The Family Fool — Claudius: Found Behind a Curtain, Poisoned With Mushrooms?

Claudius was born on August 1, 10 BC, in Lugdunum, today’s Lyon, on the day an altar to Augustus was dedicated there (Suetonius, Claudius 2). His father, Drusus, died when the boy was an infant. His older brother Germanicus grew up to be a hero of the legions. Claudius grew up to be a problem.

For most of his childhood and youth he is ill. Suetonius writes that these chronic ailments dulled his mind and body. As he grows up, he is still not thought capable of any business, public or private. For a long time he has a guardian whom he himself described as a foreigner and a former chief muleteer. The man was given to him to punish the boy with full severity for the slightest fault (Claudius 2).

His family shows him no mercy. His mother Antonia calls him a monster of a man, one that nature had begun but never finished. When she wants to scold someone for stupidity, she says he is a bigger fool than her son Claudius. His grandmother Livia, Augustus’s wife, barely speaks to him. She reprimands him in short, sharp letters or through messengers. His sister Livilla, hearing that he would one day be emperor, prays aloud that the Romans be spared so cruel a fate (Claudius 3).

Augustus writes about him to Livia more honestly than the rest of the family. He worries that the boy is deficient in body and mind, and that a public that loves to mock will ridicule him and them. That is why he does not want to show him in the places of honor at the circus. In another letter, though, he adds something odd. The poor fellow is unlucky, for when his mind does not wander, a nobility of character shows in matters of importance (Claudius 4).

When Augustus dies, he leaves Claudius only the priesthood of augur. In his will he names him only in third place, for a sixth of the estate, among people who are almost strangers. He leaves him no more than eight hundred thousand sesterces (Claudius 4).

The family thinks he is a fool. But what does he think himself? Later Claudius claims in the Senate that he had partly feigned his stupidity in order to survive under Caligula. Dio confirms that he said so (60.2). No one believes him, however. Suetonius writes that soon a book appears called “The Elevation of Fools,” arguing that no one feigns stupidity (Claudius 38).

When Tiberius becomes emperor, he gives his nephew the insignia of a consul as a courtesy. Claudius wants a real office, though, and presses him for it. The emperor replies with a short note. Guess what it says.

Not everyone despises Claudius, however. The equestrians twice choose him as their representative, and they stand when he appears at the shows (Suetonius, Claudius 6). The Senate decrees that his house, which had burned down, be rebuilt at public expense, and that he give his opinion among the former consuls. Tiberius revokes the second decree, citing Claudius’s weakness.

Only Caligula, who seeks popularity at the start of his reign, pulls his uncle out of the shadows. He makes him his colleague in the consulship for two months. When Claudius first enters the Forum with his lictors, an eagle flying overhead lands on his shoulder (Claudius 7). Then things get worse.

At banquets Caligula and his jesters show no mercy. When Claudius arrives late, he has to walk all the way around the hall before he finds a seat. When he dozes off after eating, they pelt him with olive and date stones. They wake him with a whip. They put slippers on his hands so that, when he wakes, he rubs his face with them (Claudius 8).

Those were jokes. There were real dangers too. Once Caligula nearly strips him of office because he was too slow in ordering statues of the emperor’s brothers. When Claudius travels to him as an envoy to Germania after the discovery of a plot, the emperor flies into such a rage that, as Suetonius records, some claim he had his uncle thrown into the river fully clothed. That is only a rumor. Suetonius does give as fact that Claudius must pay eight million sesterces for a new priesthood, and as a result his estate is put up for sale (Claudius 9).

This is the life of a man to whom his family gave no role at all. Now he has legions under him. How will he rule?