Download claudius caesar7/1/2023 ![]() The ambitious and power-hungry Agrippina was determined that Nero should be Claudius’s successor, rather than the Emperor’s own son by Messalina, the nine-year-old Britannicus. The Senate had to pass a special decree to authorise what would otherwise have been an illegal incestuous union. She was 33 to Claudius’s 58 and she had a 12-year-old son by a former marriage, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, better known as Nero. Claudius told the Praetorian Guard to knock him on the head if he ever married again, but within a few months he took as his fourth wife another unscrupulous and seductive beauty much younger than himself, his niece Agrippina, a sister of Caligula. The coup failed, Messalina killed herself and Silius was executed. ![]() In 48 Claudius’s young and promiscuous third wife, Valeria Messalina, attempted a coup against him with her latest lover, Gaius Silius. The inscription on his triumphal arch in Rome said that he ‘brought barbarian peoples beyond Ocean for the first time under Rome’s sway.’ It was Claudius who annexed Britain to the Empire and in 43 he crossed the Channel himself to see his legionaries take Camulodunum (Colchester). The Senate, which had meanwhile been discussing the restoration of the republic, was forced resentfully to acquiesce. Found hiding behind curtains in the palace, shaking with fright, when Caligula was murdered in AD 41, he was made emperor by the Praetorian Guard. One theory is that he suffered from cerebral palsy.Ĭlaudius was sufficiently a figure of fun to survive the murderous reign of his nephew Caligula. Constantly ill and irritatingly clumsy, he had a bad stammer and a permanently runny nose, his head twitched and he dribbled. ![]() His family kept him out of sight as far as they could because he was so uncouth and unattractive. ![]() As a young man, ignored and left to his own devices by his family, but encouraged by Livy, who spotted his talent, he wrote histories of Etruria and Carthage, began a history of Rome and wrote a historical treatise on the Roman alphabet. Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the ‘I Claudius’ of Robert Graves’s splendid historical novels, was one of the few historians who has ever exercised real power.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |