The Twelve Caesars (23 page)

Suetonius exploits the corollary to this puzzling and extraordinary interlude to illustrate Claudius’ absent-mindedness: the emperor, who does not respond to news of his wife’s death
other than by requesting more wine, ‘asked shortly after taking his place at table why the empress did not come’.

Claudius was months short of his fifty-seventh birthday. In contrast to earlier periods of his life, the first seven years of his principate had seen a marked stabilization in
his physical health (which may suggest a psychosomatic aspect to his illness); it was now that the period of deterioration began. Until now there had been notable successes. Aulus Plautius’
campaign in southern England had brooked no resistance in claiming a fabled new province for the Empire. In the triumph voted to him by the senate the following year, Claudius had briefly enjoyed
intimations of that glory once associated with his father and brother; coins depicted images of a fallen Britannia. Similarly successful were early campaigns on the German frontier (against the
Chauci and the Chatti) and Suetonius Paulinus’ campaign in Africa (for which the senate also voted Claudius a triumph:
on that occasion he demurred). Largely without
bloodshed he had extended Roman citizenship in the provinces. He had rebuilt the Circus Maximus and the Theatre of Pompey and celebrated these public works with lavish unveiling ceremonies. He had
commissioned the draining of the Fucine Lake in an attempt to increase available arable land. At the unveiling of the new harbour at Ostia, Pliny records, the assembled crowds were treated to the
unlikely sight of the emperor leading an attack on a killer whale. The animal had become trapped in sandbanks. Claudius ordered that nets be strung across the harbour mouth. He then boarded a ship
in the company of the Praetorian Guards and exhorted them to action as they showered the stranded animal with lances, to the delight of the viewing public.

On the debit side, he had failed to overcome that senatorial antipathy which had greeted his accession. Despite his much-vaunted respect for the senate, his paranoia in the face of conspiracies
real or imaginary had resulted in frequent executions. Claudius had also persistently perpetuated that process of senatorial marginalization which had been a feature of all his predecessors’
reigns. Dispensing with consultation in several areas of government, he had organized the imperial administration into a number of informal ministries, each under the control of one of his own
freedmen: Narcissus, his secretary, the minister of letters; Pallas, the finance minister; Kallistos, who helped Claudius with judicial matters; and Polybius, to whom Seneca said, ‘You owe
the whole of yourself to Caesar’, who effectively controlled imperial appointments but was nominally minister of culture and the emperor’s librarian. The loyalty of freedmen, as Seneca
indicated, was to themselves and Claudius alone. It was not a recipe guaranteed to garner senatorial good graces and it gains short shift in surviving sources. Suetonius regards it as part of a
larger pattern
of malign influence which characterizes the entirety of Claudius’ principate: ‘almost the whole conduct of his reign [was] dictated not so much by
his own judgement as that of his wives and freedmen, since he nearly always acted in accordance with their interests and desires.’ In the ancient sources, this is central to any assessment of
Claudius’ reign: it underpins his reputation for folly and injudiciousness. It is an unfair dismissal, shaped at least in part by succeeding events. For the most powerful influence of
Claudius’ principate was Agrippina the Younger: her will to power was of an indomitability Claudius could not resist. And Agrippina was the mother of the emperor Nero. Susceptibility is a
human frailty. In those writers we consider ‘primary’ witnesses, among them Suetonius and Tacitus, that susceptibility by which Claudius overlooked the claims to the throne of his own
son Britannicus in favour of his stepson Nero acquires a quasi-criminality in the light of aberrances to come.

A competition. The competitors the emperor’s freedmen. The prize a bride for Claudius and untrammelled influence for the winner. Three competitors, Narcissus, Kallistos
and Pallas, each with their own candidate for the
princeps
’ shaking hand. Narcissus favoured Claudius’ former wife, Aelia Paetina; Kallistos backed Gaius’ ex-wife, Lollia
Paulina. But it was the judgement of Pallas which prevailed. The woman who became Claudius’ fourth wife, after an adjustment to the incest laws, was his thirty-something niece Agrippina the
Younger, youngest daughter of Claudius’ brother Germanicus (hero and martyr) and Agrippina the Elder (heroine and martyr) and a great-granddaughter of Augustus. Among the baggage she brought
to the marriage was an upbringing scarred by family
feuding – and her son Domitius Ahenobarbus. Tactfully, soldiers of the Praetorian Guard overlooked Claudius’
suggestion after Messalina’s death that they kill him if he decided to marry again: they may have been won over by Agrippina’s Julian credentials and upright reputation compared with
Messalina’s lurid disgrace. Flirtation played its part in Agrippina’s winning suit: Suetonius describes her as ensnaring the emperor with her wiles (kisses and endearments), a
suggestion which raises questions about the role of Pallas’ pimping and, by extension, the veracity of the literary tradition of a three-way race masterminded by the freedmen.

But what sex was to Messalina, so the story goes, power was to Agrippina. She was not distracted by bodily appetites: arrogance and an undeviating focus steadied her performance. She engineered
the exile of her rival Lollia Paulina and subsequently her suicide, and banished one Calpurnia, whose good looks had momentarily turned Claudius’ head. She also rewarded Pallas by becoming
his mistress. He repaid the compliment by suggesting on Agrippina’s behalf that Claudius adopt Domitius Ahenobarbus. In 50 the emperor complied, winning votes of thanks in the senate for his
misjudgement. The adopted Domitius Ahenobarbus changed his name to Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar. Agrippina became the first wife of a living emperor to be styled Augusta; her public
prominence increased accordingly. Nero took the
toga virilis
, was nominated
princeps iuventutis
(‘Prince of Youth’), and, in 53, married Claudius’ daughter Octavia.
For Britannicus, an intelligent boy who, unlike his father, saw the way the wind was blowing, the outlook was bleak. Even his slaves were taken from him. As a final indignity, his
‘brother’ Nero buggered him. How Claudius envisaged his blood son’s incorporation into Agrippina’s scheme is not clear: Nero was adopted in the first instance as a guardian
for Britannicus, a fiction of short duration. After long years outside the fold, Agrippina’s pursuit of her personal agenda was systematic and undeviating, ‘a
rigorous, almost masculine despotism’, in Tacitus’ assessment. Like Messalina before her, she played on Claudius’ horror of conspiracy as a means of eliminating rivalry. Unlike
Messalina, she never lost her head. At the critical moment, she acted with ruthless decision.

‘Careless talk costs lives,’ posters once admonished. Too late would Claudius learn the truth of that wartime injunction. He was ageing quickly. There had been signs
of a slackening of his faculties, weakness his new wife seized upon to consolidate her position and extend her sphere of influence. Claudius had announced to his freedmen ‘that it had been
his destiny... to have wives who were all unchaste, but not unpunished’. Then in public he gave signs once again of favouring Britannicus over Nero. These were dangerous indiscretions in 54.
Agrippina was prepared to countenance neither her own punishment nor Nero’s disenfranchisement from the purple. She acted swiftly and with deadly resolve. She poisoned Claudius with mushrooms
and gruel, assisted by a convicted poisoner called Locusta, Halotus the eunuch taster and a doctor lacking scruples named Xenophon. Locusta poisoned the mushrooms, which Halotus gave to the
emperor. At first diarrhoea saved Claudius – that or his habitual drunkenness. With the mushrooms expelled or otherwise ejected, Xenophon administered a second draught in a bowl of gruel, or
on the tip of a feather inserted into the sleeping emperor’s throat. It was a poison chosen with care, neither too fast nor too slow in action. And on the second occasion it worked.

But posterity was not hoodwinked. Agrippina’s murder of Claudius as Britannicus’ majority loomed transformed her into the quintessence of the scheming
stepmother. In time her villainy was matched only by that of the son she served. She would pay for the crime of regicide. ‘Never yet has anyone exercised for good ends the power obtained by
crime,’ Tacitus commented in a different context.
¹⁶
So, in Nero’s case, it would prove to be. By then Agrippina had completed the hat-trick: sister, wife and mother of men who ruled the
world. In doing so, she revealed another secret of the principate: that the person of the
princeps
could be a conduit for the ambition of third parties. It was a dangerous development.
Especially, in Roman eyes, when that person was a woman. The casual reader does not doubt that Agrippina murdered Claudius: the historical sources come too close to consensus for refutation. It is
a tale spiced by misogyny, by sexual politics, by fears of a world turned upside down, by the sensationalism of the natural order subverted. It is the story of an emperor turned lightning
conductor. As we will discover, it was an appropriate introduction to the reign of Claudius’ successor.