The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  13. Nevertheless, various attempts were made on his life: by dissident individuals, by a group of conspirators, and by a full-scale rebellion. To be precise: a commoner with a dagger was arrested about midnight near Claudius’s bedroom. Two knights were found waiting to kill him—one with a sword-cane, as he left the Theatre; the other with a hunting-knife, as he sacrificed in the Temple of Mars. Then Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons respectively of the orators Pollio and Messala, brought some of Claudius’s own freedmen and slaves into a plot for his deposition. Lastly, Furius Camillus Scribonianus, Governor-general of Dalmatia, persuaded his legions to revolt; but, on being ordered to march off and rally around their new Emperor, they found that some divine intervention prevented them from dressing the Eagles with garlands and perfumes, and that the standards resisted all attempts to pull them out of the ground. Because of a superstitious fear engendered by these portents, the rebellion was smothered in less than five days.

  14. Claudius held four more consulships: the first two in successive years, the others at four-yearly intervals. The fourth lasted for six months, the remainder only for two; and he took over the third from a Consul who had just died—a thing which no other emperor has ever done, before or since. During these terms of office and, indeed, at all times, Claudius was a most conscientious judge: sitting in court even on his own birthday and those of his family, sometimes actually on ancient popular holidays or days of ill-omen. Instead of always observing the letter of the law, he let himself be guided by his sense of equity, and when he thought the punishments prescribed were either too lenient or too severe, changed them accordingly. Thus, should plaintiffs have lost their cases in a lower court by demanding more damages than the law sanctioned, he allowed them to modify the plea and ordered a re-trial. But if anyone were found guilty of some really shocking crime, Claudius condemned him to the wild beasts.

  15. However, his behaviour in Court varied unpredictably: sometimes he was wise and prudent, sometimes thoughtless and hasty, sometimes downright foolish and apparently out of his senses. One man had presented himself for jury-service without disclosing that he was exempt, as a father of three children; Claudius, revising the roster, expunged his name, remarking that he showed an unwholesome liking for the jury-box. A juror, challenged in Court on the ground that he had a case of his own pending, replied: ‘The objection is irrelevant; I will not be called upon to plead before Caesar.’ Claudius intervened, instructing the juryman to bring his case up at once, since the way he handled it would show how far he might be trusted while judging the other.

  A woman once refused to admit that she was the mother of a young man produced in Court, and a conflict of evidence arose; but the truth came out when Claudius ordered her to marry the man. He had a tendency to decide against whichever party in a suit happened to be absent, without troubling to ask whether or not this might have been unavoidable. After a man was found guilty of forgery, the crowd shouted: ‘He ought to have his hands cut off!’ Claudius immediately sent for an executioner, with block and cleaver, to act on this suggestion.

  Again, during a wrangle between counsel as to whether a man accused of wrongfully posing as a Roman citizen should wear a Roman gown or a Greek mantle in court, Claudius demonstrated his fair-mindedness by making him wear a mantle when accused and a gown when defended. Before one case opened, it is said, he wrote out the following verdict, which he subsequently delivered: ‘I decide in favour of the party which has told the truth.’ Such erratic behaviour brought Claudius into open and widespread contempt—so much so that when a lawyer kept apologizing for the non-appearance of a provincial witness whom Claudius had subpoenaed, but would not explain it, Claudius had to browbeat him before at last eliciting the answer: ‘He is dead; I trust the excuse is legitimate.’ Another lawyer thanked Claudius for letting him defend a client, and added: ‘Though this is, of course, established practice.’ Old people I know have told me that litigants imposed so rudely on his good nature that they would not only call him back after he had closed the Court, but would catch at the hem of his gown, and even at his foot, in their efforts to detain him. Though all this may sound incredible, I must also record that one nasty little Greek lawyer lost his temper with Claudius during a hearing and burst out: ‘And as for you, you’re a stupid old idiot!’

  It is a matter of common knowledge that when a Roman knight was being falsely accused of unnatural offences against women—the charge had been framed by private enemies who would stop at nothing—and saw that Claudius was admitting the evidence of common prostitutes, he hurled a stylus and set of wax tablets in his face, shouting: ‘A curse on your stupid, cruel ways!’ Claudius’s cheek was badly gashed.

  16. The Office of Censor had been allowed to lapse since the days of Plancus and Paulus, sixty years previously,66 but Claudius assumed it; and here he proved as inconsistent in his general principles as in his particular decisions. He kept the name of a young criminal on a list of knights which he was reviewing, and set no black mark against it; simply because the father denied that he had any complaints to make himself. ‘This young man has a Censor in his own home’ was Claudius’s judgement. Another knight, though a notorious seducer of girls and married women, escaped with a caution: ‘Restrain your passions, or at least go more carefully in future. Why should it be any business of mine who your mistress may be?’ Once a man’s friend persuaded Claudius to remove the black mark which stood against his name. ‘But I want the erasure to show,’ he insisted. Then there was the Greek nobleman struck from the roster of jurymen and actually deprived of his rights as a Roman citizen, because Claudius would not let anyone employ a lawyer, when asked to give an account of his life, but made him speak for himself as best he could. Several knights were also struck from the list, much to their surprise, on the novel charge of going abroad without a formal demand for leave of absence; since one of them had been acting as adviser to a petty king, Claudius brought up the classical case of Rabirius Postumus who had followed King Ptolemy to Alexandria in the hope of recovering a loan, and was held guilty of high treason when he came back.

  His attempts to remove still other names failed, the information collected by his agents proving so inaccurate. He found to his great shame that most of those charged with being bachelors or childless, or too poor to sustain their rank, were in fact married or fathers of families, or quite comfortably off; and one knight, accused of having attempted suicide with a dagger, tore off his clothes and cried: ‘Then show me the scar!’ Among Claudius’s memorable acts as Censor was the purchase of a beautiful silver chariot, offered for sale in the Silversmiths’ Street; he then had it hacked to pieces before his eyes! Two of the twenty edicts which he once published on a single day were: ‘This year’s vintage is unusually abundant, so everyone must pitch his wine-jars well,’ and: ‘Yew-juice is sovereign against snake-bite.’

  17. Claudius’s sole campaign was of no great importance. The Senate had already voted him triumphal regalia, but he thought it beneath his dignity to accept these, and decided that Britain was the country where a real triumph could be most readily earned. Its conquest had not been attempted since Julius Caesar’s day; and the Britons were now threatening vengeance because the Senate refused to extradite certain deserters who had landed in Gaul during Caligula’s reign.67 Sailing from Ostia, Claudius was nearly wrecked off the Ligurian coast, and again near the Îles d’Hyères, but made port safely at Marseilles. Thence he marched north through Gaul until reaching Boulogne; crossed the Channel without incident; and was back in Rome six months later. He had fought no battles and suffered no casualties, but reduced a large part of the island to submission. His triumph was a very splendid one, and among those whom he invited to witness it were his provincial governors, and several exiles as well. The emblems of his victory included the naval crown—ornamented with the beaks of ships and representing the crossing and conquest, so to speak, of the Ocean—which he set on the Palace gable beside a civic crown of oak-leaves. His wi
fe, Messalina, followed the decorated chariot in a covered carriage, and behind her marched the generals who had won triumphal regalia in Britain. All wore purple-bordered gowns except Marcus Crassus Frugi; having earned this same honour on a previous occasion, he now came dressed in a palm-embroidered tunic and rode a caparisoned charger.

  18. Claudius always interested himself in the proper upkeep of City buildings and the regular arrival of corn supplies. When an obstinate fire ravaged the Aemilian quarter, he lodged at the Election hut on the Campus Martius for two nights running; and, because a force of Guards and another of Palace servants proved insufficient to cope with the blaze, made the magistrates summon the commons from every City district and then sat, with bags of coin piled before him, recruiting fire-fighters; whom he paid, on the nail, whatever seemed a suitable fee for their services.

  Once, after a series of droughts had caused a scarcity of grain, a mob stopped Claudius in the Forum and pelted him so hard with curses and stale crusts that he had difficulty in regaining the Palace by a side-door; as a result he took all possible steps to import corn, even during the winter months—insuring merchants against the loss of their ships in stormy weather (which guaranteed them a good return on their ventures), and offering a bounty for every new grain-transport built, proportionate to its tonnage.

  19. The shipowner, if he happened to be a Roman citizen, was exempted from the Papian-Poppaean Law which made marriage obligatory; if only a Latin, acquired full Roman citizenship; if a woman, enjoyed the privileges granted to mothers of four children. These regulations have never since been modified.

  20. Claudius’s public works, though not numerous, were important. They included the draining of the Fucine Lake and the building of the harbour at Ostia—though he knew that Augustus had turned down the Marsians’ frequent requests for emptying the Lake, and that Julius Caesar, while often on the point of excavating the harbour at Ostia, had always abandoned the project as impractical. Claudius also completed a task begun by Caligula: he brought the cool and abundant springs called the Caerulean and the Curtian, or Albudignan, as well as the New Anio, into Rome; the water ran along a stone aqueduct, with lofty arches, now known by his name, and was then distributed into a number of ornamental reservoirs. He undertook the Fucine drainage scheme as much for profit as for glory: a group of businessmen had offered to shoulder the expense if he a warded them the reclaimed land. The outlet took eleven years to dig, although 30,000 men were kept continuously at work; it was three miles long, and his engineers had to level part of a hill and tunnel through the remainder. At Ostia, Claudius threw out curved breakwaters on either side of the harbour and built a deep-water mole by its entrance. For the base of this mole he used the ship in which Caligula had transported a great obelisk from Heliopolis; it was first sunk, then secured with piles, and finally crowned with a very tall lighthouse—like the Pharos at Alexandria—that guided ships into the harbour at night by the beams of a lamp.

  21. Claudius often distributed largesse to the people, and gave numerous magnificent public shows; not only the traditional ones in the customary places, but others, including novelties and ancient revivals, where nobody had ever seen them staged before.

  Pompey’s Theatre was damaged by fire, and when Claudius held Games at its rededication he first sacrificed in the Temple of Victorious Venus and in the shrines of Honour, Virtue and Felicity—all of which were built above the auditorium—and then walked down the aisle between packed and silent tiers, to inaugurate the Games from a raised seat in the orchestra.

  He also celebrated Saecular Games, on the excuse that Augustus had staged them before they were really due; though his own History mentions how much trouble Augustus took to reckon the intervals separating their occurrences in the past, and to recommence the series, after the tradition had long been broken, when the correct year came round once more. Therefore, when the Herald invited the people, in the ancient formula, to ‘attend games which nobody present has ever seen or will ever see again’, a great shout of laughter arose. Not only had many persons present witnessed Saecular Games, but some actors were even billed to take part in them for the second time. Claudius often gave chariot races in the Vatican Circus constructed by Caligula; sometimes introducing wild-beast shows between every five events.

  The twelve barred-off chariot compartments at the starting-post in the Great Circus had been built of volcanic tufa, and the goals marking the turning-points were of wood. Claudius substituted marble for the tufa, provided goals of gilded metal, and also reserved seats for the senators, who had hitherto sat among the common people. Besides the chariot races he staged the so-called Troy Game; a panther hunt by a squadron of Guards cavalry under their colonels and the Commander in person; and a show in which Thessalian horsemen drove wild bulls across the arena, tired them out, leaped on them, seized hold of their horns and then threw them to the ground.

  Among the many gladiatorial Games presented by him in various places, was an annual one in the Guards Camp, without wild beasts or fancy equipment, to celebrate his accession; another of the usual kind in the Enclosure; and a third, also in the Enclosure, but not part of the regular programme. This last show ran for a few days only and he himself called it ‘The Picnic’, because the first time he invited the people, by his heralds, ‘to take pot-luck, as it were’.

  Claudius never behaved less formally than at these Picnics—exposing his left hand in plebeian fashion when he distributed prizes, instead of keeping it decently covered by his gown, and counting the number of gold pieces on his fingers—‘One, two, three…’ he would shout. He urged the audience to enjoy themselves, addressing them all indiscriminately as ‘My lords’, and cracking stupid and far-fetched jokes. Once, on hearing the cry: ‘Bring on The Dove!’—which was the nickname of a famous gladiator—he yelled back: ‘Certainly, but he’ll take a bit of catching!’ Yet when four brothers pleaded for the discharge of their father, a chariot-fighter, Claudius presented him with the customary wooden sword amid resounding cheers, and then wrote a note for the Herald to read aloud: ‘You now see the great advantage of having a large family; it can win favour and protection even for a gladiator.’ He also staged, on the Campus Martius, the realistic storm and sack of a fortified town, with a tableau of the British king’s surrender, at which he presided in his purple campaigning cloak.

  Before allowing the water to escape from the Fucine Lake, he arranged to have a sham seafight on it; but when the gladiators shouted: ‘Hail, Caesar, we salute you, we who are about to die!’ he answered sarcastically: ‘Or not, as the case may be.’ They took him up on this and refused to fight, insisting that his words amounted to a pardon. Claudius grew so angry that he was on the point of sending troops to massacre them all, or burning them in their ships; however, he changed his mind, jumped from his throne and, hobbling ridiculously down to the lakeside, threatened and coaxed the gladiators into battle. Twelve Rhodian triremes then engaged twelve Sicilian ones; the signal for the fight being given by a mechanical silver Triton, which emerged from the Lake bottom and blew a conch.

  22. In matters of religious ritual, civil customs, military punctilio, and the social status of all ranks at home and abroad, Claudius not only revived obsolescent traditions but invented new ones. He never admitted a priest into a college without first taking a personal oath that he thought him worthy of the honour; and required the praetor to call an assembly whenever an earthquake shock was registered at Rome, and proclaim a public holiday. If a bird of evil omen perched on the Capitol, Claudius would go to the Rostra in his capacity as Chief Pontiff, order artisans and slaves to withdraw, and then read out the customary formula of supplication which the commons repeated after him.

  23. Until this reign there had been two terms in the Law Courts, the summer and the winter; Claudius prolonged the summer term into the autumn, and abolished the winter one altogether. Another of his changes was to institute permanent courts, both at Rome and in the provinces, for judging fiduciary cases, inste
ad of entrusting them to the annually appointed Roman magistrates. He cancelled Tiberius’s supplement to the Papian-Poppaean Law which implied that men over sixty years of age could not beget children; and authorized the Consuls as well as the proper authorities—the urban praetors and their provincial counterparts—to choose guardians for orphans; and ruled that no person who had been exiled from a province might enter Italy.

  A new form of punishment which forbade a man to go more than three miles outside Rome was likewise introduced by Claudius. Whenever any business of peculiar importance came up in the House, he would take his seat either between the two Consuls or else on the bench kept for tribunes of the people. Hitherto, when Romans wished to travel abroad, the Senate had considered their applications; Claudius reserved the right to deal with these himself.

  24. He awarded consular regalia even to provincial administrators of the second class; and if any of them declined this promotion—usually because they were entitled to engage in business as knights, but not as senators—made commoners of them. At the beginning of his reign Claudius undertook to create no new senator unless he could prove that his ancestors had been Roman citizens for five generations; presently, however, he ennobled the son of a freedman on the sole condition that he should get himself adopted by a knight. Then, to forestall criticism, he gave out that Appius the Blind, who had founded the Claudian House and been appointed Censor, used to allow freedmen’s sons into the Senate; yet this was to misread the word ‘freedmen’ which, in those days, meant the free-born sons of ex-slaves, not the ex-slaves themselves.

  Claudius relieved the quaestors of their obligation to keep the roads paved, expecting them to stage gladiatorial shows instead; next, he withdrew those on duty at Ostia and in Gaul and gave them back their custodianship of the Public Treasury in the Temple of Saturn, which was then, as now once more, held by praetors or ex-praetors.