41 A busy day in Rome
One of the cleverest twists in historical fiction was achieved by Robert Graves in his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. It was his literary conceit that Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the fourth emperor of Rome, was not the bumbling fool that historians portrayed but rather a clever survivor and acute observer of murderous imperial politics. On this day in 41 A.D. Claudius succeeded to the throne after the death of the incumbent, the mad Gaius “Caligula”.
Caligula (b. 12 A.D.) was a very bad fellow indeed. His accession to power in 37 was a popular one as his predecessor Tiberius had turned paranoid and cruel and the young man was the descendant of both Caesar Augustus and Mark Antony. After a few months of stability, Caligula began to murder family members, Senators, and military officers and to squander public funds on vast and useless projects. He began to think himself divine and demanded to be worshipped – previous emperors had been regarded as gods only after their deaths. He awarded himself a triumphal parade for having vanquished the ocean, committed incest with his sisters, and is said to have thrown spectators in the arena to be killed by wild animals when a shortage of prisoners had spoiled the show. When members of the political class began to fear for their lives, they joined in a plot to assassinate Caligula whom they stabbed to death; his wife and daughter were also murdered. The Praetorian Guard took revenge on the conspirators. When one of the guardsmen discovered Caligula’s uncle, the last male of the Julio-Claudian line, hiding behind the curtain it seemed they had found a suitable successor.
Claudius was by this time in his 50s; he limped and stuttered and was widely considered to be a harmless fool, which probably saved him from deadly court intrigues. He was happy to have been spared by the Guard, promptly granted them bonuses and ordered the execution of the assassins. Claudius’s reign was generally successful – Rome expanded militarily while the imperial bureaucracy and tax collecting powers were made more efficient. The emperor’s personal life, however, was a disaster. During the reign of Caligula, Claudius had unwisely married the fifteen-year-old beauty Messalina. The young woman turned out to be promiscuous on an industrial scale and plotted against him, forcing the poor fellow to order her death. His fourth and final wife, Agrippina, ended the farce by poisoning him to put her son Nero on the throne.