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The Apocolocyntosis by Seneca

Seneca

Seneca the Younger (4 BC to 65 AD) was recalled from exile by Agrippina, the emperor Claudius’s fourth and final wife, in 54 AD, to be appointed tutor to her son, Domitius Ahenobarbus who would, 10 years later, ascend the throne to become the emperor Nero.

Seneca was a prolific author, producing a dozen philosophical works, about the same number of blood-curdling tragic plays, the 120 or so Letters to Lucilius and a work of Natural History. He was, for the first 5 or so years of Nero’s rule, the emperor’s speech writer and wrote the moving eulogy which Nero delivered at his uncle (Claudius’s) funeral. (This is described in Tacitus’s Annals 13.3).

The Apocolocyntosis

But scholars also think that Seneca was the author of a short satire about Claudius produced shortly after the late emperor’s death. It is referred to by the Greek historian of the early imperial era, Cassius Dio, by the title the Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii. This is a pun, of sorts, on the Latin for the deification or apotheosis of Claudius which (as for previous emperors) was carried out soon after his death. It literally means ‘The Gourdification of (the Divine) Claudius’, although many translators, including the translator of the Penguin edition, J.P. Sullivan, prefer the more ludicrous word ‘Pumpkinification’.

The manuscript gives the satire the title Ludus de morte Divi Claudii (‘Play on the Death of the Divine Claudius’) and most scholars think this is the same work as Dio was referring to, although the identification is not absolutely certain and some scholars disagree. The strongest argument against identifying the two is that the text as we have it nowhere mentions the transformation of Claudius into either a gourd or a pumpkin. Instead it describes Claudius’s trial in heaven and then his journey down to hell.

To confuse the picture a bit more, the similarity of the work’s format (Menippean satire) and tone (deliberately colloquial) have led some scholars to attribute the Ludus to the author of the only other Latin Menippean satire we have, the Satyricon by Petronius – which explains why they’re both published in the same Penguin paperback volume.

So is the Ludus we have the same as the Apocolocyntosis mentioned by Dio? Is it by Seneca or could it just possibly be by Petronius? Qui sait?

Menippean satire

As a literary form, the piece belongs to the class called Satura Menippea or Menippean satire, being a satiric medley in prose and verse. This form was developed in ancient Greece and named after its chief practitioner, Menippus. Menippus of Gadara (3rd century BC) was a Cynic satirist. All of his works are lost but later authors described him as both an important purveyor of Cynic philosophy and a major comic influence. The Roman satirist, Lucian, in particular, claimed to be directly imitating Menippus.

According to later summarisers, Menippus discussed serious subjects in a spirit of ridicule; he particularly mocked the two main philosophical schools of Epicureans and Stoics. Strabo and Stephanus call him the ‘earnest-jester’ i.e. taking potentially serious subjects and mocking them.

Claudius the Clod

The translator of this Penguin edition, J.P. Sullivan, appears to have invented the title he gives to the work, the equally witty and satirical ‘The Deification of Claudius the Clod’, capturing both a play on apotheosis (‘deification of’) and a reference to Robert Graves’s famous historical novel, Claudius the God.

Some critics think the poem is so vulgar and crude as to be beneath the dignity of the author who wrote the earnest moral exhortations of the Letters to Lucilius. But it seems just about plausible that Seneca might have knocked off this short squib to entertain the new young emperor (Nero was just 17 when he ascended the throne) and his cronies.

Certainly there’s nothing new in the satire; its author repeats criticism of Claudius also made in Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio: that he was a figure of fun, part fussy pedant, part capricious tyrant. In the poem his head shakes and his speech is unclear (the difficulty of understanding anything he says is repeatedly emphasised). Claudius is portrayed as a slave to his freedmen and absent-mindedly consigns senior Romans he’s jealous of to death almost at random.

Sullivan points out that the satire is as notable for what it omits as what it includes, namely that Claudius was a great womaniser. This might have been too close to the bone for Nero, who was showing similar tastes even as a teenager. The poem also includes the specific claim that Claudius died while watching a troupe of comedians, whereas in fact he was dead by that point (probably murdered by his fourth wife, Agrippina) and the troupe was invited to his palace as a cover, to give the impression he was still alive, while Agrippina finalised the details for the smooth accession of her son.

Above all, the text describes and then, in its final passages, really focuses in on Claudius’s record as a tyrant and murderer.

The plot

The narrative takes a while to get going, is a bit laboured in the middle – where part of it is missing – and then hurries to an abrupt end, so abrupt that some scholars think it isn’t actually complete. Like most Roman prose texts, it is divided into short numbered sections, conventionally called ‘chapters’.

The narrative is told in the first person by a jokey, mocking narrator who swears what he is going to tell is the honest truth, so help him God, and if we don’t believe him, go and ask the fellow who swore he saw the soul of Julia Drusilla ascend into heaven: that’s his source. (Drusilla was the sister and, it was widely thought, lover of the emperor Caligula, who paid the senator Livius Germinius 250,000 sestercii to swear he saw her soul ascend into heaven.)

(3) It’s 13 October and Claudius is struggling to die so Mercury goes to visit the Fates and says can’t they hurry things up a bit and put Claudius, and his country, out of its misery. The Fate Clotho makes a joke, saying she’s delaying his death because Claudius hasn’t quite granted Italian citizenship to every possible nationality. (This is a jokey reference to Claudius’s famous speech to the senate defending the right of Gauls, living in Roman Gaul, to stand for magistracies in Rome, arguing that this policy of assimilation is what made Rome great.)

But Clotho gives in and agrees to let Claudius die, ensuring it happens at the same time as two other notorious buffoons pass away, so that he’ll have appropriate company on the path to heaven.

(4) There’s now a section of poetry which describes how the Fates, having dispensed with Claudius (‘cut from the imperial line one doddering life’) turn to weaving the thread of life of his successor and this turns into a cloyingly sycophantic paean to the new emperor, Nero:

To a weary folk
He brings glad days, to muted law a tongue,
As the Morning Star, setting the stars to flight,
As the shining sun, when his chariot moves first from the line,
So Caesar comes, so Nero appears to Rome,
His bright face glowing with gentle radiance,
His neck all beauty under his glowing hair.

The poem describes how the Fate Lachesis, influenced by the young man’s beauty, gives him a long life. So much for flattering the teenage successor.

Back to Claudius and he finally expires (watching a troupe of comedians, a fact the narrator says, which explains his terror of comedians). In the poem his last words are: ‘Oh I appear to have shat myself.’

Whether he had, I don’t know. He certainly shat on everything else.

(5) The narrator takes it for granted how happy people were at this news, so he moves on to describe what happens next, in heaven. It was announced to Jupiter that a new visitor had arrived. He was shaking his head and limping. When asked who he was, his reply was unintelligible.

Jupiter dispatches Hercules to deal with him but even Hercules, who’s faced and overcome every monster known to man, is intimidated by the new arrival’s strange face, weird walk and unintelligible mumble. He asks the new arrival who he is in Greek, in fact quoting a line of Homer. Claudius is reassured to find there are literary men up here, as there might find an appreciative audience for his ‘Histories’. (As a young man Claudius began researching and writing a history of the civil wars, a typically clumsy and tactless undertaking seeing as it involved assessment and judgement on so many people still living, not least the emperor Augustus.)

(6) Claudius has been accompanied to heaven by the goddess Fever also known as Our Lady of Malaria. She now tells Hercules about Claudius, repeatedly asserting that he was born in Lugdunum (modern Lyons) so is a Gaul and this explains why, like a vengeful Gaul, he ‘conquered Rome’. (Ever since the sack of Rome by Gaulish tribes in 390 BC the Romans lived in exaggerated fear of the Gauls; this was part of the feeling behind the many senators who opposed the granting to Gauls of full Roman citizenship.)

This angers Claudius who makes the biggest growl he can manage but no-one can understand what he’s saying. Instead he repeatedly makes ‘the familiar gesture with which he had people’s heads cut off’, a grim indication of Claudius’s practice. But, the narrative humorously goes on, you’d have thought the people present were all his freedmen from the way they completely ignored his request (another satirical jab, this time at the common accusation that Claudius was the pawn of a handful of freedmen who held senior positions in his household).

(7) Hercules then repeats the question, who is Claudius, this time in the form of mock epic verse (notable for, once again, repeating the claim that Claudius a) mumbles so badly he can’t be understood and b) is continually shaking his head).

Claudius finally realises he is no longer lord and master, up here in heaven. He replies to Hercules that he’s surprised he doesn’t recognise him, seeing as how he, Claudius, spent many long days judging law cases brought to him, sitting in front of the Temple of Hercules in the Roman resort of Tibur. He assures Hercules he had to deal with as much bullshit as when the hero had to sort out the Augean Stables.

At this point the text breaks off and there’s a lengthy gap. Sullivan says we can be confident it describes how Claudius wins over Hercules who forces his way into the Senate of Olympus and pleads the case for Claudius to be deified. There is uproar at the suggestion so Jupiter throws the matter open to the House. The text resumes in the speech of one of the gods refuting Hercules’ claims.

(8) The text resumes with this unnamed god making a joke about contemporary philosophy, asking what kind of god Claudius should be: he can’t be an Epicurean god, since they are ‘untroubled and trouble none’ i.e. are completely disengaged from the world. But nor can he be a Stoic god since they are, according to one description, globular with no head or other protuberance. [For Stoics, God is coterminate with the universe, so has no separate shape.] Although (joke) there is something of the Stoic god about Claudius…as he has no head and no heart (boom boom!).

Another joke suggesting Claudius was a drunk, referring to the fact that he added one day to the traditional four-day festival of the Saturnalia, and was, indeed, a heavy drinker.

There’s a tortuous reference to incest among the gods, presumably a hit at the way Claudius was persuaded to falsely accuse the fiancé of his daughter, Octavia, Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, with incest with his sister (Junia Calvina), the idea being to discredit him and call off the wedding, thus leaving Octavia free to marry Claudius’s new step-son, the future Nero. Also possibly referring to the fact that Claudius’s fourth marriage was to Agrippina, who was his niece.

The unnamed god goes on to ask why it isn’t enough that Claudius has temples to himself as a god in Britain and have savages worship him there. [Interestingly, according to Tacitus, the huge size of the temple to Claudius in Camulodunum was one of the grievances of the tribes who rose against Roman rule under Boudicca in 60.]

(9) Jupiter tries to restore order. He remembers the old Senate rule that debates shouldn’t be held with members of the public present and so has Claudius escorted out. The god Janus takes the floor. The narrator mocks Roman values by describing Janus as a canny operator, having eyes in the back as well as front of his head, living in the Forum (where his temple was) and therefore accustomed to public speaking.

Janus’s line is simple: too many people are being made into ‘gods’ and it’s making a laughing stock of the whole thing. Once it was a great thing to become a god [he doesn’t mention it, but one thinks of Hercules]; now it’s become a farce. Janus proposes that no-one who eats ordinary food grown in fields should be allowed to become a god. In fact anyone who has the presumption to do so should be handed over to ‘the Infernal Agents’ and, at the next public show, be flogged with a birch amongst the new gladiators.

Next to speak was Diespiter, son of Vica Pota, he also being consul elect, and a moneylender on the side. Diespiter makes a speech defending Claudius’s right to be a god, which starts out reasonably serious – pointing out his family links to Augustus and Livia who were both made gods – but then morphs into more satirical territory, claiming he ‘far surpasses all mortal men in wisdom’, then proceeding to outright mockery, pointing out that Rome’s venerable founder, Romulus, needs company in pursuing his humble peasant diet of eating ‘boiled turnips’. The speech ends with the surprising request that, once he’s deified, ‘that a note to that effect be added to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. [This is interesting. Is it a dig at Ovid for having ended his long collection of Greek myths with a grovellingly sycophantic description of the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and much praise of Augustus?]

The gods then fall to debating the matter and opinion is evenly matched.

(10) Then Augustus rises to his feet to speak. He explains that ever since his elevation to the pantheon of the gods he has kept silent, but the prospect of Claudius being deified appals him. He is given pretty straight lines of moral indignation:

But now I can keep on the mask no longer, nor conceal the sorrow which shame makes all the greater. Is it for this I made peace by land and sea? For this that I put an end to civil war? Was it for this I brought law and order to Rome and beautified the city with public works? And now… words fail me.

He then proceeds to a grim and serious indictment of Claudius’s record as emperor: He accuses Claudius of ordering the chopping off of heads as easily as a dog sits down; accuses him of murdering two Julias, great-granddaughters of his, one by cold steel and one by starvation. [One of these, Julius Livilla, was the one accused of adultery with Seneca, which resulted in Seneca’s banishment in 41 AD]. Augustus also accuses Claudius of killing one great-grandson, Lucius Silanus. He directly asks Claudius why he had so many people put to death without ever hearing their side of the story.

(11) Augustus continues that although Jupiter has been king of heaven for all these years the worst he’s done to any other god was break Vulcan’s leg. Even when he was furious with his wife, Juno, he never harmed her. Whereas Claudius had his third wife, Messalina, who was Augustus’s great-niece, executed. Augustus makes the further accusation that if, as the stories go, Claudius didn’t even realise the murder had taken place, it makes him all the more damnable. [This is a reference to Claudius’s notorious absent-mindedness; according to Tacitus he once asked a senator who he’d invited to dinner where his wife was, having forgotten that he had ordered the man’s wife executed the day before.]

Augustus lists Claudius’s murders. He had killed Appius Silanus, his step-father, Lucius Junius Silanus, his intended son-in-law, and Gnaius Pompeius Magnus, who had married Claudius’s daughter, Antonia. In one family he destroyed Crassus, Magnus, Scribonia, the Tristionias and Assario.

Augustus’s speech turns into a diatribe: he asks the other gods whether they can possibly be serious about turning this monster into a god? ‘Look at him! Who’s going to worship him as a god? Who’s going to believe in him? While you create such gods, no-one will believe that you yourselves are gods.’

Augustus repeats the list of crimes, that Claudius murdered:

his father-in-law Appius Silanus
his two sons-in-law, Pompeius Magnus and Lucius Silanus
his daughter’s father-in-law Crassus Frugi
his daughter’s mother-in-law, Scribonia
his wife Messalina

and others too numerous to mention, and calls for him to be banished, deported from heaven within thirty days, and from Olympus within thirty hours. The motion is quickly passed and Mercury seizes Claudius by the scruff of the neck and hauls him down to hell. [The fact that Claudius is apparently present for Augustus’s speech (‘Look at him!’) is taken by some scholars of the satire’s hurried, unrevised state.]

(12) On the way lower regions Mercury and Claudius pass an impressive procession going along the Via Sacra.

It was the most handsome cortège ever with no expense spared to let you know that a god was being buried, horn players, and every kind of brass instrumentalist that even Claudius could hear it.

The narrator remarks that ‘people walked about like free men’. A few famous advocates who thrived under Claudius were weeping, and for once, they actually meant it! But out of the shadows creep real lawyers, men with principle, thin and pale from having hidden for the duration of Claudius’s reign. When these honest lawyers see the creepy ones crying, they say: “Told you the Saturnalia [the four-day festival of misrule held in December but, by extension, the mad period of Claudius’s rule] couldn’t last forever.”

The text then includes a comic parody of a funeral dirge in verse. The satire comes in the way the dirge is a pack of lies, claiming that Claudius was witty, fleet of foot, brave in battle, defeated the Persians and Parthians, quick to decide law suits – all of which are the precise opposite of the case.

(13) Claudius was understandably please to hear himself so lavishly praised as Mercury dragged him along through the Field of Mars (with his head covered so no-one would recognise him). Somewhere between the Tiber and the Via Tecta they descended into the Infernal Regions.

On arrival he finds himself greeted by his freedman, Narcissus. The text jokes that he had taken a short cut, referencing the fact that almost as soon as he came to power, Nero had Narcissus compelled to commit suicide. Mercury tells him to go ahead of them and announce their arrival.

They come to the gate of Hell (or Dis, in Roman mythology), guarded by Cerberus, ‘certainly not the sort of thing you’d like to meet in the dark’. Interestingly, the text tells us Claudius had a white dog for a pet.

Here is assembled a welcoming committee of eminent Romans who Claudius had had executed, many for involvement in the mock marriage of his third wife, Messalina to Gaius Siliuis, which was taken as the start of a coup attempt and so led to mass executions of conspirators. Amid the throng was Mnester the mime, very popular with Caligula and, for a time, with Claudius, before he had him beheaded.

Forward come Messalina, his freedmen (Polybius, Myron, Harpocras, Amphaeus, Pheronactus), two prefects (Justus Catonius and Rufrius Pollio), his friends (Saturninus, Lusius and Pedo Pompeius and Lupus and Celer Asinius, of consular rank), his brother’s daughter, his sister’s daughter, sons-in-law, fathers and mothers-in-law – all people Claudius had had executed or forced to kill themselves.

With typical dithery absent-mindedness, Claudius is made to ask them how they all got here? To which Pedo Pompeius replies: ‘What do you mean, you cruel bastard? Who else sent us here but you, you cruel butcher of every friend you ever had,’

(14) Pedo brings Claudius before the judgement seat of Aeacus, who was holding court. The text humorously says the legal procedures in Hell are modelled on, and use the exact same laws, as Rome, especially surrounding murder, in this instance the Lex Cornelia.

Pedo reads out the charges against Claudius: charged with killing 35 senators, 221 knights and others as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore. At first nobody could be found to defend Claudius, until an old crony, Publius Petronius stepped forward for the defence. He immediately asked for an adjournment which was as quickly refused. the prosecution made its case then, without waiting for a response, Aeacus, finds Claudius guilty and announces the sentence:

There was then debate about an appropriate sentence and, humorously, it is said that some of the old lags in hell could do with a break and be replaced with Claudius, such as Sisyphus endlessly pushing his stone uphill, Tantalus dying of thirst surrounded by water he cannot reach or Ixion eternally punished on a wheel.

The punishment eventually chosen is like these ones. Claudius is condemned to eternally throw dice from a dice cup with a hole in it so he can never actually get them into it and every time he goes to pick them up they slip through his fingers.

(15) All of a sudden who should turn up but Caligula, who claims Claudius as his slave. [This is a humorous reference to the way Caligula kept Claudius alive during the four years of his rule, to torment and mock him.] Caligula now claims Claudius as his slave, and brings witnesses who say they’d seen him being flogged, caned and punched by him which, apparently, proves his case [and is yet another insight into the brutal mistreatment of slaves in ancient Rome].

But even this isn’t quite the end of the narrative. Having satirised a) Claudius’s addiction to dice and gambling and b) his humiliating treatment by Caligula, the narrative ends with a third punishment c), appropriate to two other aspects of Claudius’s character, the notorious length of time it took him to reach legal decisions, and his notorious subjugation to the opinions of his own freedmen.

So right at the end of the text Caligula hands Claudius over to Aeacus, who hands him on to his freedman Menander, to be his subordinate and legal secretary for all time.

Thoughts

I can see why critics who associate Seneca with the high-minded tone of the Letters to Lucilius would be reluctant to associate him with this very uneven satire. But for a lay reader it’s really interesting. It is, at some points, genuinely funny, as when Claudius tells Hercules that he had to deal with more shit adjudicating law cases in Tibur than Hercules did when he cleaned out the Augean stables. It is useful to know that Claudius’s limp, palsied head and incomprehensible mumbling speech were so well known as to be elements of popular comedy. And then there is the light shed on Roman customs, for example rules in the Senate, or the description of Claudius’s funeral procession, and so on. It isn’t great literature but I enjoyed it.

Ironic conclusion

The whole squib is devoted to describing what a shocking, immoral, murderous emperor Claudius had been, and to welcoming his young successor, Nero, with 20 lines of fulsome poetic praise about how he will restore freedom and justice.

So Caesar comes, so Nero appears to Rome,
His bright face glowing with gentle radiance,
His neck all beauty under his glowing hair.

Ha ha ha. Nero was not only ten times worse than Claudius but, if the author of this piece was Seneca, Nero was to compel the author of this fulsome praise to kill himself 11 years later.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves included a translation of the Apocolocyntosis in the annexes at the end of his historical novel, Claudius the God. Graves’s translation is better than Sullivan’s, more fun and fluent.

There’s one notable structural difference which is that, in the passage immediately after the gap, Sullivan attributes the speech to one (unnamed) god. Graves, far more imaginatively, and following the suggestion in the text that the gods, plural, burst into uproar, breaks the same passage down into a series of smaller segments, each being spoken by (unnamed) gods.

Doing this creates a much more dramatic effect and, incidentally, makes sense of the fact that some of the sentiments expressed contradict each other – a problem if it’s all spoken by one person but perfect sense if attributed to half a dozen squabbling speakers.

Credit

J.P. Sullivan’s translation of the Apocolocyntosis by Seneca was published in America in 1966, before being incorporated into the Penguin edition of Petronius’s Satyricon in 1977. I flipped between this translation and the online translation by W.H.D. Rouse, published in 1920.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus – 2

Introduction

In the first of these two reviews of Tacitus’s Annals I briefly explained the background to the Annals and the development of ‘history’ as a genre up to Tacitus’s time, then went on to summarise Tacitus’s account of the reign of Tiberius, 14 to 37 AD.

Frustratingly, the manuscript we have of the Annals breaks off at the death of Tiberius and omits the four-year rule of Gaius (Caligula) from 37 to 41 AD, and the first six years of Gaius’s successor and uncle, Claudius i.e. from 41 to 47. Gaius’s reign is colourfully depicted in Suetonius’s Life of Caligula but Tacitus is invaluable because he embeds the scandal which Suetonius focuses on into a much more sober, year-by-year account of the humdrum legal and administrative acts of each emperor. They complement each other perfectly, which makes it all the more vexing that there’s such a big lacuna for the vital years of these key emperors.

To summarise the missing early part of Claudius, which we know from other sources: In 38 or early 39 AD, Claudius had married a third wife, Valeria Messalina, who was his first cousin once removed. Soon afterwards she gave birth to a daughter, Claudia Octavia. A son, initially named Tiberius Claudius Germanicus, and later known as Britannicus, was born just after Claudius’s accession in 41.

The translator of the Penguin edition of the Annals, Michael Grant, divides his text into two big parts, separated by this huge gap in the original text. Within each part he groups clumps of annals, or individual years, into long ‘chapters’, and gives these informative, dramatic titles. Grant’s divisions over-write Tacitus’s division of his work into 16 books and specific years. Grant’s chapters are as follows. (My previous review summarised part one of Grant’s text. This review addresses part two.)

Part two: Claudius and Nero

The fall of Messalina (book 11)
The Mother of Nero (book 12)
The fall of Agrippina (book 13 to book 14 section 13)
Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
Innocent victims (book 16)

As I described in my previous post, on a careful rereading of the text I think it would have been better to have divided the text up by year rather than chapter, as Grant does. Starting a new section/chapter for each new year would reflect Tacitus’s intention, of producing a year-by-year ‘chronological sequence of events’, in Tacitus’s own words (p.269).

The annalistic approach is very formulaic: the account of each year starts with the announcement of who were the two consuls for that year (still, despite decades of imperial rule, very important figures, not least as the Romans’ main way of dating events). Then each year ends with a short list of notable Romans who died during that year. In between the two, Tacitus lists key events of that year in foreign policy and military campaigns, its notable laws and prosecutions, fires, food shortages and so on. That is the basic annalistic scaffold on which Tacitus then hangs his longer, more flowing descriptions of the activities of the emperors and royal family, along with (generally scathing) comments on their characters.

There is another, distinct strand to Tacitus’s work, which is his interest in foreign affairs i.e. the management of the Roman provinces (the appointment of new governors, the impeachment of existing governors for corruption). This covers the numerous tribal rebellions and wars on the borders, be they on the Rhine with the Germans, in the Middle East against the Parthians, or elsewhere. Tacitus devotes a lot of space to these, giving detailed accounts of diplomatic manoeuvrings, envoys to Rome etc, as well as vivid accounts of military campaigns and battles. Notable is the section about Britain under Claudius, including Caractacus’s noble plea for mercy when he was led in triumph through Rome (pages 264 to 269). But this whole area is so complex that (with the exception of Boudicca’s revolt) I’ve omitted it from my summary.

Claudius (reigned 41 to 54)

Historians nowadays consider Claudius to have been a ‘painstaking and bold administrator and reformer’ but, in Tacitus’s hands, the most memorable aspects of his reign are the portraits of his scheming and amoral third and fourth wives, Messalina and Agrippina.

(Just a reminder: these chapter titles are not in Tacitus, they are Michael Grant’s additions. And the years I give are also not in the text. The system of dating by BC or AD wasn’t invented until 500 years later, and wasn’t widely adopted till the Middle Ages. See M.I. Finley’s essay on the subject.)

In the summary that follows, the chapter titles in Heading 2 are Michael Grant’s. Sitting under them, in heading 3, are the years which Tacitus covers. I’ve made these. They are not clearly indicated in Grant’s text, or the original Tacitus. (Remember, Tacitus didn’t use the BC/AD system, he dated every year by the two consuls who served during it; whereas I have just used the year as per our Christian calendar). Where the year is notable for something important, such as the murder of Claudius or the revolt of Boudicca, I’ve added these into my year headings.

Chapter 9 The Fall of Messalina

47 AD

The big gap in Tacitus’s text resumes in 47 AD, in the middle of hectic events, as Claudius’s third wife, Messalina, takes aim at a rival, Poppaea Sabina.

Chronologers reckoned it was the 800th year since the founding of Rome (traditionally 753 BC) and so Claudius held Secular Games. Prominent in them were Claudius’s son, Britannicus, who was six years old (b.41) and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was 10 (b.37) who would soon be adopted as Claudius’s son and heir.

(Nero’s mother was Agrippina the Younger, who was herself the daughter of Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. So Nero was popular with the mob for being the only surviving male descendant – the grandson – of the hugely popular Germanicus. Agrippina was also one of three sisters to Gaius, who had ruled as the emperor Caligula from 37 till he was assassinated in 41. Gaius was said to have had incestuous relations with all three of his sisters. Agrippina managed to survive Gaius’s short reign and lived on into Claudius’s, when she became one of the many targets of Claudius’s malevolent third wife, Messalina. However, Agrippina not only survived Messalina but, after the latter’s downfall and execution, replaced her as Claudius’s fourth and final wife.)

At about this time Messalina became infatuated with the best-looking man in Rome, Gaius Silius. She forced him to divorce his wife, Julia Silana, and host her at not particularly concealed assignations. They carried on their affair openly while the obtuse Claudius pursued his responsibilities as Censor.

Tacitus portrays Claudius as responsible and sensible: he carries out the census, he commands the building of a new aqueduct, he suggests three new letters are added to the Roman alphabet, he proposes to the senate the creation of a Board to support the art of soothsaying. In foreign policy Claudius forbade further aggression against the Germans and ordered Roman troops – who were building camps in recently occupied German territory – back across to the west bank of the Rhine.

48 AD

Claudius makes his famous intervention in a debate in the senate about whether Gauls, by now Roman citizens for three or four generations, should be allowed to run for office in Rome. Claudius argued strongly that they should, pointing out how Rome’s strength derived from its policy of assimilating neighbouring towns and tribe and then entire regions, turning enemies into loyal citizens. (This speech is regularly cited by historians as exemplifying the core secret of Rome’s success, which was assimilating territories and peoples into the empire.)

Claudius promoted senators of long standing to patrician rank as many patrician families had died out. He concluded his census which showed a citizen body of 5,984,072 (which presumably included all men, women and children; neither Tacitus nor Grant clarify whether this included slaves or not).

Meanwhile, Messalina pursued her affair, and while Claudius was busy at Ostia, she openly and bigamously married Silius. It might seem incredible that a consul designate and the emperor’s wife should marry:

But I am not inventing marvels. What I have told, and shall tell, is the truth. Older men heard and recorded it. (p.246)

According to Grant the reign of Claudius saw a great increase in the power of the secretaries of state, often ex-slaves, and three of these now informed Claudius, not only that his wife had bigamously remarried but had, in legal terms, divorced him – and that this opened the way for her new husband, Silius, to seize power.

The commander of ‘the Guard’ was summoned, confirmed the story and said Claudius must move fast to retain their loyalty. Claudius was panicking thinking this was a real coup attempt. Command was taken by Narcissus, ex-slave and secretary general. He it was who lined up a series of witnesses to testify to Messalina’s promiscuity, many affairs, degenerate behaviour, and now this bigamous marriage. Tacitus describes a bloodbath of officials who had helped or slept with Messalina and then how, at dinner that evening Claudius began to soften against his (absent) wife and so Narcissus moved quickly, instructing another slave to go to her house where he found her wretched, weeping on the ground beside her mother, and quickly run her through with a sword. The senate ordered all statues and public memorials to her name to be removed. Claudius never referred to her again.

This two or three pages of breathless narrative are rightly considered among Tacitus’s greatest passages, by which scholars mean it has the immediacy, pace and bloody inevitability of a thriller.

Chapter 10 The Mother of Nero (Agrippina)

Central to Tacitus’s critique is that Claudius was in thrall to the advice of his secretaries who were all freedmen, namely Narcissus who took the lead in getting rid of Messalina. Now they all proposed to Claudius various candidates for his next wife. But Agrippina took advantage of being Claudius’s niece and so often being in his company, plus being allowed to give him caresses and kisses. She seduced him and won the competition. Weak and easily led, Claudius asked the senate to pass a law allowing an uncle to marry his niece (Claudius was brother of the long-dead Germanicus, whose daughter Agrippina was.)

Tacitus describes how Lucius Vitellius worked his way into Agrippina’s good books by a) managing to derail the marriage of Claudius’s daughter, Octavia, to Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus by falsely accusing the latter and having him dismissed – thus making Octavia available to be engaged to Agrippina’s son; and b) making a big speech in the senate asking for the law to be changed to allow uncles to marry nieces and for the senate to give Agrippina to Claudius as a kind of national gift.

Once in post Agrippina sought power in every way she could. This included recalling Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from exile. He had been banished by Claudius for adultery with Germanicus’s daughter, Julia Livilla. Now Agrippa recalled him (earning his gratitude) and made him tutor to her son. She enforced the suicide of one of her rivals, Lollia Paulina. Another lady whom the emperor casually praised, Calpurnia, was struck down.

Claudius decided to extend the boundaries of Rome, leading Tacitus into an interesting digression about the various sets of boundary markers (p.262).

50 AD

Responding to pressure from Agrippina’s agents Claudius adopted her son, Lucius Domitius, as his own. It was at this moment that the boy, previously a member of the Ahenobarbus clan, was awarded a name which ran in the Claudian clan, ‘Nero’, marking his entry into the prestigious (haughty and arrogant) gens Claudii. At the same time Agrippina was given the honorific ‘Augusta’.

In this year Tacitus gives detailed description of uprisings and wars in Britain.

51 AD

On the basis of a supposedly trivial incident – when Britannicus and Nero met and Nero greeted the other by his name but Britannicus greeted Nero as ‘Domitius’ – Agrippina claimed this was a alight against the decision of the senate and people of Rome and persuaded Claudius to banish or execute all Britannicus’s tutors. His guards and slaves loyal to him were dismissed. Some of the Guard commanders were loyal to Britannicus so they were replaced by Sextus Afranius Burrus, who knew who his boss was: Agrippina.

52 AD

Senators who couldn’t comply with the House’s financial requirements were expelled. Lucius Arruntius Furius Scribonianus was exiled for enquiring from astrologers about the emperor’s death. Claudius suggested a law that any woman marrying a slave should herself be enslaved. A tunnel was built linking the Fucine lake and the river Liris. Claudius held naval games on the lake to celebrate. Rebellion broke out in Judaea.

53 AD

Nero, now aged 16, married the emperor’s daughter, Claudia Octavia, born in 40 and so aged 12 or 13. This was arranged by Agrippina to solidify Nero’s position as the heir apparent. Agrippina continued her power-hungry and aggressive behaviour. She coveted the gardens of Titus Statilius Taurus and so got his deputy as governor of Africa to accuse and discredit him in the senate. Titus committed suicide. Agrippina got his gardens.

Claudius handed over sweeping powers to the order of knights, the issue at the heart of the civil war between Marius and Sulla back in the 80s BC. He exempted the island of Cos from taxation. The city of Byzantium pleaded for a remission of their taxes and this was granted.

54 AD – Murder of Claudius

Bad omens. Bees landed on the Capitol. Deformed animals were born. Agrippina decided to dispose of Domitia Lepida, her cousin once removed and Nero’s aunt, mother to Claudius’s previous wife, Messalina. She manoeuvred Claudius into having her executed (p.282).

Britannicus was now approaching his 14th birthday, traditionally the age when a Roman aristocrat began to play a part in public life. Agrippina began to worry that Claudius was beginning to regret adopting Nero and coming round to preferring his own son as successor so she moved quickly to poison her husband. She had poison supplied by the arch-poisoner, Locusta, and administered by the emperor’s taster, Halotus. She blocked anyone coming to see the body, giving out a story that the emperor was alive but ill, while she organised the smooth accession of Nero.

On 13 October 54 the palace doors were opened, and Nero appeared accompanied by a battalion of the palace guard and their commander, Sextus Afranius Burrus (who owed his position to Agrippina). Nero was carried in a litter to the Guards’ camp where he was acclaimed emperor, a decision quickly ratified by the senate and then the provinces.

Chapter 11 The Fall of Agrippina

The final section of the Annals is devoted to the reign of Nero. It is quite substantial (70 pages in the Penguin translation). Grant divides it into five chapters:

Nero and his helpers (book 14 sections 14 to 65)
Eastern settlement (book 14 sections 1 to 32)
The burning of Rome (book 15, sections 32 to 47)
The plot (book 15, sections 48 to 74)
Innocent victims (book 16)

The Nero chapters are notable for the kind of melodramatic set-pieces which Tacitus excelled at, in this case describing the Great Fire of Rome or Agrippina’s murder. At moments like this you can very much see how, for the ancients, no amount of dedication to the ‘historical truth’ or the moralising urge to judge and assess, can trump the more basic aim of inflaming awe and wonder with dramatic effects.

Nero’s reign opened with a flurry of murders. Agrippina got agents to poison governor of Asia Marcus Junius Silanus because he was brother to Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, whose engagement with Octavia she had broken and forced to commit suicide, and because Marcus was a descendant of Augustus. Then she secured the imprisonment and suicide of Narcissus, freedman and secretary to Claudius, the central figure in the downfall of Messalina.

Tactitus notes the restraining effect of two key figures, the commander of the Guard Sextus Afranius Burrus, and Nero’s tutor Lucius Annaeus Sextus. Burrus was all soldierly efficiency and seriousness of character; Agrippina had appointed Seneca Nero’s tutor in which role he taught the teenager Stoic principles and public speaking.

It was Seneca who wrote the funeral oration for Claudius which Nero delivered. Nero went on to insist the senate would reassert its ancient rights and decisions. Nero’s first acts were all leniency and forgiveness.

55 AD – Murder of Britannicus

Quite quickly Nero fell in love with a former slave girl, Acte, and became slowly alienated from the virtuous wife, Claudia Octavia, who Agrippina had engineered his marriage to. Agrippina was infuriated at Nero’s love for a common slave girl and tried to ban it. Division grew between mother and son. Nero next deposed the freedman Pallas, who had virtually run the empire for Claudius and been instrumental in Claudius choosing Agrippina as his fourth wife.

Tacitus gives a vivid almost farcical account of the florid events surrounding Nero’s decision to poison his rival, Claudius’s biological son, Britannicus (p.290). Britannicus was the last male heir of the Claudian clan whereas Nero was a Claudian only by adoption.

Realising her position was now seriously threatened, Agrippina made common cause with Nero’s spurned wife Octavia, and cast around for supporters. To isolate Agrippina, Nero withdrew her guard and expelled her from the imperial palace. Then her rival, Junia Silana, had a spy report to Nero that Agrippina was conspiring with one Rubellius Plautus to overthrow and replace him. Nero was terrified, but spared Plautus, for the time being. Tacitus tells us one of his sources claims Seneca restrained the emperor, and also from executing Burrus as being somehow implicated. The plot rebounded and Junia Silana was exiled, her accomplices executed.

56 AD

Echoing Suetonius, Tacitus claims Nero dressed up and went about the streets, from tavern to brothel, beating up passersby, stealing stuff from shops. The emperor’s example emboldened other criminals. ‘Rome at night came to resemble a conquered city.’ A senator who beat up Nero when he assaulted him, apologised when he realised his identity but was forced to commit suicide.

Nero egged on disputes among rival gangs of ballet dancers, encouraging them to degenerate into real gang fights. Tacitus devotes a page to a debate in the senate about whether misbehaving freed slaves should be re-enslaved.

57 AD

Tacitus takes the opportunity to differentiate his kind of history from mere almanacs. Talking of the completion of a huge amphitheatre in the Field of Mars, he says:

But that is material for official gazettes, whereas it has traditionally been judged fitting to Rome’s grandeur that its histories should contain only important events. (p.298)

An interesting indication of the way that history was conceived as a literary genre, with appropriate tone and subject matter; lofty subject matter; important events and imperial players.

A law was passed that provincial officials were banned from giving gladiator or animal shows. These a) cost provincials a fortune b) were used as cover by governors to hide their irregularities.

Another law decreed that if a man was murdered by a slave, not only all the slaves, but all the freed slaves in his household would be executed as punishment.

58 AD

The endless war between Rome and Parthia for possession of the kingdom of Armenia heated up.

A detailed account of how Nero was introduced by his fellow libertine, Otho, to his lover Poppaea, how she then seduced Nero and eclipsed Acte as his chief concubine. As a result Nero fell out with Otho, eventually consigning him to Lusitania as governor. (This Otho was to return and seize power in the Year of Four Emperors, 69 AD, following Nero’s death, events Tacitus describes in detail in his ‘Histories’.)

Various cities (Puteoli, Syracuse) petitioned Rome for favours. Persistent complaints about tax farmers led Nero to contemplate scrapping all indirect taxes. Rebellious tribes in Germany fought the Romans or each other.

59 AD – Murder of Agrippina

Tacitus puts Nero’s decision to finally eliminate his mother down to the taunts of his new lover Poppaea. Agrippina tried to counter this by appearing before Nero in lascivious clothes and seduced him to incest. Seneca commissioned Acte to re-enter his life and warm him that such sacrilege would alienate the Guards on whom his power rested. Interestingly, Tacitus openly states various versions of these stories attributed to other historians (whose works are now lost).

Tacitus openly states in several places that when the sources agree he won’t mention them; but where they disagree he will cite them and the disagreements and let the reader decide.

The death of Agrippina takes 6 pages to describe and is semi-farcical. After rejecting poison and the dagger, Nero settled on the madcap scheme of getting Agrippina onto a ship with a collapsible section which would fall on her. And this is what he did, inviting her to a long friendly banquet at Baiae, then seeing her off in a beautifully appointed ship whose ceiling, at a signal, caved in. This killed Agrippina’s attendant and when another cried out that she was the emperor’s mother, she was beaten to death by the crew, so Agrippina disguised herself. Then the galley slaves all went to one side of the ship in order to capsize it, but Agrippina managed to get free and swim to safety. This sounds like a fairy story.

Nero was waiting for news and was appalled to learn it hadn’t worked. So he called in his most senior advisers, Seneca and Burrus. Burrus declared the Guard would not touch a member of the imperial family and descendant of Germanicus. So they conceived a plot whereby Nero would drop a sword by the feet of the servant Agrippina had sent to tell Nero she had survived this terrible accident – and then claim he was an assassin sent by Agrippina.

This is as farcical and laughable as the collapsible boat gambit.

Nero promptly had a freedman, Anicetus, take soldiers and surround Agrippina’s house. Slaves fled. Anicetus, a naval captain and lieutenant then beat and stabbed Agrippina to death. Her body was quickly cremated with no ceremony.

Nero cringed in fear all night long until Burrus got colonels and captains of the Guard to come and congratulate him on escaping the conspiracy, at which he recovered his spirits. Nero then sent a long letter to be read out in the senate justifying his actions with a long list of Agrippina’s incriminating behaviour leading up to the supposed ‘conspiracy’. This was written by Seneca and reflected badly on him.

Many bad omens. And Nero was scared of the public response. But there was much thanksgiving for his safety and he returned to Rome amid cheering crowds as at a triumph.

Chapter 12 Nero and his Helpers

With Agrippina out of the way, Nero finally let rip. ‘There was no stopping him.’ (p.320) Tacitus describes Nero’s addiction to singing to his own accompaniment on the lyre, and chariot racing. He goes into less detail than Suetonius but is much more damning. When Nero institutes the ‘Youth Games’ and:

In the wood which Augustus had planted around his Naval Lake, places of assignation and taverns were built, and every stimulus to vice was displayed for sale…Promiscuity and degradation throve…Never was there so favourable a climate for debauchery as among this filthy crowd. (p.321)

Nero performed for the crowd on the lyre. He formed a corp of young knights known as the Augustiani, to maintain ‘a din of applause day and night’. He fancied himself a poet and sat around at dinner parties extemporising verses with cronies.

This method is apparent from Nero’s poems themselves which lack vigour, inspiration and homogeneity.

Tacitus, like Suetonius, had copies of these poems, all now lost to us. Meanwhile, back in the annalistic list of political events: the senate settled a riot which had broken out between citizens of Pompeii and Nuceria. Cyrene secured the expulsion of a governor. Two famous men died (Cnaeus Domitius Afer and Marcus Servilius Nonianus). It’s Tacitus’s listing of these kinds of humdrum events which provide the scaffolding or background hum of his year-by-year annals.

60 AD

Nero institutes 5-yearly games on the Greek model. Tacitus stages a set-piece debate between its critics who thought games should only be held in temporary buildings put up for the events, and that permanent buildings were an incitement to sloth and vice; and its proponents who thought they had to change with the times and permanent buildings saved money in the long run. (p.323).

It’s worth mentioning that ‘ballet dancers’, in all these ancient accounts, are closely associated with booing, hissing, throwing chairs and rioting. In a note, Grant explains that:

These were the highly popular, sophisticated dances of the pantomimi who danced traditional themes in dumb-show, with music and chorus. These performances were first seen in Rome under Augustus. (p.402)

Many bad omens and portents. A comet, which was universally taken as the sign of a change of emperors. Much talk that Nero’s successor would be Rubellius Plautus. Rumour spread that a bolt of lightning had hit and split a table at which Nero was sitting (!). Nero, with notable restraint, didn’t have Plautus killed, simply told him to move with his family to their estate in Asia. According to his Wikipedia article:

Plautus appears to have been a follower of Stoicism. According to Tacitus, Tigellinus wrote to Nero: ‘Plautus again, with his great wealth, does not so much as affect a love of repose, but he flaunts before us his imitations of the old Romans, and assumes the self-consciousness of the Stoics along with a philosophy, which makes men restless, and eager for a busy life.’ When he was exiled from Rome by Nero, Plautus was accompanied by the famous Stoic teacher Musonius Rufus. He was associated with a group of Stoics who criticized the perceived tyranny and autocratic rule of certain emperors, referred to today as the Stoic Opposition.

What interest me about this passage is the idea that Stoicism, as well as being a reputable philosophy, was also a fashionable pose and allowed its proponents to swank and pride themselves on maintaining the values of ‘the old Romans’. So I noticed when, later on, the corrupt head of the Guard, Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, in calumniating Plautus, says:

Plautus is rich and does not pretend to like retirement. He parades an admiration of the ancient Romans but he has the arrogance of the Stoics, who breed sedition and intrigue. (p.339)

‘The arrogance of the Stoics’, eh?

More about the never-ending war in Armenia, prosecuted by Cnaeus Domitius Corbulo. The ancient town of Puteoli was given the status of a Roman settlement and named after Nero. Tacitus describes the challenge of keeping colonies of Roman soldiers consistently populated since many didn’t marry or have children, and many came from different regiments and were even different nationalities.

Nero sorts out a squabble about who’s elected praetor (15 men apply for 12 places). A knight called Vibius Secundus was convicted for extortion when governor of Mauretania and expelled from Italy.

61 AD – Boudicca’s revolt

Disaster in Britain. The ambitious new governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, appointed in 58, continued his predecessor’s policy of aggressively subduing the tribes of modern Wales, and was successful for his first two years in the post. Tacitus gives a vivid description of his amphibious assault on the island of Mona (modern-day Anglesey), its shores lined with the enemy, shrieking women and spooky druids. The Romans conquer the island and chop down the groves sacred to the Druids, who conducted human sacrifices there.

But while he was Paullinus was subduing Anglesey rebellion broke out on the other side of the province. Since this is a legendary part of our history it’s worth citing at length:

Prasutagus, king of the Icenii, after a life of long and renowned prosperity, had made the emperor co-heir with his two daughters. Prasutagus hoped by this submissiveness to preserve his kingdom and household from attack. But it turned out otherwise. Kingdom and household alike were plundered like prizes of war, the one by Roman officers, the other by Roman slaves. As a start his widow, Boudicca, was flogged and their two daughters raped. The Icenian chiefs were deprived of their hereditary estates as if the Romans had been given the entire country. The king’s own relatives were treated like slaves.

The huge temple to the god Claudius could be seen from everywhere, symbolising their oppression, and its priests used their power to bleed households dry with taxes and levies. The greed of the Roman agent, Catus Decianus, had driven the entire province to rebellion.

So the Iceni rebelled and raised neighbouring tribes. They stormed the Roman settlement of Camulodonum. Omens were, of course, seen everywhere. The empty theatre echoed with shrieks. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement was seen in ruins. The sea turned blood red and left human corpses on the ebb tide. The garrison and a small cohort of reinforcements sent from London were massacred.

Suetonius marched his army all the way back from Wales to London. Interestingly:

Londinium did not rank as a Roman settlement, but was an important centre for business men and merchandise.

Nonetheless Suetonius realised he couldn’t hold it against massed tribes, so abandoned it. When Boudicca’s forces stormed into it all the men were killed and all the women raped. Same happened at St Albans (Verulamium). Tacitus says 70,000 perished, for the Britons did not take prisoners with a view to exchanges:

They could not wait to cut throats, hang, burn and crucify, as though avenging in advance, the retribution which was on its way. (p.329)

Tacitus gives us a typical rhetorical set-piece: first he gives Boudicca a genuinely inspiring speech as she rouses her troops to face the Roman army, which has followed and now set up opposite them. Then he gives verbatim what he claims is the pre-battle speech of Suetonius. Both are effective in their different ways. It was a massacre. The Romans killed all the Britons and their camp followers. Boudicca poisoned herself.

However, the Romans then fell out among themselves. The newly arrived imperial agent didn’t like Suetonius and briefed against him. A former imperial slave, Polyclitus, was sent to assess the situation. Suetonius was relieved of duty and his replacement took a softly-softly approach. Peace of a sort returned to the province.

Tacitus returns to his annalistic approach with notes on two noteworthy trials. What strikes me is that, despite existing for hundreds of years, the Romans were continually finding loopholes or omissions in their laws, which the senate patched up and emperors approved or modified.

The City Prefect, Lucius Pedianus Secundus, was murdered by one of his slaves. The traditional punishment was that every other slave in the household would be executed. Popular sentiment protested against this, rioting began and the senate house was surrounded. Tacitus uses this to give us another of his verbatim speeches, this time by Gaius Cassius Longinus in favour of enforcing the traditional law. The speech reveals that Pedianus had 400 slaves. His peroration is striking:

Our ancestors distrusted their slaves. Yet slaves were then born on the same estates, in the same homes, as their masters, who had treated them kindly from birth. But nowadays our huge households are international. They include every alien religion – or none at all. The only way to keep down this scum is by intimidation…Exemplary punishment always contains an element of injustice. But individual wrongs are outweighed by the advantage of the community. (p.334)

Many argued to spare the innocent, or the women slaves, but Cassius’s view prevailed, and the emperor Nero backed it up, lining with troops the route along which those condemned for execution were taken.

Bithynia secured the condemnation of its governor. In Gaul a census was carried out. The noble Publius Memmius Regulus passed away. Nero dedicated a new gymnasium.

62 AD

Big fuss about an ex-praetor who read out verses satirising Nero at a dinner party. He is condemned by the senate and Tacitus summarises the positions of various senators to show how the politics of the time worked, with some arguing for execution, others for exile. The senate referred their decision for leniency to Nero who was cross but accepted it. Another aristocrat included in a so-called will insults against senators and priests. Nero ordered him exiled from Italy and his writings burned.

Commander of the Guard Burrus died, probably of a throat tumour, though maybe poisoned by Nero. He was replaced by two commanders, one responsible, the other a crony of Nero’s private debaucheries.

Burrus’s death weakened Seneca’s position. One mentor is less powerful than two. His critics queued up to bad-mouth him to the emperor, attacking:

his wealth, enormous and excessive for any subject
the grandeur of his mansions and beauty of his gardens, which exceeded the emperors (!)
his alleged bids for popularity

Nero listened to Seneca’s detractors and began distancing himself from him. This is the opportunity for Tacitus to put into Seneca’s mouth a noble and persuasive speech, asking to be allowed to retire (he was now 64 years old and had been tutor to Nero for 14 years) and happily handing most of his property over to Nero. Tacitus then has Nero reply with a speech even more eloquent and organised. Nero refuses to take back his gifts lest it reflect badly on him. But Seneca withdrew from Rome, terminated his large receptions and dismissed his entourage, in a bid to deflect criticism.

Tigellinus achieves sole command of the palace Guard and plays on Nero’s fears. As a result of his calumnies, Nero orders the killing of two exiles, Faustus Cornelius Sulla Felix at Massilia. When his head is brought to Nero the emperor jokes that he’s gone grey. More elaborate are the measures taken to kill Plautus, in exile in Asia, but he too was killed and decapitated. When Nero was given his head, he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Nero! How could a man with such a long nose have frightened you!’

Nero wrote a letter to the senate denouncing Plautus and Sulla as traitors at which the senate voted him a thanksgiving. This occasioned disgust among freethinking men and led Nero to believe he could do anything. So he divorced his wife, Octavia and married Poppaea. The new wife swiftly set about disposing of the old one, concocting an accusation that Octavia was guilty of adultery and getting her exiled to Campania. (As usual, it’s the fact that Octavia’s slaves were tortured to extract false confessions, which I find so upsetting.) But this set off protests among the people who clamoured for Octavia’s return, overturning new statues of Poppaea. For a while Nero appeared to cave in – wild rejoicing – but then returned to his former stance – protests and rioting.

Poppaea is beside herself and renews her please to be rid of Octavia. So Nero concocts a second adultery confession, this time persuading admiral of the fleet Anicetus (who had played a leading role in dispatching Agrippina) to admit to adultery with Octavia. He was rewarded with peaceful retirement in Sardinia. Octavia was banished to the island of Pandateria. Much sympathy for another innocent royal woman exiled cf Julia the Elder, the Younger, Agrippina the Elder and Julia Livila.

Within days she was ordered dead. Soldiers arrived and forced the opening of veins all over her body in a hot bath. She was just 20. The senate ordered another thanksgiving and Tacitus breaks cover to record how disgustingly sycophantic that body had become.

Chapter 13 Eastern Settlement

63 AD

Latest episode of the war with Parthia over Armenia. Corn ships are destroyed by fire or storm, and some has rotted. Some people were adopting ‘children’ in order to count as fathers and so gain advantage in elections for posts where fatherhood gave an advantage (ever since Augustus’s laws designed to increase the population). Then, once elected, they repealed the adoptions. The senate decreed that these fictitious adoptions should carry no weight.

Prosecution of a governor of Crete who suggested his power was above the senate. At Nero’s prompting a decree was passed forbidding votes of thanks to governors at provincial assemblies. I’m including stuff like this to show what the nuts and bolts of ruling the empire really consisted of.

The Gymnasium was struck by lightning and burned down. A statue of Nero inside was melted into a shapeless mass. An earthquake demolished Pompeii (not the famous volcanic eruption of 79 AD).

Poppaea gave Nero a daughter. Both were awarded the honorific ‘Augusta’, according to the law of inflation of titles (at first rare and precious, eventually standard and ordinary). The senate voted a thanksgiving (of course), Nero instituted some games. Four months later the baby died, but the sycophancy continued. The dead baby was declared a goddess and a temple and priest created.

Latest episode of the war against the Parthians, also known as The Armenian Question. The figure to emerge most clearly from this is the Roman general, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, now awarded plenary powers comparable to those awarded to Pompey to fight the pirate menace in 67 BC. Corbulo brings off an honourable truce with the Parthian prince Tiridates.

Back in Italy, Latin rights are awarded to the tribes of the Maritime Alps. Magnificent gladiatorial displays but Tacitus deprecates the number of women and senators ‘disgracing themselves in the arena.’

Chapter 14 The Burning of Rome

64 AD

Frustrated at giving only private performances of his singing and lyre playing, Nero now vows to take part in public performances. First one is Naples then he crosses to Greece. In the event Nero abruptly cancelled his trip to Greece, and another one to Egypt. Maybe he was scared. he gave it out that he couldn’t let the people of Rome be without him.

Tacitus describes a typical public banquet. Nero gave magnificent ones but the most extravagant was given by his creature, Tigellinus. It was held on a raft in the middle of a lake. On the shore were brothels populated by aristocratic women, opposite them naked women posing. Tigellinus had collected birds and animals from remote countries.

Nero went through a public wedding with one of his pervert cronies named Pythagoras, in which Nero wore a bridal dress, and then marriage night sex was performed in view of the invited guests.

Then the Great Fire of Rome, ten days in July 64. When it was finally brought under control two-thirds of Rome had been destroyed. Nero was at Antium when it started. He took steps: he threw open the Field of Mars and his own gardens and constructed emergency accommodation for the homeless. He reduced the price of corn.

Of Rome’s 14 districts only 4 remained intact. Three were completely destroyed. The other seven were reduced to a few mangled ruins. Nero determined to build back better. He had a huge new palace built full of extravagance. New streets were built on an orderly plan. Houses had a height limit. Nero sagely offered to pay for the building of many of these and to ensure builders rubble was cleared away before houses were occupied.

Sensible fire provisions were put into place: a fixed proportion of each house was to be of stone; guards were appointed to ensure a better water supply; each building had to keep firefighting equipment.

But old timers remembered the huge number of ancient shrines and temples and treasures from the earliest times which had been consumed. And thought the old plan was healthier because the winding narrow alleys provided many bits of shade whereas the new more open streets were more exposed.

Nonetheless, despite all Nero’s wise ordinances, his reputation still suffered. It was said that while the city burned he took to his private stage and performed a song about the Fall of Troy. Others said he had actively started the fire because he wanted to rebuild the city and name it after himself. To distract attention away from himself he blamed the Christians. This is so important I quote at length:

To suppress this rumour [that he started the fire] Nero fabricated scapegoats – and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judaea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. (All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capital.)

First, Nero had self-acknowledged Christians arrested. Then, on their information, large numbers of others were condemned – not so much for incendiarism as for their anti-social tendencies apparently the original Latin could also be translated ‘because the human race detested them’].

Their deaths were made farcical. Dressed in wild animals’ skins, they were torn to pieces by dogs, or crucified, or made into torches to be ignited after dark as substitutes for daylight. Nero provided his Gardens for the spectacle, and exhibited displays in the Circus, at which he mingled with the crowd – or stood in a chariot, dressed as a charioteer. Despite their guilt as Christians and the ruthless punishment it deserved, the victims were pitied. For it was felt that they were being sacrificed to one man’s brutality rather than to the national interest. (15.44)

Meanwhile Italy was ransacked for funds and all the provinces ruined by exactions to pay for the rebuilding of Rome. Gold statues and offerings were stolen and melted down. Agents were sent out to plunder Greece and Asia, emptying temples of all their valuables.

Seneca tried to avoid the unpopularity of being involved in any of this policy by asking leave to go to his country retreat. When this was forbidden he very publicly kept to his house, feigning illness. Rumour had it that a slave was despatched to poison him but Seneca forestalled all such efforts by living on fruit and running water.

A group of gladiators revolted at Praenaste and there was a naval disaster, caused by Nero ordering the fleet to return on a set date, when a storm drove it ashore at Cumae, destroying many ships. Many omens portended mighty changes!

Chapter 15 The Plot (65 AD)

Gaius Calpurnius Piso had going for him that he was a member of the aristocratic gens Calpurnii with an extensive network of influential connections; he was popular, he defended his fellow citizens in court; he was a loyal friend, affable to all including strangers; and he was tall and handsome. On the downside, he lacked seriousness and self control, was superficial, ostentatious and sometimes dissolute. But then, as Tacitus remarks in a telling comment:

Many people are fascinated by depravity and disinclined for austere morals on the throne.

Maybe the common people, then as now, enjoy royal gossip and identify with ‘bad’ behaviour. As Tacitus himself remarks at several points – people enjoy gossip and scandal (‘Discreditable versions are always popular’, p.376).

Tacitus describes in detail the growth of the conspiracy to assassinate Nero and replace him with Piso, the Pisonian Consipracy, listing the recruitment of the main conspirators, but then the problems: delay while they squabbled about where the murder should take place, and Piso’s fears that several equally well-qualified alternatives might replace him (accurately anticipating the anarchy of 69).

They decided to kill Nero at some games, in front of the crowd, but the night before, the lead conspirator, Flavius Scaevinus, had a banquet, freed all his favourite slaves, made his will and ordered a freedman, Milichus, to take his dagger to the sharpeners. This Milichus saw all these signs and nerved himself to go, next morning, to Nero’s gardens and ask for an interview with the emperor’s freedman and secretary.

After initial scepticism, Nero was persuaded, and suspects were brought in who, under terrible torture, implicated each other. The conspiracy unravelled. Men implicated their family and friends. One strand was the implication of Seneca, who probably wasn’t in the conspiracy, but Nero had wanted to get rid of for some time. On flimsy evidence an officer was sent to execute him. Seneca had time to address his household and tell them to follow his Stoic philosophy and staunch their tears. His wife insisted on dying with him and they both cut open the veins in their arms.

Seneca took some time to die, his blood flowing weakly, he ordered veins to also be opened at his ankles and behind his knees. He had time to dictate a dissertation (!). Seeing as he was not dying, he asked for poison (hemlock) to be administered, but this didn’t work, either. Then he was placed in a bath of warm water, which didn’t work. And then into ‘a vapour-bath, where he suffocated’. What is a vapour-bath?

Nero ordered Seneca’s wife’s wounds to be bound and she lived on for several years. Tacitus lists all the conspirators and their ends. The most famous one to posterity, beside Seneca, was Seneca’s nephew, the poet Lucan, who was just 25 and had joined the conspiracy because he was angry at Nero for blocking his career.

At least 41 individuals were accused, 19 senators, seven knights, 11 soldiers, and four women. 20 were executed or forced to commit suicide, 13 were sent into exile.

There was an outbreak of sycophancy with various senators calling for a thanksgiving, a Triumph, creation of a temple specifically to thank the gods for Nero’s survival and lots of other bum kissing.

Chapter 16 Innocent Victims

Nero believed the fantasies of a Carthaginian, Caesellius Bassus, who swore he had discovered the ancient treasure of Dido on his land and would give it to Nero. This encouraged the emperor to even more spendthrift behaviour, digging the nation deeper into debt.

Nero presided over the second five-yearly games and insisted on competing as a singer and lyre player. Tacitus echoes the claim made in Suetonius that audiences weren’t allowed to leave the theatre during Nero’s performances, and some fell sick and died, others were killed in the crush. He adds that Guards were stationed throughout the audience to cuff anyone who didn’t cheer loudly enough. Aristocrats such as Vespasian were reported for not cheering enthusiastically enough, but he was destined to survive and become emperor himself in 69.

Poppaea died. She was pregnant. In Tacitus’s account Nero, in a fit of anger, kicked her just once and that was enough (Suetonius gives the impression that Nero kicked her to death). Tacitus thinks it was an accident because a) he genuinely loved her b) he was desperate for a son and she was pregnant. Nero read her eulogy. She was buried in the Mausoleum Augustus built.

Nero continues enforcing the deaths of those he suspects, forcing the senate to denounce some of its own members. The gruesome triple suicide of Lucius Antistius Vetus, his daughter Antistia Pollitta and mother-in-law Sextia. Bum-licking toadyism reached new heights: one Servius Cornelius Orfitus suggested the names of the months should be changed to celebrate Nero’s family, so that April became ‘Neroneus’, May ‘Claudius’ and June ‘Germanicus’.

Campania was hit by a hurricane. Rome was hit by a plague. A disastrous fire at Lugdunum (modern Lyons) was alleviated when Nero assigned 4 million sesterces to its reconstruction (the same amount its people had contributed to Rome’s rebuilding after the fire). This kind of incident gives a welcome break from the hothouse, blood-soaked atmosphere of imperial politics, but also remind us that a lot of the political events were of sublime indifference to the 60 million or so citizens who just got on with their day-to-day lives, working, shopping, trading, eating, teaching children, managing households, across the vast expanse of the huge empire.

66 AD

A sordid conspiracy by banished Antistius Sosianus to alleviate his punishment by incriminating Publius Anteius and Marcus Ostorius Scapula, who paranoid Nero suspected, both of whom were forced to commit suicide. If this succession of worthy citizens who are snitched on by informers who pandered to Nero’s paranoia and jealousy of anyone richer than him gets a little wearing, Tacitus agrees:

Even if I were describing foreign wars and patriotic deaths, this monotonous series of events would have become tedious both for me and for my readers. For I should expect them to feel as surfeited as myself by the tragic sequence of citizen deaths – even if they had been honourable deaths. but this slavish passivity, this torrent of wasted bloodshed far from active service, wearies, depresses and paralyses the mind. (p.388; book 16, section 14).

Tacitus goes onto lament the death of the author, Petronius, devoting a page to his unconventional life, his dissipation, and witty popularity. Without trying Petronius was admitted to Nero’s inner circle and became his arbiter of taste. However, this inflamed Nero’s chief crony, Tigellinus, against him, and Tigellinus concocted the usual accusations, which easily triggered Nero to order his court arbiter’s death. Petronius opened his veins but continued attending a banquet and listening to light verse as he expired. Then he dictated a letter detailing all Nero’s sexual partners and perversions which he had sent to the emperor, who was shaken to see how much was known about him.

The final passage of the Annals describes yet another indictment of a good man, Thrasea, and his family, by the sycophantic toadies in the senate, inspired by Nero. Then the manuscript breaks off.

The missing portion of the work described the visit of King Tiridates to Rome, the start of the Jewish Revolt, Nero’s visit to Greece, the revolt of military commander Gaius Julius Vindex in Gaul, which triggers a general revolt against Nero and the selection by the senate of Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania, to replace Nero. Nero fled to the villa of a freed slave, Phaon, and there got slaves to help him commit suicide.

Thoughts

Suetonius’s Life of Nero is a more enjoyable read than the Tacitus. It’s shorter and more to the point. It goes into more detail about Nero’s addiction to singing, playing the lyre and chariot racing than Tacitus does, and presents a more coherent and persuasive profile of the emperor. Tacitus embeds all this in annals which report all the important events of each year so that the sheer welter of events becomes tiring and, as Tacitus himself concedes, towards the end, really wearing.

I suppose the Annals is a great work, but probably best read in chapters or sections: the cumulative effect of so many cruel murders, villainous informers, of so much slavish sycophancy to the emperor and the suicides of so many aristocrats, eventually becomes numbing.

Credit

Michael Grant’s fluent, energetic translation of Tacitus’s Annals was published by Penguin Books in 1956. References are to the revised 1971 edition, as reprinted in 1988.

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Complete list of my Roman reviews

The Life of Claudius by Suetonius

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the fourth Roman emperor. Born in 10 BC, Claudius ruled from the assassination of his predecessor Caligula, in 41, until his own death in 54, a total of 13 years.

Claudius was the son of Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (38 to 9 BC) and Antonia the Younger, the younger of two surviving daughters of Mark Antony and Octavia the Elder. He was born at Lugdunum (modern-day Lyons) in Roman Gaul, where his father was stationed as a military legate.

In his boyhood Claudius suffered an illness which left him with a limp and slight deafness. This led to him being ostracised by his family and excluded from public office (unlike most of his male relatives he didn’t hold any public office until he was allotted a consulship when his nephew became emperor in 37).

It was probably these infirmities which saved his life. Under the reigns of terror instituted by Tiberius (14 to 37) and Caligula (37 to 41) most of his extended family was executed. Claudius, by contrast, was not seen as a serious threat. In his Life of Caligula, Suetonius states that Caligula kept Claudius around as a laughing-stock (Caligula, chapter 23). When, to his own amazement, he was selected by the Praetorian Guard to replace Caligula, Claudius was the last surviving adult male of his family.

Claudius ruled effectively, though under continual threat from restive nobles. It was under Claudius that Britain was first invaded, conquered and settled by the Romans. (Julius Caesar had made a couple of brief incursions in 55 and 54 BC, fought a few battles then departed, leaving no lasting impact.)

When Claudius died at the age of 63, it was widely rumoured that he’d been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina the Younger. Agrippina wanted to secure the succession for her son, Lucius Domitius, whom Claudius had, at her bidding, adopted, before Claudius’s biological son (Britannicus) by his third wife (Messalina) could come of age. So Nero ascended the throne and the next year, 55, Britannicus died aged just 13, and all sources agree he was poisoned on Nero’s orders.

Suetonius’s life of Claudius

Roman texts were divided into short sections, sometimes called ‘chapters’ though most are less than a page long. Suetonius’s biography of the emperor Claudius is 46 sections long.

1. Claudius’s father, Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (38 to 9 BC), also called Drusus the Elder, was the son of Livia Drusilla. He was born just three months after her marriage to Augustus (i.e. Augustus married her when she was 6 months pregnant by her first husband, who he forced her to divorce – unless the child was Augustus’s all along, and he had been sleeping with Livia while she was married).

Drusus was a successful general, in charge of the war in Raetia and later in Germany, the first Roman general to sail the northern Ocean, and responsible for building the huge canals which bear his name to this day. He was awarded an ovation with the triumphal regalia and was named consul, but after he returned to his summer camp in northern Gaul, he died, aged just 29. His body was brought back to Rome amid widespread mourning, he was given a marble arch on the Appian Way, and the surname Germanicus for himself and his descendants.

He made no secret of wanting to restore the old republican form of government whenever possible.

Some think that this prompted the enmity of Augustus and even accuse Augustus of having him poisoned. But Suetonius thinks this unlikely because there is plenty of evidence that Augustus loved him dearly, named him joint-heir along with his (adopted) sons, and eulogised him warmly after his death.

Drusus had several children by the younger Antonia, but was survived by only three, Germanicus, Livilla and Claudius.

2. At birth, Claudius’s name was Tiberius Claudius Drusus. Later, on the adoption of his elder brother Germanicus into the Julian family, he took over the surname Germanicus.

Claudius lost his father when he was a baby and throughout his childhood and youth he suffered so severely from various obstinate disorders that the vigour of both his mind and his body was dulled, so that he was not thought capable of any public or private business.

For a long time, even after he reached the age of manhood, he remained in the charge of a guardian. Later Claudius complained that this man was a barbarian and a former chief of muleteers, whose sole purpose was punishing severely for any cause of all.

It was because of poor health that Claudius wore a cloak when he presided at the gladiatorial games which he and his brother gave in honour of their father. Such was the family’s embarrassment of him that on the day when he assumed the gown of manhood, instead of processing to the Capitol in a public procession, he was taken there in a litter in the middle of the night, with no escort.

3. Claudius early was interested in the liberal arts and published works in many genres. But he could not attain any public position.

His mother Antonia often called him ‘a monster of a man, a man Nature had begun but not finished’ and if she ever accused anyone of dullness, she used to say that they were ‘an even bigger fool than my son Claudius.’

Claudius’s grandmother, Augusta, always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely speaking to him, and reproving him in short, bitter letters.

When his sister Livilla heard that he would one day be emperor, she openly and loudly prayed that the Roman people would be spared such a cruel and undeserved fate.

4. Suetonius then quotes extensively from letters by Augustus to Livia saying something must be done about ‘the Claudius problem’, namely that his lack of soundness of mind and body risked making the entire imperial family a laughing stock. However, his letters also suggest that, when he had a quit chat with Claudius, he was surprised how sensible and dignified he was.

‘How in the world anyone who is so unclear in his conversation can speak with such clearness and propriety when he declaims, is more than I can understand.’

In the event, Augustus left him invested with no office other than the augural priesthood and didn’t even name him as one of his heirs, save in the third degree, and to a sixth part of his estate – among relatives so distant as to be virtual strangers.

5. When Claudius’s paternal uncle, Tiberius, assumed the throne, he gave him the consular regalia but refused to give him any other office.

So Claudius abandoned all hope of advancement and gave himself up to idleness, living sometimes in his house and gardens in the suburbs, sometimes at a villa in Campania. He hung out with the lowest of men and incurred criticism for drunkenness and gambling.

Yet somehow he retained the respect of the nobility and the public.

6. The equestrian order twice chose Claudius as their patron, to head a deputation on their behalf. They used to rise when he appeared at the public shows and put off their cloaks. The senate voted that he be made a special member of the priests of Augustus, who were usually chosen by lot. When he later lost his house by fire, the senate voted that it should be rebuilt at the public expense.

When Tiberius died (in 37) he named Claudius only among his heirs in the third degree, to a third part of his estate, although he did give him a legacy of about two million sesterces, and expressly commended him besides to the armies and to the senate and people of Rome.

7. It was only when his nephew, Caligula, came to power, that his uncle Claudius was awarded any significant office. Caligula made him consul, though admittedly only for two months.

It chanced that as he entered the Forum for the first time with the fasces, an eagle that was flying by alighted on his shoulder.

He was allotted a second consulship, to be held four years later, and several times he presided at the shows in place of Caligula, and was greeted by the people with cries of ‘Success to the emperor’s uncle!’ and with ‘All hail to the brother of Germanicus!’

8. None of which saved Claudius from constant insults. He’d arrive at dinner to find no place for him and have to wander round the dining-room. Whenever he went to sleep after dinner, which was a habit of his, he was pelted with the stones of olives and dates.

9. But Claudius also faced real dangers. He was almost deposed from his first consulship when he was slow in setting up statues of the emperor’s brothers, of Nero and Drusus.

After the conspiracy of Lepidus and Gaetulicus was discovered he was sent to Germany as one of the envoys to congratulate the emperor, but Caligula was furious that his uncle of all men had been sent to him, as if he were a child in need of a guardian. Some say Caligula had Claudius thrown into the river, clothes and all.

In the Senate he was humiliated by being ranked last to have his opinion asked.

10. Having spent most of his life putting up with humiliations like this, Claudius became emperor in his fiftieth year by a freak of fortune. When Caligula’s assassins shut out the crowd under pretence that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius was ousted with the rest and withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum. When rumour of the assassination spread Claudius hid behind the curtains on a nearby balcony.

As he cowered there, a common soldier, who was prowling about at random, saw his feet and, intending to ask who he was, pulled him out. But when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he was astonished when the soldier hailed him as emperor.

Then he took him to the rest of his comrades who were angry, confused and didn’t know what to do. These placed him in a litter and carried him to the army camp in a state of despair and terror. Here he spent the night among the sentries, full of doubt because the consuls, the senate and the city cohorts had taken possession of the Forum and the Capitol, and were determined to restore the republic.

When he was summoned to the Senate by the tribunes to give his advice on the situation, he sent word that he was being detained by force. But the Senate lost its chance by prevarication and argument among factions while the people, standing outside, called for one ruler and expressly named Claudius.

Learning of this, Claudius allowed the assembly of the soldiers to swear allegiance to him, and promised each man fifteen thousand sesterces. In doing so he was the first of the Caesars who resorted to bribery to secure the loyalty of the troops.

11. The first thing Claudius did was pass an act of oblivion for everything done and said in the confusion after the assassination, except for executing a few of the tribunes and centurions who he learned had called for his own death.

He then set about venerating the memories of his grandmother Livia and Augustus. He inaugurated annual games on his father’s birthday and for his (dead) mother a carriage to bear her image through the Circus and the surname of Augusta, which she had declined during her lifetime.

He took every opportunity of honouring his (dead) brother, Germanicus. He completed the marble arch to Tiberius near Pompey’s theatre, which had been voted some time before by the senate, but left unfinished.

He annulled all the acts of Caligula.

12. Claudius was modest and unassuming, refraining from taking the forename Imperator, refusing excessive honours, and passing over the betrothal of his daughter and the birthday of a grandson in with merely private ceremonies.

He recalled no one from exile except with the approval of the senate. He asked the consuls for permission to hold fairs on his private estates. He often appeared as one of the advisers at cases tried before the magistrates. When games were held he rose with the rest of the audience and showed his respect by acclamations and applause.

When the tribunes of the commons appeared before him as he sat upon the tribunal, he apologised to them because for lack of room he could not hear them unless they stood up.

By such conduct he won love and devotion in a short time. When it was erroneously reported that he had been ambushed and killed on a journey to Ostia, it triggered a riot and outpouring of anger against the senate and soldiers, until witnesses were brought to the rostra to assure the people that Claudius was safe.

13. Yet Claudius’s rule saw many threats: he was attacked by individuals, by a conspiracy, and finally by a civil war.

A commoner was caught near his bed-chamber in the middle of the night, dagger in hand. Two members of the equestrian order were found lying in wait for him in public places, one ready to attack him with a sword-cane as he came out of the theatre, the other with a hunting knife as he was sacrificing in the temple of Mars.

Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons of the orators Pollio and Messala, conspired to overthrow him, aided by a number of his own freedmen and slaves. [When you consider how wise and just Augustus was, and yet the final years of his rule were clouded by conspiracies, you realise there will always be men who want to overthrow the existing regime, for whatever purpose.]

The civil war was set on foot by Furius Camillus Scribonianus, governor of Dalmatia but his rebellion was put down within five days, since the legions which had changed their allegiance were turned from their purpose by superstitious fear for when the order was given to march, by some chance the eagles could not be adorned nor the standards pulled up and moved.

14. Claudius held four consulships in addition to his original one under Caligula. He administered justice most conscientiously both as consul and when out of office, even on his own anniversaries and those of his family, and sometimes even on festivals of ancient date and days of ill-omen.

He did not always follow the letter of the laws, but modified their severity or lenity in many cases according to his own notions of equity and justice; for he allowed a new trial to those who had lost their cases before private judges by demanding more than the law prescribed, while, overstepping the lawful penalty, he condemned to the wild beasts those who were convicted of especially heinous crimes.

15. In hearing and deciding cases Claudius showed a strange inconsistency of temper, for he was now careful and shrewd, sometimes hasty and inconsiderate, occasionally silly.

When a woman refused to recognise her son, the evidence on both sides was conflicting, he forced her to admit the truth by ordering her to marry the young man.

Whenever one party to a suit was absent, he was prone to decide in favour of the one who was present, without considering whether his opponent had failed to appear through his own fault or from a necessary cause.

On a man’s being convicted of forgery, someone cried out that his hands ought to be cut off, whereupon Claudius insisted that an executioner be summoned at once with knife and block.

In a case involving citizenship a fruitless dispute arose among the advocates as to whether the defendant ought to make his appearance in the toga or in a Greek mantle, and the emperor, with the idea of showing absolute impartiality, made him change his garb several times, according as he was accused or defended.

By such acts as these he so discredited himself that he was held in general and open contempt.

Suetonius drops in another personal anecdote, saying that he himself used to hear older men say that the pleaders took such advantage of Claudius’s good-nature, that they would not only call him back when he left the tribunal, but would catch hold of the fringe of his robe, and sometimes of his foot, and thus detain him.

Suetonius says it is a widely known story that a Roman knight who was tried on charge of improper conduct towards women cooked up by his enemies, upon seeing common prostitutes brought as witnesses against him, hurled his stylus and tablets in the emperor’s face with such force as to cut his cheek badly. [Suetonius doesn’t say whether he was punished for this outburst.]

16. Claudius also assumed the censorship which had long been discontinued, but in this office too he was variable and both his theory and his practice were inconsistent.

In his review of the knights he left off a young man of evil character on his own judgement. Another who was notorious for corruption and adultery he merely admonished to be more restrained. He removed the mark of censure affixed to one man’s name, at the request of his friends, but insisted that the mark of erasure remain visible. He struck from the list of jurors a man of high birth, a leading citizen of the province of Greece, because he did not know Latin, and even deprived him of the rights of citizenship. And he degraded many, some contrary to their expectation and on the novel charge that they had left Italy without consulting him and obtaining leave of absence.

When he attempted to degrade more he discovered that the snooping of his spies was often careless, because those he accused of celibacy, childlessness or lack of means were able to prove that they were married, or fathers or well-to‑do.

17. Claudius waged only one military campaign and that of little importance. When the senate voted him the triumphal regalia, thinking the honour beneath the imperial dignity and desiring the glory of a legitimate triumph, he chose Britain as the best place for gaining it, a land that had been attempted by no one since the Deified Julius and was just at that time in a state of rebellion because of the refusal to return certain deserters.

He led a force across the Channel and, without any battle or bloodshed, received the submission of a part of the island, returned to Rome within six months after leaving the city, and celebrated a triumph of great splendour.

18. Claudius always gave scrupulous attention to the care of the city and the supply of grain. On the occasion of a serious fire he paid the common people to work to put it out with his own money. When there was a bread shortage, he was caught by the mob and pelted with bread and abuse so that, from that moment on, he used every possible means to bring grain to Rome.

20. The public works which Claudius completed were great and essential rather than numerous. He completed an aqueduct begun by Caligula. He built an outlet of Lake Fucinus which was three miles in length, partly by levelling and partly by tunnelling a mountain, a work of great difficulty and requiring eleven years, although he had 30,000 men at work all the time without interruption.

He brought to the city on stone arches the cool and abundant founts of the Claudian aqueduct, one of which is called Caeruleus and the other Curtius and Albudignus, and at the same time the spring of the new Anio, distributing them into many beautifully ornamented pools.

He constructed the harbour at Ostia by building curving breakwaters on the right and left, while before the entrance he placed a mole in deep water. To give this mole a firmer foundation, he first sank the ship in which the great obelisk had been brought from Egypt, and then securing it by piles, built upon it a very lofty tower after the model of the Pharos at Alexandria, to be lighted at night and guide the course of ships.

21. Claudius very often distributed largess to the people. He also gave several splendid shows, some of a new kind and some revived from ancient times.

He opened the games at the dedication of Pompey’s theatre, which he had restored when it was damaged by a fire.

He also celebrated secular games, alleging that they had been given too early by Augustus and not reserved for the regular time.

He often gave games in the Vatican Circus, with a beast-baiting between every five races. The Great Circus he adorned with barriers of marble and gilded goals, whereas before they had been of tufa and wood, and assigned special seats to the senators, who had been in the habit of viewing the games with the rest of the people.

In addition to the chariot races he exhibited the game called Troy and also panthers, which were hunted down by a squadron of the praetorian cavalry under the lead of the tribunes and the prefect himself. And Thessalian horsemen who drive wild bulls all over the arena, leaping upon them when they are tired out and throwing them to the ground by the horns.

He gave many gladiatorial shows: one in yearly celebration of his accession, and one in the Saepta of the usual kind; another not in the regular list, short and lasting but a few days, to which he was the first to apply the name of sportula, because he proclaimed that he invited the people ‘as it were to an extempore meal, hastily prepared.’

He was familiar with the people, regularly addressing the audience and urging them to merriment, interspersing feeble jokes.

When he had granted the wooden sword to an essedarius for whose discharge four sons begged, and the act was received with loud and general applause, he at once circulated a note, pointing out to the people how greatly they ought to desire children, since they saw that they brought favour and protection even to a gladiator [an interesting commentary on the ongoing need to keep Rome’s population up which had so bothered Augustus 50 years earlier].

He staged a sea battle on the Fucine lake between a Sicilian and a Rhodian fleet, each numbering twelve triremes. The signal to commence was sounded on a horn by a silver Triton, which was raised from the middle of the lake by a mechanical device.

22. Claudius corrected various abuses, revived some old customs or even established new ones. He scrupulously observed the custom of having the praetor call an assembly and proclaim a holiday whenever there was an earthquake within the city, as well as that of offering up a supplication whenever a bird of ill-omen was seen on the Capitol.

23. The courts previously sat in a winter and a summer season; Claudius made them sit continuously.

He made a law that those who were banished from a province by its magistrates should also be debarred from Rome and from Italy. He created a new punishment whereby some were forbidden to go more than three miles outside of the city.

24. Claudius obliged the college of quaestors to give a gladiatorial show in place of paving the roads, then, depriving them of their official duties at Ostia and in Gaul, he restored to them the charge of the treasury of Saturn, which had in the meantime been administered by praetors, or by ex-praetors, as in our time.

He gave the triumphal regalia to Silanus, his daughter’s affianced husband, who was still a boy, and conferred them on older men so often and so readily, that a joint petition was circulated in the name of the legions, praying that those emblems be given the consular governors at the same time with their armies, to prevent their seeking pretexts for war.

25. Claudius rearranged the military career of the knights, assigning a division of cavalry after a cohort, and next the tribunate of a legion. He also instituted a series of military positions and a kind of fictitious service, which is called ‘supernumerary’ and could be performed in absentia and in name only.

When certain men were exposing their sick and worn out slaves on the Island of Aesculapius because of the trouble of treating them, Claudius decreed that all such slaves were free, and that if they recovered, they should not return to the control of their master; but if anyone preferred to kill such a slave rather than to abandon him, he was liable to the charge of murder.

Those who usurped the privileges of Roman citizenship he executed in the Esquiline field. He restored to the senate the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia, which Tiberius had taken into his own charge. He deprived the Lycians of their independence because of deadly intestine feuds, and restored theirs to the Rhodians, since they had given up their former faults.

He allowed the people of Ilium perpetual exemption from tribute, on the ground that they were the founders of the Roman race.

Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.

He allowed the envoys of the Germans to sit in the orchestra, led by their naïve self-confidence; for when they had been taken to the seats occupied by the common people and saw the Parthian and Armenian envoys sitting with the senate, they moved of their own accord to the same part of the theatre, protesting that their merits and rank were no whit inferior.

He abolished the cruel and inhuman religion of the Druids among the Gauls, which under Augustus had merely been prohibited to Roman citizens. He tried to transfer the Eleusinian rites from Attica to Rome.

In this and many other acts he acquired the reputation of being dictated to by his wives and freedmen, since he nearly always acted in accordance with their interests and desires.

26. Claudius had four wives. He was betrothed several times before marrying Plautia Urgulanilla, whose father had been honoured with a triumph. Then Aelia Paetina, daughter of an ex-consul. He divorced both these, Paetina for trivial offences, Urgulanilla because of her scandalous lewdness and the suspicion of murder.

Then he married Valeria Messalina, daughter of his cousin Messala Barbatus. But when he learned that, besides other shameful and wicked deeds, she had bigamously married Gaius Silius, he put her to death and declared before the praetorian guard that, because his marriages did not turn out well, he would remain a widower.

Nonetheless, he toyed with marrying Paetina, whom he had formerly discarded, or Lollia Paulina, who had been the wife of Caligula.

But his affections were finally captured by Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus and so, at the next meeting of the senate, he sponsored some senators to propose that he be compelled to marry Agrippina ‘for the interest of the State’, and he married her with hardly a single day’s delay.

27. He had children by three of his wives: by Urgulanilla, Drusus and Claudia; by Paetina, Antonia; by Messalina, Octavia and a son, at first called Germanicus and later Britannicus.

He lost Drusus just before he came to manhood, for he was strangled by a pear which he had thrown into the air in play and caught in his open mouth. A few days before this he had betrothed him to the daughter of Sejanus. Claudia was the offspring of his freedman Boter, and although she was born within five months after the divorce and he had begun to rear her, yet he ordered her to be cast out naked at her mother’s door and disowned.

He gave Antonia in marriage to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and later to Faustus Sulla, both young men of high birth, and gave Octavia to his stepson Nero, after she had previously been betrothed to Silanus.

Britannicus was born on the twenty-second day of his reign and in his second consulship. When he was still very small, Claudius would often take him in his arms and commend him to the assembled soldiers, and to the people at the games, holding him in his outstretched hands to the applauding crowd.

Of his sons-in‑law he adopted Nero; Pompeius and Silanus he not only declined to adopt, but put to death.

28. Suetonius lists some of Claudius’s favourite freedmen. Most of all he was devoted to his secretary Narcissus and his treasurer Pallas, and he gladly allowed them to be honoured in addition by a decree of the senate, not only with immense gifts, but even with the insignia of quaestors and praetors. He permitted them to amass such wealth by plunder, that when he once complained of the low state of his funds, the witty answer was made that he would have enough and to spare, if he were taken into partnership by his two freedmen.

29. Suetonius repeats the claim that Claudius was wholly under the control of these freedmen and his wives, playing the part, not of a prince, but of a servant lavishing honours, the command of armies, pardons or punishments, as they wishes.

It was at their wishes that he put to death his father-in‑law Appius Silanus and the two Julias, daughters of Drusus and Germanicus, on an unsupported charge and giving them no opportunity for defence. Also Gnaeus Pompeius, the husband of his elder daughter, and Lucius Silanus who was betrothed to his younger one.

He inflicted the death penalty on 35 senators and more than 300 Roman knights with such indifference, that when a centurion in reporting the death of an ex-consul said that his order had been carried out, he replied that he had given no order; but he nevertheless approved the act, since his freedmen declared that the soldiers had done their duty in hastening to avenge their emperor without instructions.

30. Claudius possessed majesty and dignity of appearance, but only when he was standing still or sitting, and especially when he was lying down; for he was tall but not slender, with an attractive face, becoming white hair, and a full neck.

But when he walked, his weak knees gave way under him (in 21 Suetonius describes it as ‘his ridiculous tottering gait’).

He had many disagreeable traits: his laughter was unseemly and his anger still more disgusting for he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose. He stammered and his head was very shaky at all times, but especially when he made the least exertion.

31. Though before ascending the throne Claudius’s health had been bad, it was excellent while he was emperor, except for attacks of heartburn, which he said all but drove him to suicide.

32. Claudius gave frequent and grand dinner parties, as a rule in spacious places, where 600 guests were often entertained at one time.

He gave a banquet close to the outlet of the Fucine Lake and was well-nigh drowned, when the water was let out with a rush and deluged the place.

He always invited his own children to dinner along with the sons and daughters of distinguished men, having them sit at the arms of the couches as they ate, after the old time custom.

He is even said to have considered an edict allowing the privilege of breaking wind quietly or noisily at table, having learned of a man who ran some risk by restraining himself through modesty.

33. Claudius was eager for food and drink at all times and in all places. Once when he was holding court in the forum of Augustus and had caught the savour of a meal which was preparing for the Salii in the temple of Mars hard by, he left the tribunal, went up where the priests were, and took his place at their table.

He hardly ever left the dining-room until he was stuffed and soaked. Then he went to sleep at once, lying on his back with his mouth open, and a feather was put down his throat to relieve his stomach.

He slept but little at a time, for he was usually awake before midnight; but he would sometimes drop off in the daytime while holding court and could hardly be roused when the advocates raised their voices for the purpose.

He was immoderate in his passion for women, but wholly free from unnatural vice.

He was greatly devoted to gaming, even publishing a book on the art, and he actually used to play while driving, having the board so fitted to his carriage as to prevent his game from being disturbed.

34. That Claudius was of a cruel and bloodthirsty disposition was shown in matters great and small:

He always exacted examination by torture and the punishment of parricides at once and in his presence.

When he was at Tibur and wished to see an execution in the ancient fashion, no executioner could be found after the criminals were bound to the stake, whereupon he sent to fetch one from the city and continued to wait for him until nightfall.

At any gladiatorial show, either his own or another’s, he gave orders that even those who fell accidentally should be slain, in particular the net-fighters, so that he could watch their faces as they died.

He took such pleasure in the combats with wild beasts and of those who fought at noonday that he would go down to the arena at daybreak and after dismissing the people for luncheon at midday, he would keep his seat and in addition to the appointed combatants, he would for trivial and hasty reasons match others, even of the carpenters, the assistants, and men of that class, if any automatic device, or pageant, or anything else of the kind, had not worked well. He even forced one of his pages to enter the arena just as he was, in his toga.

35. Claudius was most famous, though, for timidity and suspicion.

He never ventured to go to a banquet without being surrounded by guards with lances and having his soldiers wait upon him in place of the servants.

He never visited a man who was ill without having the patient’s room examined beforehand and his pillows and bed-clothing felt over and shaken out.

When Camillus began his coup he wrote Claudius a threatening letter telling him to retire to private life if he wanted to live and Claudius was so timorous that he called together the leading men and asked their advice about complying.

36. After the man with a dagger was caught near his person, Claudius summoned the senate in haste and bewailed his lot in tears. Coward.

When he thought Messalina’s lover Silius was planning a coup, he ran off to the army base, doing nothing all the way but ask whether his throne was secure.

[When you compare this behaviour with that of Sulla and Marius or Caesar and Pompey, it is laughable, pathetic.]

37. No suspicion was too trivial to drive him on to precaution and vengeance.

When Messalina and Narcissus had put their heads together to destroy him, they agreed on their parts and the latter rushed into his patron’s bed-chamber before daybreak in pretended consternation, declaring that he had dreamed that Appius Silanus had made an attack on the emperor. Then Messalina, with assumed surprise, declared that she had had the same dream for several successive nights. A little later, as the conspirators had arranged, Appius, who had received orders the day before to come at that time, was reported to be forcing his way in, as proving the conspirators’ dreams. And so Claudius ordered his immediate accusation and death. Then recounted the whole story to the senate next day and thanked the freedman for watching over his emperor’s safety even in his sleep.

38. Claudius knew he was quick to anger and resentment and excused both in an edict. Suetonius gives a list of his rash acts, generally punishing people for minor offences.

In some speeches Claudius declared that he had purposely feigned stupidity under Caligula in order to survive. This convinced no one and an anonymous book was published called ‘The Elevation of Fools’ arguing that that no-one feigned folly.

39. People were astonished by Claudius’s forgetfulness. Shortly after having his third wife, Messalina, put to death, he took his place at the table and asked where the empress was.

He caused many of those he had condemned to death to be summoned the very next day to consult with him or game with him, and sent a messenger to upbraid them for being sleepy-heads when they didn’t appear.

Just before his adoption of Nero, as if it were not bad enough to adopt a stepson when he had a grown-up son of his own, he publicly declared more than once that no-one had ever been taken into the Claudian family by adoption.

40. He often showed such heedlessness in word and act that one would suppose that he did not know or care to whom, with whom, when, or where he was speaking. Every hour he made unwise or tactless remarks.

41. He began to write a history in his youth with the encouragement of Livy and the help of Sulpicius Flavius. But when he gave his first reading to a large audience, he had difficulty in finishing, since he more than once threw cold water on his own performance. For at the beginning of the reading the breaking down of several benches by a fat man raised a laugh, and even after the disturbance was quieted, Claudius could not keep from recalling the incident and renewing his guffaws.

Even while emperor he wrote a good deal and gave constant recitals through a professional reader.

He began his history with the death of the dictator Caesar, but passed to a later period and took a fresh start at the end of the civil war, realising that he was not allowed to give a frank or true account of the earlier times, since he was often taken to task both by his mother and his grandmother.

He left two books of the earlier history, but forty-one of the later one.

He also composed an autobiography in eight books, lacking rather in good taste than in style, as well as a ‘Defence of Cicero against the Writings of Asinius Gallus’, a work of no little learning.

He invented three new letters and added them to the alphabet, maintaining that they were greatly needed. He published a book on their theory when he was still in private life, and when he became emperor had no difficulty in bringing about their general use. These characters may still be seen in numerous books and in inscriptions on public buildings.

42. Claudius studied Greek which he publicly declared superior to Latin. He often replied to Greek envoys in the senate in a set speech. He quoted many Homeric lines from the tribunal.

He wrote historical works in Greek, 20 books of Etruscan History and eight of Carthaginian. Because of these works there was added to the old Museum at Alexandria a new one called after his name where it was required that his Etruscan History should be read each year from beginning to end, and in the other his Carthaginian, by various readers in turn, in the manner of public recitations.

43. Towards the end of his life Claudius repented his marriage with Agrippina and his adoption of Nero. For example when he was praised for his judgement in the trial of a woman for adultery, he declared that it had been his destiny, also, to have wives who were all adulterous but who went unpunished.

Meeting Britannicus, he hugged him close and urged him to grow up and receive from his father an account of all that he had done, adding in Greek, ‘He who dealt the wound will heal it.’

He expressed his intention of giving Britannicus the gown of manhood, since his stature justified it though he was still young, adding that: ‘The Roman people may at last have a genuine Caesar’.

44. Not long afterwards Claudius made his will and sealed it with the seals of all the magistrates but before he could go any farther he was cut short by Agrippina, who was being accused by increasing numbers of informers.

It is the general belief that Claudius was poisoned, but by whom is disputed. Some say that it was his taster, the eunuch Halotus, as he was banqueting on the Citadel with the priests. Others say that at a family dinner Agrippina served the poison to him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish which he was extravagantly fond of.

Reports also differ as to what followed. Many say that as soon as he swallowed the poison he became speechless and then suffered excruciating pain all night, dying just before dawn. Some say that he first fell into a stupor, then vomited up the whole contents of his overloaded stomach, and was given a second dose, perhaps in a gruel, under pretence that he must be refreshed with food after his exhaustion, or administered in a syringe, as if he were suffering from a surfeit and required relief by that form of evacuation as well.

45. Claudius’s death was kept quiet until all the arrangements were made about the succession. Accordingly, vows were offered for his safety as if he were still ill, and the farce was kept up by bringing in comic actors, under pretence that he had asked to be entertained in that way.

He died on the third day before the Ides of October in the sixty-fourth year of his age and the fourteenth of his reign (in 54 AD). He was buried with regal pomp and enrolled among the gods, an honour neglected and finally annulled by Nero, but later restored to him by Vespasian.

46. There were, of course, omens foretelling Claudius’s death:

the rise of a long-haired star, commonly called a comet
the striking of his father Drusus’s tomb by lightning
the fact that many magistrates of all ranks had died that same year

There are indications that he suspected his approaching end: when he was appointing the consuls, he made no appointment beyond the month when, it turned out, he died. On his last appearance in the senate, after earnestly exhorting his children to harmony, he begged the members to watch over the tender years of both. And in his last sitting on the tribunal he declared more than once that he had reached the end of a mortal career, although all who heard him prayed that the omen might be averted.

Summary

One has the vague idea that Claudius was a huge relief after the madness of Caligula, but Suetonius goes out of his way to emphasise that Claudius, just as much as his predecessor, enjoyed watching people being tortured or forced to fight to the death in the arena and ordered the execution of senators and knights – while at the same time being a cowardly pawn of his scheming wife and freedmen.

In other words, he was still a pitiful falling-off after the ability and honour and sheer competence of Julius Caesar or Augustus: only the fact that he was bookended by Caligula and Nero makes Claudius look good.

Credit

Robert Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius was published by Penguin in 1957. A revised translation by Classicist Michael Grant, more faithful to the Latin original, was published in 1979. A further revised edition was published in 1989 with an updated bibliography. I read it in parallel with the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation which is available online.

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The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus – 2

Introduction

Part two: Claudius and Nero

Claudius (reigned 41 to 54)

Chapter 9 The Fall of Messalina

47 AD

48 AD

Chapter 10 The Mother of Nero (Agrippina)

50 AD

51 AD

52 AD

53 AD

54 AD – Murder of Claudius

Chapter 11 The Fall of Agrippina

55 AD – Murder of Britannicus

56 AD

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58 AD

59 AD – Murder of Agrippina

Chapter 12 Nero and his Helpers

60 AD

61 AD – Boudicca’s revolt

62 AD

Chapter 13 Eastern Settlement

63 AD

Chapter 14 The Burning of Rome

64 AD

Chapter 15 The Plot (65 AD)

Chapter 16 Innocent Victims

66 AD

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The Life of Claudius by Suetonius

Suetonius’s life of Claudius

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