly prayed that the Roman people might be spared so cruel and undeserved a fortune.’
It is a sibling reaction typical of that dysfunctionalism engendered in Augustus’ heirs by the scramble for power. (Livilla may have coveted the throne for her husband, Marcus Vinicius, or
her own sons.) As it happened, misfortune was not the lot of the sixty million inhabitants of Claudius’ empire. His victims were senators and, in particular, knights. Some thirty-five of the
former and as many as three hundred of the latter received death penalties during the thirteen years of his reign. (‘This man, my lords, who looks as though he could not hurt a fly, used to
chop off heads as a dog sits down,’ as Augustus laments in Seneca’s satirical
Apocolocyntosis
, ‘The Pumpkinification of Claudius’.) It was the latest chapter of
post-Republican Rome’s tortuous dialogue between senate and Palatine, which only Augustus
had arbitrated with consistent success and which Claudius, moving ineluctably
towards military-backed absolutism, failed to resolve.

Despite the misgivings shared by the senate and his family, Claudius governed with conscientiousness and a degree of wisdom for much of his reign. Characteristically, Suetonius accuses him of
lack of moderation in his passion for women: he applied the same wholeheartedness to the business of empire, working ‘even on his own anniversaries and those of his family, and sometimes even
on festivals of ancient date and days of ill-omen’. He completed the annexation of Britain; he extended and overhauled membership of the senate, in 47 invoking the ancient office of censor to
do so and cudgelling Rome’s conservative upper classes into accepting colleagues from the provinces, specifically Gallia Comata; he improved the lot of the ordinary Roman by building a
harbour at Ostia to ensure the safe arrival of the imported grain supply and prevent food shortages, as well as by completing two new aqueducts, the Aqua Claudia and the Aqua Anio Novus, at a cost
estimated by Pliny the Elder at 350 million sesterces: together they supplied almost half the city’s drinking water. In his coin issues he celebrated a virtue that was both inarguable and
uncontentious: Constantia, personifying the steadfastness, persistence and perseverance of the emperor. It was a suitably unshowy claim on the part of a man whose political experience prior to 41
was virtually non-existent and who, despite the notable careers of his father Drusus and his brother Germanicus, lacked military experience entirely. ‘By dulling the blade of tyranny, I
reconciled Rome to the monarchy,’ claims Graves’s Claudius in
Claudius the God.
It was only partly true. (Certainly, in entrusting tasks to imperial freedmen, Claudius spared
himself some of the opprobrium of unpopular decision-making.) With greater trust in the legions
which had made him
princeps
than in the senators who had hesitated to
confirm their
fait accompli
, Claudius treated Rome’s political classes with traditional respect. Like all his immediate predecessors, he denied them the means of effective dissent.

In the absence of the relevant passages of Tacitus’
Annals
, and in light of question marks over the surviving version of Dio’s account and the loss of lives
of Claudius by Pliny the Elder, Fabius Rusticus and Cluvius Rufus, Suetonius bequeaths us the only full-length account of Claudius’ life to survive from antiquity.
¹
Its enjoyment ought not to
preclude a degree of cautious scepticism on the reader’s part. For in one of his more richly coloured biographies, Suetonius presents that series of apparent contradictions which, taken in
aggregate, have contributed to Claudius’ historiographical reputation as a ‘problem’ emperor, his legacy ambiguous, ripe for just the sort of red-top sensationalism which adds
piquancy to Graves’s novels and their subsequent televisation. Suetonius’ fifth Caesar combines physical frailty with academic rigour, timidity with barbarous cruelty, clear thinking
with overwhelming susceptibility to the self-interest of unofficial close advisers, notably his wives and freedmen. Both his strengths and his weaknesses are strident. He inspires conflicting
responses: more than inconsistent, he appears to be compounded of irreconcilables. Early studiousness prior to the throne later gives way to buffoonery; physical infirmities regulated by high
office, he apparently jettisons aspects of right thinking.

His ascent to the purple, a case of the swish of the curtain, is one of the best-known vignettes of the layman’s Rome, more dramatic than convincing. In 1871, it inspired an equally
well-known painting,
A Roman Emperor,
AD
41
, by Dutch-born classical painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Alma-Tadema painted pot-boilers. His
large-scale snapshots of Roman life and history enjoyed immense popularity and were acclaimed in the artist’s lifetime for the accuracy of their archaeological details. In
A Roman Emperor,
AD
41
, it is the narrative, not the decorative impulse, which predominates. An old and ugly Claudius cowers behind a curtain, where he is discovered by a soldier. We
join the scene at the moment the centurion draws back the heavily fringed drapery to expose Gaius’ grim-faced uncle to the obeisance of a motley crowd of soldiers and court beauties. Claudius
is revealed half in shadow, right of centre. Occupying the centre of the painting are a mound of richly draped dead bodies and a marble herm, its base suggestively stained with crimson handprints.
The painting contains a single image typical of Roman heroism: the dignified profile of the herm.
²
It also offers a potent riposte to the legend of ‘innocent’ serendipity surrounding
Claudius’ accession. To seize his destiny, the unprepossessing Claudius must step over those ornamental corpses. He must also overcome that fear which contorts his face – surely born of
a sense of his own unworthiness which, in Alma-Tadema’s image, the viewer shares.

But
A Roman Emperor,
AD
41
was not Alma-Tadema’s only depiction of Claudius’ transition to pre-eminence. Four years earlier he had painted
Proclaiming Claudius Emperor.
In this earlier, quite different image, the composition is inspired by paintings of the Annunciation by Fra Angelico, Filippino Lippi and Botticelli. A youthful
Claudius kneels in supplication before a bowing soldier, begging for his life. Other soldiers look on, their faces rapt with joy. The painting depicts the prequel to an unambiguously happy ending,
the moment Claudius emerges from his curtained hiding-place to a brighter destiny. In both
compositional and symbolic terms, Claudius occupies the Virgin Mary’s place.
Inscribed on the frame of Botticelli’s Annunciation were words from St Luke’s Gospel: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow
thee.’ In this first image of Claudius, Alma-Tadema draws on the visual language of good and evil, blessings (in the form of benefactions promised by the youthful figure of Claudius)
following the curse of Gaius’ short reign. It was an historical inaccuracy, of course, and not without melodrama and a heavy dollop of sentiment. More than this,
Proclaiming Claudius
Emperor
cannot be reconciled with the painter’s later revisiting of the same scene. Unable to negotiate the contradictions of Suetonius’ Claudius, a Victorian crowd-pleaser offered
the gallery-visiting public both sides of the story, verdicts wholly at variance.