After Gaius was killed, Claudius, the fourth emperor from Augustus, assumed the empire. This was in the year 4600 from the beginning of the world, or 5240 according to another computation, and in the 785th year from the founding of the city. He ruled for fourteen years.
He is said to have had a tall and stout body, beautiful gray hair, and a full neck. As he walked, his rather weak knees failed him. Many other defects also disfigured him: immoderate laughter, still uglier anger, a foaming voice, moist nostrils, and a trembling head.
Among other things, people especially marveled at his forgetfulness and lack of judgment. Not long after his wife Messalina had been killed, he asked his eunuchs why his wife was not coming to dinner. He also ordered many leading men whom he had condemned to death on the preceding day to be summoned immediately to his council and to a game of dice.
When Claudius heard of Gaius’s death, he feared that the conspirators would rage against all Gaius’s relatives. Terrified by the report of the murder, he fled to a nearby balcony and hid himself among the curtains of a chamber.
A common soldier running about happened to notice his feet. Wishing to learn who he was, the soldier recognized him and dragged him out. Claudius fell at the man’s knees in fear, but the soldier greeted him as emperor. He then led Claudius to the other soldiers who were discussing the choice of an emperor. They placed him in a litter and carried him, sad and trembling, to the Praetorian camp, while the crowd that met them pitied him as though an innocent man were being dragged to punishment.
The consuls and senate assembled at the Temple of Jupiter the Triumpher. Deliberating together there, they wished to restore the republic to the state of liberty that it had possessed before Julius Caesar.
While they discussed the present condition in common, a sudden and immense clamor was heard from the assembled army. It demanded that a military emperor be chosen and that the Roman Empire by no means be broken apart through the rule of many men.
The soldiers had decided that the empire should be given to one man. Nevertheless, they yielded to the senate so that it might choose whomever it considered worthy. Opinions therefore conflicted: one senator judged this man worthy of the empire, another that man. Some said that no one from the family of the former rulers ought to be chosen, but someone from a noble family who could govern the Roman Empire with courage and prudence.
A certain Mucianus, very powerful in the senate, proposed for the empire Marcus, who had as his wife Julia, Gaius’s sister. Others named Valerius Asiaticus, a man strong in action and counsel. Thus the senate could not agree among itself about the choice of a ruler.
At last Claudius himself, with the senate’s consent, was summoned by the tribunes of the plebs to the senate house to set forth what seemed proper. He answered that he was being detained by the soldiers through force and necessity.
He sent Agrippa, king of Judea, who happened then to be at Rome, and informed the senate that at first he had been seized by the army against his will. It would now be unjust, he said, to abandon the soldiers’ devoted attachment to him, and indeed his position was no longer safe otherwise. He further promised that he would administer the republic so as to be called a worthy ruler and not a tyrant.
After Agrippa reported these things in the senate, one of the centurions of the urban army, who was then supporting the senate’s side, drew his sword and said: “Fellow soldiers, what desperate circumstances make us desire to rush against our fellow citizens, especially when we have an emperor whom we ought to approach with just arguments rather than arms?”
After saying this, he departed through the middle of the senate house. Almost the whole armed force abandoned the senators and followed him out. Deserted by this example, the leading men were shaken by great fear. Recognizing that it was no longer safe to resist Claudius, almost the whole senate, together with the consuls, went over to him.
§ I: The Beginning of Claudius’s Reign
When his imperial power had thus been established, Claudius considered nothing more important than removing from Roman memory the two days of hesitation about changing the form of the republic. He therefore decreed perpetual pardon and oblivion for all words and deeds.
Nevertheless, he executed the few centurions who had conspired in Gaius’s death and whom he had learned had also demanded his own murder. Among them Cassius Chaerea and Lupus were killed.
Josephus relates that Chaerea accepted this death, which he appeared to undergo for the liberty of his fatherland, with the great spirit appropriate to a military man. He not only cast sorrow from his face but even rebuked Lupus when Lupus dissolved into tears.
When Chaerea came to the place where he was to be punished, he asked the soldier to pierce him with the sword by which he had given liberty to his fatherland and killed Gaius. Chaerea therefore died happily, dispatched by the blow of a single stroke.
Thereafter Claudius turned to works of mercy and restored to their homeland all prisoners and exiles, including those banished by Gaius. He was very frugal and civil. Except for the title of emperor, he abstained from all other titles and refused excessive honors.
He frequently attended the election of magistrates as one of the counselors. Indeed, when tribunes of the plebs approached him as he sat before the tribunal, he apologized that because of the confined space he could not hear them unless they remained standing.
For this reason he gained so much love and favor in a short time that, when it was reported that he had been killed in an ambush while traveling to Ostia, the people and soldiers, greatly dismayed, pursued those they regarded as traitors, and the senate, as though it were a parricide, with dreadful curses. They continued until they learned that he was approaching safe and unharmed.
At the beginning of his principate, Gallus Asimus [read: Asinius Gallus] and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons of the orators Pollio and Messalla, conspired against him, taking with them many of Claudius’s own slaves and freedmen. They were suppressed within a few days.
He managed the care of the city and its grain supply with the greatest diligence. When the food supply was restricted by persistent crop failures, a crowd once attacked him in the middle of the forum with insults and pieces of bread so severely that he could enter the palace only by a rear door.
He therefore worked to bring in provisions even during winter. He promised merchants certain profits and even assumed the loss himself if any adversity occurred because of storms.
He completed many great and very necessary works, especially the aqueduct begun by Gaius, the outlet of Lake Fucinus, and the harbor at Ostia. He presented games of various kinds to the people and attended them himself with great courtesy.
Because some masters of no mean standing had exposed their sick and afflicted slaves upon an island out of weariness with treating them, Claudius declared all who had been exposed, and all who would be exposed thereafter, free. He decreed that if they recovered, they should never return under their masters’ power.
He perpetually remitted the tribute of the Ilians—that is, the Trojans—as the founders of the Roman race. He expelled the Jews from Rome.
[Running head: Chapter Twenty-Two, Folio 203.]
§ II: On His Evil Character
Claudius was exceedingly greedy for food and wine at every time and place. He attended frequent, lavish, and continual banquets. He slept very little, for he often remained awake until after midnight. He was utterly abandoned to lust for women and played dice with the greatest enthusiasm. That he was cruel and bloodthirsty appeared especially in the smallest matters.
When very young, he was betrothed to two women, Aemilia and Lepida. He was also betrothed to Luna Medullina [read: Livia Medullina], whose surname was Camilla and who descended from the ancient dictator Camillus. After rejecting these women within a short time for various reasons, he married Plaucia and then Petina, but divorced both.
After them he married Valeria Messalina, of his cousin Messalla [read: daughter of his cousin Messalla Barbatus], but he also put her to death. Captivated by the charms of Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus, and drawn into love through the right of kissing and the opportunity of caresses, he caused the senate to compel him to marry her, as though this were most advantageous to the republic. It also granted others permission for such marriages, which until that time had been regarded as incestuous.
He had children by three wives: by Plaucia, Drusus and Claudia; by Petina, Antonia; and by Messalina, Octavia and Germanicus, whom he soon named Britannicus. He lost Drusus before the boy reached puberty. Octavia married Nero, whom Claudius later also adopted as a son.
Joined to these wives, he presented himself not as a ruler but as their servant. At their zeal or caprice he bestowed honors, armies, immunities, and punishments. Not to enumerate everything individually, through them grants of freedom were revoked, judgments rescinded, and documents conferring offices altered.
At his wives’ instigation he ordered the killing of his co-father-in-law Appius Silanus and of two Julias—one the daughter of Germanicus and the other the daughter of Drusus—on an uncertain charge and without allowing any defense. He killed Pompey, husband of his elder daughter, and Lucius Silanus, betrothed to his younger daughter.
He punished thirty-five senators and more than three hundred Roman knights with such ease that, when the death of a man of consular rank was reported to him as having been carried out at his command, he denied that he had commanded anything. He required that judicial tortures and the penalties of parricides be carried out in his presence.
Yet nothing equaled his timidity and distrust. In the first days of his reign he did not dare enter banquets unless guards bearing spears stood beside him, nor visit any sick man unless the chamber had first been searched.
He was so terrified by a certain plot rashly reported to him that he considered relinquishing the empire. Weeping and loudly lamenting that nothing was ever concealed from his condition, he abstained from appearing in public for a long time.
No suspicion was so slight, and no informant so insignificant, that Claudius was not driven by considerable anxiety to take precautions and seek vengeance. One litigant asserted that in his sleep he had seen Claudius stabbed with a sword by a certain man. A little later he pointed out his opponent as the man attempted to hand the emperor a petition. Claudius immediately treated him as convicted by confession and ordered him dragged away to punishment.
In the fourth year of his reign, the year in which Peter reached Rome, Claudius wished to display himself as a ruler useful to the republic. He sought war everywhere and victory from every quarter.
He therefore first launched an expedition into Britain and was the first after Julius Caesar to dare attack that island. As he sailed from Ostia, a violent northwest wind nearly sank him twice near the Scladae.
Crossing from there to the island, he received almost all of it into surrender within very few days, without danger or bloodshed. He also added to the Roman Empire the Orchades, situated in the ocean beyond Britain.
In the sixth month after his departure he returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph with the greatest display. He permitted not only provincial governors to come to the city for the spectacle but also granted the same indulgence to exiles. His wife Messalina followed his chariot.
§ III: On His Death and on Herod
When Claudius saw that he was now worn out by old age, he wrote a will and had it sealed with the seals of all the magistrates. After doing so, before he could proceed further, he was poisoned by his wife Agrippina.
She feared that as Britannicus, Claudius’s son by Messalina, grew older, he would himself receive from his father the empire that she was striving to prepare for her son Nero. She therefore began to discuss Claudius’s death with the eunuchs of the court.
Not long afterward, at a domestic banquet, she gave poison to Claudius through the eunuch Halotus, his food taster. It is said that immediately after swallowing it he became mute and that, tortured by pain throughout the night, he died near dawn.
His death was concealed until those who sided with Agrippina arranged everything concerning his successor. When he expired, Agrippina sent the commander of the soldiers and powerful tribunes with him to lead her son Nero to the Praetorian camp, so that the army might worship him according to the custom observed for other rulers and swear allegiance to him.
Claudius died in the sixty-fourth year of his age. The chief portents of his death were the appearance of a long-haired star, which the Greeks call a comet, and the striking by lightning of the monument of his father Drusus.
Suetonius says that Claudius himself neither failed to know nor concealed his coming death. At the last meeting of the senate that he attended, he exhorted his children to concord, humbly commended them to the senate, and added that he was approaching death.
Under this Claudius, ruler of the Romans, a census was held at Rome. Throughout the whole world, seven million and forty-four thousand Roman citizens were found.
Because Herod Agrippa had labored no less to secure Claudius’s possession of the empire than he had for Gaius’s, Claudius elevated him still further. He added to Agrippa all the territories that Octavian Augustus had given to the first Herod, namely the Aschalonita, Agrippa’s grandfather, who had ordered the innocent children killed. He added Judea and sent Agrippa back to his own land laden with the greatest gifts.
Claudius sent Marsus as successor to Petronius, who had governed Syria and Judea.
When Herod Agrippa came to Jerusalem, he hung in the Temple the golden chain Gaius had given him. It was made in the likeness of the iron chain with which he had been bound in prison by Tiberius’s command, so that it might recall the memory of his sadder fortune and offer testimony concerning his better circumstances. He suspended it there to display the magnitude of his reversal and at the same time to show that one who had fallen could be raised up again.
After this Agrippa Herod began at public expense to build the walls of Jerusalem equally great in height and breadth. Marsus, governor of Syria, reported the matter to Claudius. The emperor, suspecting a cause for rebellion, commanded Agrippa to cease building the walls, and he did so.
According to Josephus, Agrippa’s conduct was gentle toward everyone, but toward his own nation he was magnificent and beneficent beyond all measure. He was nevertheless merciful toward foreigners and was therefore loved by all.
[Running head: Sixth Title.]
To gain the Jews’ favor, Herod Agrippa persecuted the Church newly rising in Judea. This was the Herod Agrippa who killed James, John’s brother, with the sword. When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also and imprisoned him so that he might kill him, as was said above from Acts 12.
From these facts it is clear that this James was not beheaded by Herod within one year of Christ’s Passion, as some say, but several years later. For Christ suffered in or about the nineteenth year of Tiberius’s reign, and two or three years of Tiberius’s rule remained. After him Gayus ruled for three and a half years, and after Gayus came Claudius, who gave Judea to Agrippa.
As Eusebius says, divine vengeance did not permit the king’s crime to be delayed. Agrippa went down to Caesarea and, clothed in a splendid garment, sat on a lofty tribunal and addressed the people. When the people acclaimed him with the words, “The voice of a god and not of a man,” he delighted in those divine praises. An angel struck him, and after swarming with worms he died several days later, in the fiftieth year of his age, the seventh year of his reign, and the third year of Claudius.
When Claudius heard of Agrippa’s death, he wished to appoint Agrippa’s son, also named Agrippa, as successor to his kingdom. The senate did not advise it, maintaining that it was unsafe to entrust the scepter of a most powerful kingdom to a boy, for he was seventeen years old.
Yielding to the senate, Claudius reduced the kingdom granted to Agrippa to the form of a province. To his son, also called Agrippa, he entrusted under the name of a kingdom the region across the Jordan. After Marsus, who governed Syria, Claudius sent Caspius [read: Cassius] to govern both Syria and the kingdom of Judea following the death of Herod Agrippa.