A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond

Author:Anthony Blond [Blond, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472103628
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2015-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

CLAUDIUS

Claudius had more than one reason for keeping out of the way when he heard that his nephew, the Emperor Caligula, had been assassinated, just after one o’clock on 24 January AD 41.

He had left the Games to go to lunch, before Caligula, with two senators who may or may not have been in the plot, and would have heard the rumpus below. If he had been complicit – and historians still disagree – Claudius might have been in danger from the Emperor’s enraged German bodyguard, if not, from the assassins, young nobs with no clear plan, save that the death of an Emperor was always, in the patrician mind, an opportunity to restore the Republic. So Claudius, who never pretended to be a hero, hid himself, but not very successfully. Maybe the Praetorian who spotted an expensive pair of sandals peeping from behind a curtain and discovered him – crying, ‘I have found a Germanicus!’ – did not have to search too hard. This officer, one Gratus, was a member of an élite, whose high pay and perquisites would be at risk were there not an Emperor in Rome, so he held on to this gibbering middle-aged man, comforted him, saluted him imperator and ordered a litter to convey him to the safety of the Praetorian barracks about three kilometres away.

There Claudius stayed, a ‘captive’ he said, but willing to be drafted, using a technique described by his most recent biographer as ‘disreputable, essentially infantile, but useful and adopted by others – by Henry II [of England for the murder of Beckett] and Elizabeth I [for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots] against internal threats (1170 and 1587) and by Reagan in the USA against Iran and Nicaragua – which consisted of allowing others to act or engineering them into it, while the principle remains “ignorant” of what is going on. Thus servants or subordinates have to take responsibility, eschewing the defence of superior orders.’ This process, which sounds so complicated, was invoked by Claudius, considered so simple-minded, in a matter of hours to make himself Emperor. However it happened, and the main authorities have different versions – to Suetonius he remains an idiot, to Josephus, inept and manipulated by that great family friend, Herod Agrippa (who had buried Caligula in a shallow grave) – it did happen, and forty-eight hours after he had been taken off to the barracks, the same Praetorians escorted him to the Palatine Hill, where he was invested with all the powers accorded to his predecessors.

The night of the assassination, chatting in the mess over a jar or two – if Claudius remained sober, it was the only night of his life, including his last, that he had – Claudius had promised a donative of 15,000 to 20,000 sesterces per guardsman and pro-rata for the officers. This enormous and unpredecented sum riveted the Praetorian Guard to his side. Each needed the other, the Praetorians had to have an Emperor and though Claudius was

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