The Twelve Caesars (22 page)

Visitors to the palace, regardless of the nature of their business, were rigorously searched. Only towards the end of his reign did he permit a less intimate frisking of women
and children. Conscious that he owed his throne to the simple fact of physical survival, ever mindful of the swingeing depredations to Augustus’ family tree of the previous two reigns, and
apprised, from his reading of history, of the vulnerability of prominent lives, Claudius’ anxiety in the face of possible attack was extreme. Perhaps the nature of his nervous condition
exacerbated his response. After an equestrian was discovered in the Temple of Mars armed with a hunting knife while Claudius sacrificed, he tearfully begged the senate’s protection,
proclaiming with purple pathos that there was no safety for him anywhere. We need not doubt Claudius’ sincerity – nor in several cases the sincere intent of the instances of opposition
which punctuate his rule from the outset: the suspected conspiracy of Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, confirmed by Suetonius and Dio; the unnamed equestrian who lay in wait for Claudius
outside the theatre brandishing a sword-stick; the man who broke into the palace at night and, dagger in hand, found his way to Claudius’ bedchamber.

Of greater significance both to Claudius’ future outlook and, given the nature of his response, to attitudes to his principate among senatorial circles was the
attempted uprising in 42 of Lucius Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus, governor of Dalmatia, which Suetonius described as a rebellion amounting to civil war. This five-day conspiracy of senators who
the sources claim as former potential successors to Gaius, chief among them Scribonianus himself and Annius Vinicianus, collapsed, Dio asserts, because the Dalmatian legions, ‘when
Scribonianus held out to them the hope of seeing the Republic restored and promised to give back to them their ancient freedom, suspected that they should have trouble and strife once more, and
would therefore no longer listen to him.’
⁹
Claudius duly rewarded the legions with the name ‘Claudian, Loyal and Patriotic’ and further gifts of money,
¹⁰
sagaciously blind to the
element of pragmatism that had governed their actions and the decisive role of ominous weather conditions. So far, so good. But in his determination to stamp out lingering embers of
Scribonianus’ revolt, he embarked on something like a witch-hunt, which offered informers a bonanza and resulted in large numbers of executions, women as well as men in Dio’s account.
The repressiveness of Claudius’ reprisals disconcerted those concerned most nearly, namely Roman senators and their families, precisely that group which for the past year had demonstrated
reservations about Claudian rule. In a response which extended to denying the condemned even ordinary funeral rites, Claudius could no longer lay claim to moderation: although she was ultimately
pardoned, a wife called Cloatilla found herself on trial for burying her husband.
¹¹
It was vindictive and petty-minded, closer to Gaius’ model of leadership than Augustus’, and gave rise
to rumours of a ‘cruel and bloodthirsty disposition’ which revelled, among other diversions, in scenes of torture and execution.

Unsuccessful it may have been, but Claudius was unsettled by Scribonianus’ conspiracy. It indicated the extent of personal dissatisfaction with his rule, and the
failure of his policy, in the face of senatorial intransigence, of legitimizing his claim to power by emphasizing family connections. The wholly Claudian Claudius had set in motion the process of
awarding divine honours to his grandmother Livia, wife of the adopted Julian Augustus, and in addition to games given in memory of his father Drusus, had similarly honoured his mother Antonia,
herself Augustus’ niece. Early coin issues reiterated this litany of distinguished and useful descent, commemorating Drusus, Antonia and the Divine Augustus. It was unavoidable, given the
nature of Claudius’ claim to the throne. It was evidently not enough.

But Claudius was not insensitive to the feelings of the senate. An assiduous (even officious) jurist, when it suited him he cultivated an illusion of something approaching
stakeholder government. He requested the senate to voice independent judgements, this insistence on the appearance of free-thinking his own version of Augustus’ ‘collaboration’ of
princeps
and magistrates. Punctiliousness in the matter of traditional courtesies created that ersatz equality by which he meant to woo senators, etiquette in the service of deception. He
avoided the bulldozer approach of his nephew Gaius: his intention was never Eastern-style monarchy. To this end he overruled the senate’s proposed awards following the birth of his only son
three weeks after his accession; Claudius’ third wife, Valeria Messalina, was not created Augusta nor did the couple’s son, afterwards called Britannicus, receive the honorific
‘Augustus’. Such resilience in the face of apparent senatorial sycophancy
(whatever the truth of that body’s feelings) countered claims of tyranny. It also
attempted to reassure Romans that the role of the emperor’s wife was appropriately circumscribed. This too was a deceit.

Claudius had had two previous wives before his marriage to Valeria Messalina (he had also been engaged on a further two occasions: his second would-be bride died on their wedding day). His
divorce of his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla included charges of adultery and sensational, if unconfirmed, rumours of murder: not of Claudius but of Plautia’s sister-in-law. The
circumstances of that death – a fatal fall from a window – were sufficiently provocative to necessitate the involvement of the emperor Tiberius. Claudius’ second wife, Aelia
Paetina, was a connection of Sejanus. Their marriage was of relatively short duration, its purpose presumably negated by Sejanus’ fall. By early 39 at the latest, Claudius had married the
youthful Messalina, who was less than half his age. As a great-granddaughter of Augustus’ sister Octavia through both her father’s and her mother’s families, she would afterwards
reinforce those claims to power made by Claudius on the grounds of Augustan pedigree. The couple’s marriage coincided with Claudius’ emergence under Gaius to a position of greater
prominence.

Distinction takes many forms. Messalina could undoubtedly lay claim to high birth. It would not prove her chief attribute. Amoral, rapacious, manipulative, deceitful, interfering, fecund and
above all spectacularly oversexed, she emerges from the sources as a byword for feminine transgression. We assume that she was beautiful, though thanks to the
damnatio memoriae
which
followed her death, no certain contemporary images of her survive: certainly she exercised sexual power bordering on bewitchment over the susceptible Claudius. (Perhaps she was a cause of that
insomnia which led him to fall asleep during
his working day, often when he was hearing cases in court.) In his
Natural History
, Pliny the Elder records a competition
instigated by Messalina with ‘one of the most notorious women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute’ to see who could take the largest number of sexual partners in a single
session. Predictably – else the story should hardly have survived – Messalina won with a tally of twenty-five.
¹²
In a well-known passage of character assassination, Juvenal related
nocturnal sorties made by Claudius’ wife to a Roman brothel. There, while the
princeps
slept, she worked in a blonde wig, with gilded nipples, under the trade name
‘She-Wolf’. All the sources agree that Messalina suffered from an addiction. Juvenal describes her unrosily after such a session as ‘still burning with her clitoris inflamed and
stiff... exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied... a disgusting creature’.
¹³
Such images would undoubtedly have shocked the empress’s contemporaries: so marked a predisposition, were
it known, could hardly have earned her the award of the title Augusta from the senate, however debased.

At the outset of Claudius’ reign, Messalina received public honours, including a grant of statues and a place alongside the Vestal Virgins at the theatre. When Claudius celebrated the
triumph of Britain in 44, she took a prominent place in the procession in a special carriage behind him. It might have continued thus, but Messalina’s cravings apparently drove her to actions
which, impacting on upper-class life in the capital, merged distinctions between her public and private lives, politicizing her libido in a way which could only end badly. At this point she becomes
the bejewelled nude of a Gustave Moreau watercolour, skin pale as whey, a diadem in her hair, so dizzy with her own erotic delusions that she scarcely notices the ardent youth whose neck she
cradles; blind to the Rome beyond palace windows, the claims of rank, motherhood or
Claudius’ happiness. Examples like this of overspill into the public arena of the
peccadilloes of his wives would become one of the principal criticisms of Claudius’ reign. In Messalina’s case, it offended another precept of Augustus’ revolution: the promotion
of imperial women as exemplars of outstanding moral virtue, the role Livia, Octavia and Antonia had embraced.

At first Messalina adhered to Augustan convention. But she busied herself in pointless conspiracies. Her motives may be lost for ever. She enlisted in her cause Claudius’ powerful
freedmen: Pallas (his treasurer), Narcissus (his secretary) and that opportunistic relic of the previous regime, Kallistos. Marcus Vinicius, brother of the conspirator Vinicianus, was apparently
poisoned for resisting Messalina’s advances, a story which includes too many unprovables for comfort. Earlier Messalina’s jealousy probably lay behind the second banishment of
Vinicius’ wife, Julia Livilla: on this occasion Gaius’ sister starved to death. The Gaulish consul Valerius Asiaticus died so that Messalina could gratify through theft her craving for
gardens in Rome which Tacitus reports him as ‘beautifying with exceptional lavishness’.
¹⁴
Asiaticus’ trial behind closed doors, with every appearance of a stitch-up, earned
senatorial antipathy for both Messalina and Claudius; his phlegmatism in the face of imperial caprice gave the regime’s opponents a valuable martyr.
¹⁵
By contrast there may have been dynastic
reasons for getting rid of Appius Silanus, a connection of the Claudii, at the beginning of the reign. ‘Messalina and Narcissus put their heads together to destroy him,’ Suetonius
records. They invented dreams in which both saw Appius kill Claudius. It was enough to ensure his hasty execution. Claudius took naïvety to extremes in reporting the affair to the senate and
importuning thanks for his freedman. Such proofs of uxoriousness did not
enhance senators’ views of the emperor’s capabilities nor of the good practice of his
government. Over time they also eroded Messalina’s popularity to an extent which boded ill for her son Britannicus. For as there existed within the imperial family men and women equally
closely related to Augustus as Claudius and Messalina – and therefore equally qualified to rule – there existed in the next generation a young man whose claim to the principate came
close to matching Britannicus’. His name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus and he was the son of Agrippina the Younger, who so far, unlike her less fortunate sister Julia Livilla, had resisted
Messalina’s fury. At the Secular Games held by Claudius in 47, the year Agrippina became a widow for the second time, Domitius received applause more lusty than that accorded to Britannicus,
his junior by five years. It was a sign of things to come.

Before that, Messalina’s downfall. Sluttishness alone did not undo the emperor’s well-born wife. As she cherry-picked the flower of Roman manhood (the sources would have us believe),
diverted alike by aristocrats and the ballet dancer Mnester, she distracted Claudius with a stream of pretty maids and serving wenches. Until, in the autumn of 48, Messalina succumbed to momentary
madness. Taking the opportunity of Claudius’ absence from Rome, she ‘married’ a consul designate, Gaius Silius, who, in Tacitus’ account, meant to adopt Britannicus and
usurp Claudius’ throne. She did not do so discreetly in a secret room of the palace but in a formal service conducted in semipublic surrounds. Afterwards she followed her indiscretion with a
revel that sounds like a Bacchic
fête champêtre.
The outcome provides an example of dishonour among thieves. The same freedmen who had once forwarded her schemes of
vindictiveness and greed turned against Messalina: they persuaded two of Claudius’ mistresses to report her to the emperor. As news
seeped out that Claudius was
returning to Rome, the wedding throng dispersed and Messalina herself hastened to Ostia to intercept Claudius and explain herself in person. She was forced to hitch-hike in a garden refuse cart.
The encounter of husband and wife proved unsatisfactory, thanks to the intervention of an implacable Narcissus. Messalina won a temporary stay of execution, but was later killed on Narcissus’
instructions before Claudius had a chance to relent. In the best Roman tradition, her mother Domitia Lepida looked on with apparent dispassion, having already tried to persuade Messalina to commit
suicide.