The Emperor and His Freedmen — Claudius: Found Behind a Curtain, Poisoned With Mushrooms?
The surprise: Claudius rules well. He starts by cleaning up after Caligula. Dio records that he drops the treason charges, releases innocent people from prison, and repeals Caligula’s taxes. He brings the dead emperor’s two sisters, Agrippina and Julia, back from exile and returns their property (60.4). Remember Agrippina’s name.
Almost every day he sits in court, usually in the Forum. He judges strangely: sometimes carefully and shrewdly, sometimes hastily, sometimes like a madman (Suetonius, Claudius 15). When a woman refuses to acknowledge her son and the evidence is contradictory, he orders her to marry him. Then she confesses. When someone cries out that a forger should have his hands cut off, Claudius immediately summons an executioner with a knife and a block.
The most important thing, though, is what he builds. In winter, grain ships at Ostia have nowhere to shelter. Dio describes how, when Claudius asked the architects what a new harbor would cost, he was told he would not want it. He built it anyway (60.11). Suetonius adds that after years of drought a crowd stopped him in the middle of the Forum and pelted him with insults and scraps of bread. He barely escaped to the palace through a back door. From then on he does everything he can to keep grain flowing to Rome even in winter (Claudius 18).
There are more projects like this. An aqueduct begun by Caligula. A tunnel under a mountain to drain a lake. Claudius takes on things that Augustus and Julius Caesar had shied away from (Suetonius, Claudius 20). And then he looks for glory where no Caesar had found it.
The Senate votes him triumphal insignia, but Claudius decides that is too little for an emperor. He wants a real triumph. He chooses Britain for it, a land nobody had tried to conquer since Julius Caesar (Suetonius, Claudius 17). The year is AD 43. Dio writes that the Roman commander Plautius halted on the Thames and sent for the emperor. Claudius entrusts affairs in Rome to his fellow consul and sets out (60.21).
Accounts of this expedition differ. Dio describes a battle, the capture of Camulodunum and repeated cries of “imperator,” contrary to custom (60.21). Suetonius writes that the emperor, without battle or bloodshed, accepted the surrender of part of the island and returned to Rome after six months (Claudius 17). The triumph is magnificent. On the roof of the palace the emperor hangs a naval crown beside the civic crown, as a sign that he had crossed the ocean and, in a way, conquered it. Behind his chariot, in a carriage, rides his wife Messalina.
The Senate grants the emperor the title Britannicus and bestows it on his son as well. The boy, who had been named Germanicus, is from then on called Britannicus (Dio 60.22; Suetonius, Claudius 27). Remember that name.
Who really runs this state? Suetonius records that almost all of Claudius’s decisions are dictated to him by his wives and freedmen. The emperor acts almost always in line with their interests and wishes (Claudius 25). They hand out honors, commands, pardons and punishments. Claudius often does not even know what he is signing (Claudius 29).
Two matter most: the secretary Narcissus and the treasurer Pallas. The Senate even grants them the insignia of a quaestor and a praetor. They amass wealth so fast that when the emperor complains of an empty treasury, someone answers with a quip: he would have plenty if the two freedmen took him into partnership (Suetonius, Claudius 28). Dio claims that Narcissus alone possessed more than four hundred million sesterces (60.34).
Suetonius shows how this works in practice. The senator Appius Silanus has displeased the empress. Dio adds the reason: he had rejected her advances (60.14). Then Narcissus bursts into the emperor’s bedroom before dawn, terrified because he dreamed that Silanus attacked him. The empress feigns surprise and says that for several nights she has had the same dream. Right then Silanus appears, summoned earlier for that very hour, so it looks like proof. He is put to death at once. The next day Claudius tells the whole story in the Senate and thanks the freedman for watching over him even in his sleep (Claudius 37).
The empress in this story is named Messalina. She married Claudius when she was very young, and ahead of her lies the most notorious court career in Roman history. And the swiftest fall.