Transcript of 537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com. When the conspirators who were lurking in wait for Caligula took everyone else along on the grounds that the Emperor wish to be alone, Claudius retreated to a wing of the palace known as the Hermeum. Not long afterwards, alarmed by the distant shouts of, murder, crept away to a nearby balcony where he hid himself behind the curtains hanging in front of the door. There he cowered. And as he did so, a soldier who happened to be wandering past noticed his feet and dragged him out, intending to ask him who he was. But then, as he sank to his knees in terror, recognized him and hailed him as Emperor. The soldier then led him away to where the other Pratorians were all milling around, uncertain what to do. The soldiers put him in a litter, And because his own attendance had run away, took it in turns to carry the unhappy and fearful man on their shoulders to their camp, and all the crowds they passed on the way pitted him on the assumption that he was an innocent being bundled off to execution.

Received within the ramparts, he spent the night under the protection of the Pretorians, but in a mood of relief rather than of any great expectation. But as the next day passed, so large crowds of people gathered outside the Praetorian camp, agitating for a single man to be given rule and calling for Claudius by name. These chants prompted him to allow an armed assembly of the Praetorians to swear allegiance to him and to promise each one of them 15,000 sestercies, thereby becoming the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe. That last sentence, I'm not sure whether that's really true, but that's Suetonius in his life of Claudius, as translated in the New Penguin Classics edition by our very own Tom Holland. Tom there, Suetonius, is taking the story forwards from where we left it last time. We left it on a of anger. The Emperor Caligula, mad or not, definitely a populace, has been assassinated by Cassius Kyria and the Praetorian Guard. The question is, is Rome going to turn back the clock 60 years to the time of the Republic and all the chaos at the end of the Republic, or is it going to continue with the family of Augustus, known as the Caesars?

So take us forward. What happens next?

Yeah, well, it's the pressing question. What happens next? Is there an eligible Caesar to hand? Or as you were implying, might it be time to turn the clock back, to go back to the Republican system of government? What makes that question even more pressing is the fact that, as we've been saying throughout this series, the autocracy of the Caesars is not formerly a hereditary monarchy. In fact, formerly, it's not a monarchy at all, and so there are no rules governing the succession. That said, it has come to be accepted that the Emperor should be a Caesar. That means an heir, either by adoption, as was the case with Tiberia or by bloodline, as was the case with Caligula, of the deified Augustus, the first of the emperors, and who is now a God. The question then is, what are the options? Who is there on hand? I suppose the obvious question, which we didn't touch on in our episode on Caligula, is has he left any children? Although he's only 28 when he gets murdered, he hasn't stinted when it comes to having wives. I mean, he's burned through a lot of them. His last wife is the one that actually seems to have been his great love.

She's a woman called Melonia Sisonia. She isn't particularly young. She's not particularly attractive, but she does seem to have appealed to something very deep in Caligula. Who knows? Well, actually, I think we can have a fairly good idea what it is. They both seem to have certainly had a taste for dressing up.

She's like Lucy Worsley.

Well, to a degree, so when he goes riding off to see soldiers or whatever, he dresses her up in a military outfit as well. She clearly enjoys that. But he also gets her to pose nude for friends. To that extent, she's not like Lucy Worsley. But she's clearly... She's a fun girl. She gels well with Caligula's inimitable madcap sense of humor. I think it would be fair to say. She's a zany fun sister. She has given him one child, but unfortunately, for fans of the bloodline of Caligula, that child is a daughter. Caligula has named her after his beloved sister who died and whom he deified in his grief. He calls her Julia Drusilla.

She's a lovely, sweet-natured girl, isn't she, by all accounts?

Yeah. This, again, I think is one of them. I mean, very funny bit from Serotonius. This is Caligula talking about Drusilla Caligula. There existed no sure evidence that she was indeed his child, he believed, than her temper, which was so violent. Whenever she played with other little children, she would scratch at their faces and jab at their eyes with her fingers. So Daddy watches on. Oh, chip off the old block. What happens to them? Well, according to Soutonius, they get murdered along with Caligula. He says that they've been accompanying him when they run into the pritorians. But Josephus, the great Judean historian who has very precise information about what happens. He reports that they weren't with him, but when the news came that he'd been murdered, they come and seek out the body of their husband's straight father, and they find him, and they lie prostrated with grief, mourning him. This is where they are found by a pratorian who has been sent to dispatch them. Sisonia looks up at the soldier and she's sobbing and she says, Finish the last act of the drama. Again, this idea that everyone in the house of Caesar is an actor on a stage.

The pratorian duly does as he's told. He slits Sisonia's throat and he picks up little Drusilla and he smashes out her brains on the side of a wall. That's the end of them. They have gone. There are no male descendants of Augustus at all, full stop. There's no male candidate with the blood of Augustus in their veins to succeed Caligula. It's not surprising that there are many in the Senate who do think, Well, this might be the time to bring back the Republic, to wake up from this terrible nightmare that we've been living through. That evening, the soldiers come, the guards come, and they say to the consuls who've taken control of the city now that Caligula's gone, and they say, What's the watchword? And they say, Liberty. It's all very noble and outstanding. The next day, they have a very grandiose, florid debate on the need to restore the Republic. Words like liberty and various other abstractions are banded around with great abandon. But while they are having this debate, they are forgetting the fact that there are other players in this crisis. One group of which, of course, is the pritorians, the Imperial Guard, some of whom had been prompted to murder Caligula, but who absolutely do not want to see the overthrow of the monarchy because they depend on it for their status and their income.

Obviously, they don't want to republic. There'd be no role for them. The other player in the drama, of course, is the people, the mass of the Roman people who likewise mourn Calicula. They're very upset that he's gone. They, too, want a Caesar because it is Caesar who keeps them fed above all. It's Caesar who organizes the grain supply, and it's Caesar who keeps the who's entertained, who provides the gladiatorial shows and so on. They, likewise, don't really want a Republic.

Let's get back to this moment of the curtain. This bloke in the Palatine, Pratorian, he sees these feet sticking out under the curtain. He takes Claudius to the Pratorian camp, and presumably the Pratorians at this point are thinking of Claudius purely as their puppet. He's somebody from the family, so they feel a sentimental attachment, perhaps, and they think, We need a figurehead. Here's this bloke, who cares what his back story is. He's got the right bloodline. Great.

Bring him in. Well, we'll discuss in due course, I think, whether it's just luck or whether it's perhaps something slightly more organized. But yes, you're right. They I find Claudius. Claudius is a part of the August family. He's quite old by this point. He's born in 10 BC. So Caligula is murdered in 41, so he's into his 50s. People may be wondering, well, if he's in his 50s, he's a member of the August family, why hasn't he become Emperor before? Why isn't he the obvious candidate? I suppose, why hasn't Caligula killed him? If he's an alternative Emperor.

Actually, I said he's got the It's quite bloodline, but that's not quite right, isn't it? Because now it comes back to this issue that Soutonius was very interested in with Caligula, which really loomed large for Soutonius then, and I guess must do now again, which is exactly whom are you descended from?

Yeah, this really, really matters. Who is Claudius? To answer that, we need to go back to the scandalous marriage that Augustus had with this woman called Livia. Livia is She had a Claudian. She had previously been married to another Claudian. She'd had a baby boy, Tiberius. She's then pregnant by her first husband when Augustus decides he really wants her and marries her. He's in a position to obviously impose his will. Olivia is massively pregnant when she marries Augustus, and shortly afterwards, she gives birth to a second son who is called Drusus. Drusus, like Tiberius, is a tremendous war hero. He's entrusted by Augustus with assorted German campaigns. He invades so far east that he reaches the line of the Elba, where he sees the ghostly apparition of a huge woman telling him to turn back. But he's very dashing, very heroic. Then he dies young, which, of course, confirms his reputation in the hearts of the Roman people. It's all very early years of Rome in a story by Livy. Tiberius escorts the corpse of his brother back to Rome on foot, weeping the whole way. Very, very heroic tableau. So Drusus is much admired, much loved.

Unfortunately, he has given the Roman people another war hero because Drusus is the father of Germanicus, who we talked about in the previous episode, the father of Caligula. Very dashing, perfect in every way apart from his spindly legs, absolute war hero, again, and everyone loves him. However, Germanicus is not Drusus' son. He has a second son, and this is Claudius. Claudius, as we said, is born in 10 BC, the first of August, at Lugdunum, which is Lyon in Gaul, the great cult center for the Augustine cult in Gaul. Claudius is born. Drusus dies the following year in 9 BC. The infant Claudius is raised by his mother, Antonius, who is the daughter of Mark Anthony.

Just to recap for people who don't know the family tree in front of them, Claudius is the nephew of Tiberius. He is the brother of Germanicus, who never got to become Emperor. He's also the grand son of Mark Anthony. I mean, he's very well connected. He's the step-grandson of Anthony's great rival, the first Emperor Augustus. So he has all kinds of connections, although the crucial one, the one with the Augustus is not a blood connection.

Yeah, and that wouldn't be an absolutely hopeless problem because Tiberius wasn't, but he gets adopted. In the Roman system, if you get adopted, then you do become the son. I mean, as good as being a blood son. It would have been possible for Augustus or Tiberius at some point to have adopted Claudius, but they don't. Why do they not? Well, the words of Soutonius, for almost the entire length of childhood and adolescence, he suffered from a range of chronic illnesses. These left him so impaired, both mentally and physically, that even once he had come of age, he was regarded as unfitted for either public or private duties.

What are these illnesses?

Well, so Suetonius goes on to list them. He has weak knees, which gives him a hobbling, almost limping gait. His laughter, Suetonius says, is an unbecoming bray. It's a bit like Kamala Harris.

I was about to say Kamala Harris. People gave her a lot of hard time, but I didn't mind her laugh, actually. I thought it was quite endearing.

Well, you might have liked Claudius's then.

But I wouldn't say hers was a bray. If his was a bray, I would dislike it because I don't like a braying laugh.

Okay, well, Suetonius says it was a bray, so obviously it was because Suetonius is never wrong.

Suetonius says he stammers and twitches, and when he gets angry, he drooled and snorted mucus. I hate that in a man, Tom, the snorting of mucus.

Apparently, Claudius gets angry quite a lot. There's quite a lot of snot flying around the Palatine. Clearly, he suffers from various ailments and disadvantages. People might be wondering, well, do his grandmother, Livia, and his mother, Antonia, show him sympathy and compassion, or are they monstrously ableist? I'm afraid to say that they are monstrously ableist. That's disappointing. Olivia is so mortified by having this grandson who twitches and limps blows snot everywhere that she can barely bring herself to talk to him and generally communicates with him by sending him written missives. Again, to quote S eautonius, his mother Antonia used to describe him as a monstrosity of a human being, begun by nature but only half finished, and would accuse anyone whose stupidity she particularly wish to emphasize of being a bigger fool than her son, Claudius.

But actually, I tell you who's really nice to him, and this bears out my view that actually, I think you're very hard on this person, and you paint him in an unduly dark light, and that is Augustus. Augustus is ultimately a kind man and is lovely to Claudius.

Except when she's altering senators.

Yeah, but who cares about them? He's very nice to Claudius, isn't he? He's very nice to Claudius.

He's not very nice to Claudius.

Yeah, but compare with the rest of the family, Tom.

He's nicer than his mother, for sure. Augustus agrees that it would be embarrassing to his regime to have Claudius exposed the public eye. But he It does recognize qualities in Claudius.

Read, Tom, to the listeners what Augustus wrote about him.

Right. This is a letter quoted by Suetonius. I love it when Suetonius quotes letters. You feel really up close. Augustus wrote to Olivia, The poor boy has been cheated by fortune for insignificant matters. When he can hold his concentration, the nobility of his spirit is evident enough.

Quaterat Demonstrandum.

There's another letter where he says, It's amazing. I went to hear Claudius give a talk about some academic subject, and it was brilliant. Amazing.

Okay, now, you said to give a talk about this academic subject. Now, it's true, you can be academically very prominent and a complete and utter fool. And I think we can all think of people who tick that particular box But this business that Antonio said, Oh, anyone who's really stupid, I call him a bigger fool than Claudius. And Claudius is an absolute dribbling idiot. If he's a dribbling idiot, how is it he's giving academic lectures? I mean, again, people who've spent time at our great universities may find that question easy to answer, but no doubt you'll have your own answer, Tom.

I think that it is a general assumption in the Greek and Roman world that if you look like an idiot, you are an idiot. That's the core assumption. They're not very woke at all on such matters. But it's evident that Claudius, despite sending streams of snot everywhere when he gets cross, is very intellectual, academically able. He's fluent in Greek, he's very knowledgeable about literature. Precisely because he's not allowed to enjoy a public life, he's not allowed to go and follow in the footsteps of Germanicus and lead expeditions into Germany. That gives him the chance to spend, or I guess if you're a Roman aristocrat, or waste his time on scholarly pursuits. The mark, I guess, of how much he wastes his of how contemplable a figure he is by the standards of the Roman aristocracy is actually he becomes a historian. So he's a total loser.

Yeah, a slobbering, twitching, socially incompetent historian. Who would have thought it? Thank goodness there are none of those left anymore, Tom.

Well, and Dominic, the other possible point of comparison with historians that certainly I know is that he writes enormously long books. No way. His editor Here's a commission to write a history of the Etruscans. Could you keep it down to two books? And he writes 20 books. No way. And he gets commissioned to write history of Carthage. Make it one book, eight books.

Sometimes it's good to write a properly immersive, well-textured history. That takesCultiple volumes, what can I say?

With chapters on Snuker. Do you know, Claudius would have loved all that because he writes a book about dice. He's interested in pretty much everything.

And he's a historian. He's a contemporary historian. He is a He writes about things within living memory.

Yes, he does, which is very foolish of him or brave. I think this may be one of the reasons why his mother and grandmother think that he's an idiot, because he writes a history of Rome from the assassination of Caesar. Suittonia says he was a regular criticized by his mother and grandmother for covering the events that followed the murder of Caesar. Because he felt unable to write about them, frankly or truthfully, skipped to the subsequent period of peace which followed the Civil Wars. Obviously, the story of how Augustus When it comes to power, there's a lot of murder, there's a lot of killing, there's a lot of bloodshed. Basically, Livia is saying to him, Just don't go there. We have drawn a veil over all of that. Here you are trying to-Yeah, that's mad from Claudius. Just don't Don't do it. Just don't do it.

That's absolute rank idiocy. I mean, that is rank idiocy from him to-Yes, I think it is. To rake all that up again.

But he does write it, and he actually gets to give a public reading. It's like he gets invited to a literature festival. He starts reading it. Then just as he started reading, there's a quote, again, quote, Sittonius, A great gust of laughter swept the audience when a bench broke under the weight of an enormously fat man. Even after everybody else had calmed down, Claudia has found it impossible to put the incident from his mind and would periodically collapse in fits of giggles.

Oh, my God. I'll tell you one thing, Theo would never forgive me if I didn't remind everybody that this is actually what happened to our erstwhile producer, Tom Johnson, when we went to New Zealand. Remember he sat on that bench and it collapsed?

Yes, I do. Yes, outside the home of a New Zealand farmer who had just been showing us around a cave complex with glow worms. It had been in the family for 150 years.

That was literally the best thing that's ever happened to Theo, watching Tom break that bench. Anyway, let's move on.

So Glaudius, he leads this essentially inoffensive life as a scholar, et Where watching people break benches and he has to be told often about writing on sensitive subjects, but he doesn't get into trouble. There's no risk to him or anything. But then in '37, Caligula, who is, of course, Claudius' nephew, and I'm It's rare for listeners that it is quite complicated keeping all these relations in the head, but Claudius is Caligula's uncle. So Caligula comes to power, and by this stage, Claudius is in his late '40s. Caligula's accession is both good and bad news for Claudius. It's good news because Caligula doesn't really respect the Senate, and so he doesn't mind having Claudius enter it. He appoints Claudius to be his co-consult when he comes to power. At last, Claudius has become a senator, and in due course, later in Caligula's reign, he gets a second consulship. When When Caligula is absent, Claudius presides over public entertainments, public games, and so on.

Which must be proof that Caligula thinks of his uncle as a harmless fool because he wouldn't be promoting him in this way as a potential rival if he thought he was a serious, formidable person.

Yes, I think that's right. I think that Caligula finds it funny to have Claudius in the Senate and also on hand because then he can bully him. There are lots of stories that, again, have the smack of truth that Caligula will invite Claudius to a dinner party. Claudius is quite old. He's also very, very fond of a drink, and so he's very prone to falling asleep. When he does, all the other, either Caligula and the lads, will pelt him with olive stones and bread rolls and that thing.

Right. Flashman style.

Flashman style. There's also this great gag, which Sittonius reports that people will put slippers on his hands and then abruptly wake him so that he'll wake with a jolt, rub his eyes, and find slippers.

I actually find that genuinely funny.

Is that the jeep you got up to in the dawn?

Yeah, I genuinely think that. I'd love to see that.

Well, so Sittanius writes, and this is my translation, very influenced, obviously, by the experience of being on the rest of his history, Just for the banter was the excuse.

Oh, dear. Some people who listen to this podcast say there's too much banter, but I think if anything, there is not enough.

Well, it's not banter on the level of Caligula's court. I think that's safe to say. There is one moment where Claudies might be in serious danger, which is people may remember that there's been this conspiracy against Caligula. He's gone to Germany, he's gone to Gaul, he's coming back to Rome, and he tells the Senate, I hate you. The person he says this to is a delegation of senators led by Claudius. Caligula is furious that Claudius has come. He basically says, You think that you're playing the role of a tutor, disciplining me like I'm a naughty boy or something. So Caligula's response to this, it is said, is to pick Claudius up and throw him into the Rhône. The meeting takes place in Lyon, fully clothed. That's not looking good for Claudius. There are also, it is said, portents that seem to prophesy the golden future that Claudius can look forward to. That very first time when he becomes console and he walks out into the forum and he has all his lictors with the rod an axis on their shoulders, the markers of Claudius's status. It is said that an eagle descends and lands on his shoulder.

It is said that. That's doing a lot of work.

But the fact this story is told-is worrying for Claudius. Is worrying for Claudius.

Yeah, because Caligula want to get rid of him.

Is it possible that Claudius could become Emperor? The big problem is he's not descended from Augustus, and everyone thinks he's an idiot. But it's still a risk if people are even contemplating the possibility that he might be capable of becoming the Emperor, that Caligula will then have him killed because the evidence suggests that's what happens to people who are in the line of descent. In the event, of course, Caligula is murdered. The Praetorian finds him hiding behind a curtain. They take him to the camp, and Claudius becomes Emperor. The whole way through this two-day sequence of events, Claudius is saying, I don't want to be Emperor. It's mad. I'm wholly unsuited to it. People will remember that passage that you read, Suetonius ends by saying he is the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe. Now, that's not true. Augustus, Tiberius, and Legla, they'd all recognize what their security depended on. But with Claudius, it's very, very overt. The amount of money he gives is obscene, and it's paid when he's in their camp, and it enables him to become Emperor.

Is it possible the stuff about the curtain is nonsense and an invention, a folk tale, too good to be true, and that actually he's in the conspiracy from the beginning, he's been paying these blokes, and actually all this, he may not be acting out of ambition so much as fear. He thinks, I'm next to the chopping block. Basically, I've got to act now. I'm not such an idiot. I'm going to act now because otherwise, Caligula is going to have me killed.

We all never know because we don't have the sources. But I think when you weigh them up, I think you'd have to say that's very probable. Because otherwise, the sequence of events has the faint quality of a myth or something.

Yeah, exactly. They find him behind a curtain.

They find him behind a curtain, yeah. They know to find him. They know to take him to the camp. Claudius knows He's got the money ready to pay them. The cash, yeah. He's got the cash ready to pay them. I think it's pretty likely that he was involved. Of course, the fact that he's come to power in that way, protesting that he doesn't want to part of it, disguises the fact that what has happened is basically a coup. It is a coup, plain and simple. It's the first coup, really, since Augustus came to power. There's not been a peaceful handover of power. The consequences of that, the consequence of how he comes to power and the fact that he's neither a blood nor an adoptive descendant of Augustus will crucially shape the course of his rule and its character. Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, they had ruled as as a princeps, as a first man, as a first citizen. Even Caligula, who had despised the notion that Rome might have any Republican traditions, nevertheless, that was officially the role that he was playing. But The thing is that what Caligula had drawn attention to, the brute underpinnings of the imperial system, the fact that it's dependent on military power.

There is another aspect to it, which is that if that's the case, if it is a monarchy, a military monarchy, then it's becoming an institution. It's something that you can inherit not just the title, but an entire way of administering and governing the empire. It's Claudius, because he doesn't have this family link, because when he gets the name of Caesar, it has to be voted to him by the Senate. It's not his by right. What that does is to reveal to people that this is now something that you can inherit in the form of an institution. Claudius' ability to make that work, to make the Imperial institution, the Imperial office, work as an institution, will be absolutely fundamental to the question of whether he will be a success and ultimately, whether the autocracy will be a success and whether Rome itself will endure and prosper. So high stakes.

High stakes. Come back after the break to see if this stammering, twitching, socially inept historian turns out to be a good Emperor.

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That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn. Com/restishistory. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan, and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. Welcome back to The Rest is History. Claudius, written off for half a century, an idiot, a fool, a stammerer, unfit to be exhibited in public, is now the master of the Roman world. And Tom, how does he do? The answer is actually he does all right, doesn't he?

Yeah, he does. He's very proactive. He's full of ideas. He's willing to experiment. I think you get the sense of a man who has profited from his study of history and from his ringside view of the Court of the Caesars. I think he's been sitting there and thinking, Well, this is what I do. This is what I try. He puts these various plans into action. I think he's a pretty good Emperor. Because he's grown up in the Court of Augustus and because he studied the reign of Augustus in the context of what had gone before, the Republican traditions, I think he is alert to a degree that his predecessors hadn't really thought through just how cleverly Augustus had fused these rival traditions that we've been talking about, the elite traditionalist approach and the populist approach. Augustus had been brilliant at playing to both galleries, wearing both masks. He had attempted to appeal to the Senate as Tiberius had done and to the people as Caligula had done. Claudius, his aim is to try and repeat that trick, to try and get both the Senate and the people on board. Now, in doing that, he faces an obvious problem, which is that he lacks the prestige of Augustus.

He doesn't have the background, he doesn't have the range of achievements. Of course, everyone thinks he's an idiot, which is a ongoing challenge. On top of that, there's also the fact that there are lots of senators who just really resent him being Emperor, partly because lots of them had wanted to restore the Republic, and partly also because there were lots in the Senate who think that they could be a much better Emperor than this guy who dribbles and shakes and blows snot.

Yeah.

And so behind his back, they're constantly mocking him, and Claudius is well aware of this. But of course, Claudius has been mocked all his life, and here he is, he's Emperor.

And there are plenty of examples of politicians who are laughed at a lot at the time, but actually are big enough to ignore it and end up being pretty successful.

Claudius is, I mean, he rules for almost 14 years. Despite the fact that there are repeated displays of resentment and contempt from the Senate. In fact, even as we'll see, the occasional conspiracy, he shrugs it all aside. Now, it's true that he's a bit paranoid He's the first Emperor to institute friskings of people who are brought into his private presence. When he first enters the Senate House, it's a month after he's come to power, he does so accompanied by guards. That's a reminder of the fact that, just as Caliglia had done, he's identified what the real source of his power within the capital is. He is unembarrassed about this. He mints various coins that flatter the Pritorians. There's one that's stamped with an image of their camp. There's another that shows Claudia shaking hands with the Pratorian standard bearer. Of course, he's given them massive donatives. He also gives massive donatives and pay rises to the legions. And senators can laugh at him all they like, but it's Claudius who's in charge of the legions. So ultimately, that is the bedrock of his rule. I think it's fair to say that even though they may feel resentful, even though they may despise him.

Obviously, he's not Caligula, and so it is very hard for any senator not to feel a certain measure of relief that they've got someone who isn't going to try and get off with their wives or all the other things that he was getting up to. Claudius, of course, he's a historian, so he understands the role the Senate has played in Roman history. He respects it. He basically shares their values. He's an aristocrat. More than that, he's a Claudian. And so he knows the rules. He knows how to dress, he knows how to speak, he knows how to act the part of a traditional Republican Roman autocrat. We've talked the whole way through how being a successful Emperor really is as much as anything about working out what role you're going to play and then playing it well.

Ronald Reagan being an actor. It's a really important thing for any politician at any point in history, I would say, massively important.

Yeah. If you lack the charisma and the self-confidence to play a part that will be appealing to people who it's important to influence, then you're not going to be basically a good politician. On that level, Claudius is a good politician. Now, of course, he has this limp, he has his infirmities, but when he sits down or when he just stands still, he looks impressive. Suatonia is clearly recognizing is that this is important. He says, especially while lying down, he did not fail to give an impression of Majesty and dignity. He looks good. He looks impressive.

Now, probably the single most famous thing that he does, that people who've listened to a lot of the rest of his history will remember, is he orders the invasion of Britain. He doesn't personally lead it because he's hardly a obvious military man, but he's associated with it. It's his invasion. Presumably, he's doing that because he knows from his study of history that nothing is better calculated to stir the emotions of the populace than a military victory, even if it's against a people as useless as the Britons.

Exactly. More than that, that this is what a Claudian and a Caesar The Julians, that these two great families who've been conjoined in the house of Augustus, that that's what their ancestors did. They went out and they conquered people. It's what Julius Caesar had done. It's what various Claudian generals had done. Claudius is saying, I am their heir. Again, as you say, he doesn't actually lead it himself. But once the Bridgehead has been established and Colchester is on the verge of falling, Claudius goes over and he does it with elephants to create as big a splash as possible. Then when he comes back, he reenacts it. He resides over various reenactments on the campus marshes, showing highlights from the campaign in Britain, Cultures are being stormed, various British King's surrendering. Across the Mediterranean, he has himself portrayed as a buff, piste. There's this freeze from aphrodisias in what's now Turkey, which shows him, which shows Britannia as a woman whose robes have been torn from her and Claudius as this muscle-bound guy who's forcing to the ground. Obviously, that's not how a politician today would want to be represented, but that's how it plays well with Roman audiences.

It's clearly how Claudius wanted to be seen. He's no longer the elder He's a stammering, twitching historian. He's a man of action who subdues provinces, subdues women, and he's a Caesar.

Yeah, but it's not just military, is it? He likes a grand projet, public works, a lot of hydraulic action, I think it's fair to say.

He's very into hydrology. Another thing he'd written a book about, he'd written a book about canals in Mesopotamia.

God, that's fascinating.

Yeah, except Grand Projet, again, Caesar had been into that, Augustus had been into that, and the Claudians definitely had been into that. One of his most famous ancestors, Appius Claudius, had built the Appian Way, the great road that joins Rome to the heel of Italy. Claudia seems to be genuinely enthusiastic about taking up that battle of improving infrastructure in Rome. The obvious thing that every Emperor has to worry about is the grain supply. Historically, it's been a problem that Rome does not have a deep sea port. At the mouth of the Tiber, this is Port Ostia, which I know, Dominic, you're a big fan of.

Brilliant.

Yeah, you love it, don't you?

I think Ostia is one of the best places you can go. If you go to Rome, my single recommendation to the listeners is to go to Ostia Antica. It's as good as Pompeii, and there's nobody else there. There you go.

You've heard it. Okay. Well, Claudius will be thrilled to hear that because he decides that he's going to build a massive deep sea port at the mouth of the Tiber. When he summons engineers and tells them this is what he's going to do, they throw up their hands in horror and say, on no account attempt this, it'll be a disaster. It'll be a HS2 fiasco. But Claudius is Caesar. He can do what he likes. If it serves the good of the Roman people to to remold the land, to gouge out the bottom of the sea, then that's what he's going to do. And so he goes ahead. He's a great man for an aqueduct. He builds two enormous aqueducts, and one of them, the Claudia is probably the greatest of all Rome's aqueducts. What's fascinating about them is that they, like Claudius, are simultaneously very modern and very ancient. They're cutting-edge engineering, but they have the cladding of a old-school aqueduct. I think that's a beautiful summation of what Claudius is about. Efficiency, modernity, but dress it up to look old. That's basically what I'd like as well, I have to say. I'd be all in favor of that.

These are recognized by contemporaries as being astonishing achievements. So Pliny the elder, he writes that they are wonders without rival in the world. Obviously, this redounds, again, greatly to Claudius's credit. It makes him very, very popular with the people who look to Caesar to keep them watered, to keep them fed. It's also popular because it gives them jobs. It's not slaves who are doing the work, it's the mass of the people. It's the mass of the people. It's a Keynesian scheme, I guess. You could say.

Putting money into the economy.

Putting money into the economy.

The other thing is that Claudius is not, although he's quite old school, he's not like a Tiberius dour killjoy who snears at the other pleasures of the populace. You said Claudius would like a chapter on Snooker. He'd enjoy a night out at a smoke-filled Snuka Hall.

He absolutely would. Yes, he absolutely would. As I said, he writes a book on gambling, which is seen as being a very declined ase occupation. He enjoys the pleasures of the masses. In fact, he's so keen on gladiatorial combat that Suetonius writes that he is shockingly obsessed by executions, which in a day of spectacles in an amphitheater, the climax would be gladiators. Then before that, you'd have the Wild Beasts. And before that, you would have the executions. The executions, you've got to be an obsessive fan to go and watch them. And Claudius is a... He does like to go and watch them. So it's like going to see a famous band or something and going to see the warm-up act.

The warm-up act. So going to the Olympics and going to watch some terrible sport that know and trust him.

Yeah, exactly. It's unsurprising that a lot of the shows that he puts on are very famous. In fact, one of them gives rise to perhaps one of the most famous sayings from the whole of Roman history. He's trying to drain this lake in the countryside above Rome. To mark the final completion of this project before the canal is open that would drain the lake, he has a great sea battle staged there. All the gladiators who've been assembled onto the boats to stage this, turn to Claudius, where he's looking very splendid. He sat down looking tremendously imperious, and they say, 'Hail Caesar, we who are about to die, salute you.

' That's where this is from?

That is where that phrase has come from. Although it's very, very Claudius that he then totally messes it up. When they say, 'We're about to die, salute you, ' he replies, or not, because maybe some of them will Won't die. It's very Dawnish, very waspish humor, or not. No. All the gladiators hear him say that and so they think, Brilliant, he's pardoning us. We don't have to fight. So they put down their weapons and refuse to fight. Claudius is so outraged by this that he gets up out of his throne and hurries down to yell at them and tell them to get a move on. Of course, when he does that, he hobbles and limps and the impression of Majesty and Splender is compromised. However, he does He managed to persuade the gladiators to pick up their weapons, and so the fight goes ahead.

That's good news for the crowd.

Good news for the crowd, absolutely. Maybe less good news for the gladiators. Now, there is, of course, a problem with this, which is that it's very expensive. That is compounded by the fact that Claudius' predecessor curricula had also been very keen on lavishing money on extravaganzas. The treasury is pretty bare, but Claudius is very proactive. Again, I think he's clearly thought about what he's What are we going to do. He wants to set the administration of the household of Caesar on as firmer footing as he can because he recognizes that that administration is also effectively the administration of the entire empire. Until Claudius, the fact that Caesar needs money because the money that he has is basically the income that keeps the empire running had been disguised, or at least hadn't properly been acknowledged. But It's hideous, perhaps because the circumstances in which he's come to power, he's more like a military strong man who's come to power in a coup than a hereditary monarch. He's unabashed about the need to make his administration as streamlined and efficient as possible. The people he turns to for that are the people that any wealthy Roman who needs specialists would turn to.

These are people who are slaves or freedmen, because as Caesar, he has the pick of the ableist smartest people, Greeks with particular specialisms in various fields of finance or whatever. So these freed men are basically entrusted by Claudius with the running of the empire, and they proved to be very, very effective at it.

So These are the people like anyone who's read iClaudius will remember Narcissus and Palace and people like that who presumably they're very bright and they're very good, but I would guess they must attract a lot of haters. Of course, because everyone in the Senate is massively resentful.

But of course, it also plays into the stereotype of Claudius as a foolish old man who is easily manipulated and dominated by people who properly should be kept firmly under thumb, of whom slaves the Friedmann, would be the paradigm. Under the thumb as he was of these men, so that's the Friedmann, the favorites, he played the part not of a princeps, but of a flunky, dispensing majestacies here and military commands there, pardoning and punishing people, largely oblivious to how much he was the creature of this or that favourite's interests. This is a crucial part of the image of Claudius, that he's an idiot who essentially is so feeble-minded that he's become the plaything of his favorites. Now, we know that's not true because in Egypt, we found, when I say we, I mean, scholars, archeologists, have found documentary evidence for the close attention that Claudius plays to the administration of his empire and the the evident intelligence with which he corresponds to people in provinces across the span of the Roman world. He's a very smart, able guy. Actually, the fact he has all these freedmen serving him, now, this isn't evidence of his senility or imbacility.

It's evidence of his astute ability to marshal innovation. But part of what makes his contemporaries and posterity assume that Claudius is feeble-minded is that there's a sense that he's under the thumb not just of freed men, but also, even worse, of women, and particularly of a succession of wives of whom perhaps the most notorious is a woman called Messalina.

Now, I was hoping we'd get on to Messalina. So Messalina is... He basically has his pick, I guess, does he? And he picks a young, beautiful, and crucially, very blue-blooded wife.

I think it's the blue-blooded that matters. I think the beauty and youth, these are perks.

She's the great grandniece of Augustus, right? She helps him to say, I'm the heir to the greatest Emperor, the first Emperor.

That is a crucial role that she plays, and it gives her a certain degree of independent power because everyone, I mean, Claudius knows and everyone else knows that being married to who is the great grandniece of Augustus, this is a crucial buttressing of his status and prestige. Her significance and her independence of operation is enhanced by the fact that in AD41, she gives him crucially a male heir. He now has a son who can inherit his role in the house of Caesar.

With a great name.

Right. Two years later, Claudius presides over the conquest of Britain, and so this little boy gets given the name of Britannicus. Messalina's role in this crucial. She has basically made herself fundamental not just to the status of Claudius's regime as it exists in the present, but its prospects in the future, Basically, it's perpetuation. It's unsurprising that she is portrayed in statues as the very model of a sober, respectable Roman matron, and she's praised as the absolute model of Roman womanhood. But Dominic, dear listeners, here's the question, is she the model of Roman womanhood, or is she an outrageous strumpet?

Well, if you've seen or indeed read iClaudius, you will remember that there is... I mean, it's one of the great scandals, not just in Roman history, but all history. When Claudius... He's at Ostia, isn't he? He's looking around that splendid site that I was recommending to the listeners. If the Ostia tourist board want to get in touch, I'd be very keen to hear from them. He's looking around Austria and somebody, a concubine of his, comes up to him and says, Messalina is carrying on behind your back. And not just carrying on, she's up to all sorts, Tom.

Yeah, well, she's having an affair with this very good-looking young senator who's also very ambitious. The story is that they're conspiring to replace Claudius as Emperor, and in fact, that Messalina has married this guy. She's the great grandniece of Augustus, and she's the mother of Britannicus. This is potentially, if it's true, very, very dangerous for Claudius. The measure of his alarm is that he goes, He's speeding back to Rome, and he doesn't go to the Palatine, but he goes to the Pratorian camp because clearly, he's worried. He needs to make sure that that's secure, because only if that's secure, can he then take measures to deal with this threat? His worry must have been that Messalina and her toy boy might have subborn the Pratorians. I mean, in the event they haven't, which perhaps suggests that the story has been slightly overblown, but we'll come to that in a minute. But anyway, Claudius is in a position to send the Pratorians out and suppress the coup, which they do. So all the various conspirators are arrested and executed. Messalina has vanished. It turns out that she's gone to find her mother, which is in her moment of crisis, she wants mommy, and they are closeted together in one of their beautiful gardens that all the aristocracy in Rome have.

She's cornered there, run through by the Praetorians, and dumped at the feet of her mother. That is the end of Messalina. The question is, well, what is going on here? Now, I think it's evident from contemporaneous sources that Messalina is a very proficient player in power politics, that she's very ruthless in getting rid of potential rivals or anyone who seems to threaten her position, that she's very ambitious, certainly. Certainly ambitious for her son. Maybe she's been cheating on Claudius, can't be war. But was she really conspiring against it?

Yeah, maybe there's been a bit of an internal power struggle that we can't really glimpse and that maybe the bureaucrats, the freed men, have turned against her. Is that Definitely.

That concubine who goes to see Claudius at Ostia, she is prompted by one of Claudius's most powerful Friedmen, and they are lurking in the background of this whole episode. It is, I think, likelier that Messalina is destroyed in a faction fight between her supporters and overmighty Friedmann, than that she really was getting up to all kinds of sexual shenanigans.

Like Like the last days of Boris Johnson, where there was rival briefing between his wife, Cari, and some of his aides, remember? I think from the point of view of Roman history, this is a key moment because this is a huge event.

There are clearly all kinds of political interests at stake, but we just don't know what the truth is. It points to the way in which rivalries that for centuries and centuries have been played out on the floor of the Senate House are now being conducted in in side rooms and passageways and bedrooms in the Palatine. It means that certainty is impossible, and the lack of certainty in turn breeds scandalous gossip.

That's what explains these incredibly lured stories. Again, iClaudius has great fun with these, that she has been… You describe it in your notes as an all-day sexathon with Rome's Most hot courtesan.

Yes. Rome's most experienced and seasoned whore, and they go head to head, it is said, as it were, and Messalina wins.

That obviously didn't happen.

No, it obviously didn't happen. Also what What he didn't happen is what Jouvenal claims in his poem, he's a satirist writing maybe half a century or so after Messalina's death. He describes her as Nostalgie de la boue, going off and working incognita in a low-rent brothel. Juvenile says that she gilds her nipples and wears a blonde wig over her hair and lies in this dirty, dirty room where plebeians come and have their way with her. This is clearly not true, but it suggests the titulation that these faction fights in the Palatine are now capable of generating. Of course, it's very bad for Messalina's postumous reputation, but it's also terrible for Claudius's postumous reputation, and in fact, his reputation when he's still alive, because it leaves him with a double problem. It leaves him looking weak, cookholded, deluded, and that plays into all the stories that are being told about him as the play thing of his freedman. But it's also deprived him of a crucial buttress upholding his regime because he no longer has a marital link to the bloodline of Augustus. He clearly It feels that this is so important that he is prepared to offend some of the most sacred laws of Rome to deal with the problem, because there is a suitable candidate on hand.

There is a woman who She's not just a great granny, she's a great granddaughter of Augustus. This is one of the two surviving sisters of Calicula. The pair of them, people may remember, had been exiled to a prison island by their brother. When Claudius came to power, where he'd allowed them to return, and he'd become very close to one of them, a woman called Agrippina, so like her mother, confusingly. She's called Agrippina the Younger by historians. She's very beautiful, very smart. Claudia thinks she's great. But I think unless his need had been what it was, he would not have passed the law revoking the taboo against an uncle marrying his niece. He No, this is absolutely legitimate. He goes ahead and he marries Agrippina. Suetonius says, As he was getting ready to marry Agrippina in defiance of all morality, he kept describing her in every speech he gave as his daughter, his ward, born and raised in his loving embrace. It's very creepy, but more than that, it's evidence of his desperation. Still, even though he's now about a decade into his reign, the sense of insecurity, the anxiety that he's not a real Caesar, and he needs a wife who will make him feel a real Caesar.

Just to give people a sense of it, he is 59, she is 34. So a 25-year, exactly 25-year age gap. She already has a son of her own who is much older than Britannicus, right?

Yeah, four or five years older, which when you're 12, as Agrippina's son is, I mean, that's quite an age gap. This is a young lad called Lucius Demitius Ahenobarbus, after his father. He, of course, has two advantages over Britannicus. One of them, we just mentioned the fact that he's older. When you're in your teens, being four or five years older is a considerable advantage. The other thing, of course, is that he's a direct descendant of Augustus. There's a third advantage, which is that Agrippina is really, really ambitious to see him rather than Britannicus on the throne. She presses Claudius to adopt this young lad. Sure enough, on the 25th of February '50, so very shortly after his marriage to Agrippina, Claudius adopts the young Lucius Demitius Ahenabarbus, and the boy formerly becomes Claudius's eldest son, and as a marker of this, he takes on a new name, and this new name is Nero Claudius Caesar, or as we know him, Nero.

Yeah, so this isn't going to end well. I mean, to be When I went to Agrippina, she might well be thinking, If I don't do this, one day, Britannicus will become Emperor, and he'll probably kill my son because my son will be a rival claimant.

I think that's exactly what she thinks. I think that even if the name of Nero didn't cast the shadow that it does, I think just listening to that set up, it has the quality of a folk tale. You can see it's a Cinderella story, the befuddled father, obsessing a new wife, the child who gets abandoned, all these elements are there. Sure enough, on 13th of October 54, so Claudius has been in power by this point, just under 14 14 years. An announcement is released from the Palatine to the Roman people, and this announcement is that Claudius is dead. Shortly afterwards, Nero, who by this point is 16 years old, he comes out from the Palatine. He's hailed by a He's a Praetorian escort as Caesar. He's placed in a litter, and as Claudius had been some 14 years previously, he has taken to the Pretorian camp. So Agrippina and Nero, likewise, have recognized that this is the key to seizing power of the capital. Within a year, Britannicus is dead, supposedly of a seizure, but of course, everyone assumes that Nero has had him poisoned. Agrippina herself dies in '59. She is definitely murdered by Nero.

I mean, Nero makes no bones about that. Nero himself, of course, dies in '68. As we heard in the details of how he died, we heard in the very opening reading of this series, and with him dies Augustus's bloodline. That's it. There are no more heirs of Augustus.

Let's go back to Claudius for a second. He died in October '54. That's what four years after he'd adopted Nero as his heir. It's always thought, isn't it, thanks largely probably to Soutonius and also to iGlaudius, that he was poisoned by Agrippina and Nero with mushrooms. Soutonius says he was poisoned with a dish of mushrooms. Do you think that's true?

Well, I think when Suetonius is the first to report something, that's when you need to be on your guard. That's suspicious. Suetonius is not the first to report that Claudius was murdered with a dish of poison mushrooms. So Plinnie the elder mentions it. But I mean, having said that, we don't know. Maybe he dies of natural causes. He'd been sickly all his life. He's had a good innings. He's 63 when he finally pops his clogs. There's Josiah Osgood, who's written a brilliant book on Claudius. Claudius Caesar. In that, he points out that there had been a lot of plague in Rome at the time. He points through evidence from Tacitus of people, large number of high-ranking people who died. So that suggests that there's quite a lot of sickness around. The honest truth is we can't know. I guess that you would say as a historian who has… I mean, think of all the episodes we did on 1968 or Kennedy or whatever. I mean, it's so much material that this is a cause of frustration. But I think it's also it breeds what to me is part of the fascination of this period and of Suetonius's biographies, which is the way that recorded fact and myth blur into one another and sometimes you can distinguish the lignaments of history, and other times you see the lignments of mythology.

Trying to make sense of that, for me, is what makes this whole story so fascinating. We talked about it. This is the ultimate denastic story. It's why I, Claudius, as a novel, but even more as a TV drama, lies at the head of all these great denastic epics that we've had on TV over the past decades. The fact Suetonius's account has this mythic folkloric quality, as well as quoting letters and sighting laws and things, I think is a crucial part of that.

No, I agree. I agree completely. But actually, where I'd slightly probably disagree with you is I don't necessarily think this is actually as different from modern history as you would think, because the modern history, too, is freighted with all kinds of assumptions, folk myths, urban myths, and actually teasing out what really happened is the impossible goal for any historian of any period.

I was just thinking about the... When I was thinking about the death of Claudius and was he murdered, was he not? Then, of course, thinking about that series we did on Kennedy and yearning for the equivalent of a Warren report or something. All the the whole range of pieces of evidence that you could bring to bear and thinking how frustrating it is we don't have that. But of course, Kennedy is a myth, isn't it? Right.

Also, which wouldn't Wouldn't end the conversation because these things don't. If people want to make up their own minds, what they should do is to buy Tom's new translation of Suttonius's book, The Lives of the Caesars, which is available now from all good bookshops with Penguin Classics. Tom, a great translation, a great series, I have to say. A Tour de Force, I think, is the approved Restes History terminology. That was absolutely tremendous. And by the way, the book is brilliant, so people should absolutely go and buy the book. We will be back next week with something very different, another of history's great Monsters, actually, and another story in which it's actually quite difficult to get at, as it were, the truth of what really happened, because there are so many different accounts. And that is the story of King Leopold and the Belgian Congo. So we will be telling that story next week. The Heart of darkness, indeed. Okay, on that bombshell, goodbye.

Bye-bye..