more into gross intemperance, and the pains of indigestion, from which he suffered so acutely as to meditate, it was said, escaping from them by suicide, were caused, we may believe, by this habitual abuse.1 His jaded appetite was excited by the splendour of his banquets and the numbers of the company: his viands were often spread in ample halls or pleasure-grounds, and his couches crowded by many hundreds of guests. On such occasions he gratified his senses to the utmost, and seldom rose from table till he had gorged himself to repletion, and required to relieve his overloaded stomach by vomiting. In judging of the character of the poor old man, whose private failings have been elevated into public notoriety, some allowance must be made for the coarseness of the times, and the ordinary licence of his associates. Nor must we forget how readily the scandalous anecdotes of the day were accepted by annalists and biographers as veritable history. With regard to women, the intemperance of which he is accused may be confined, or nearly so, to the ease with which he passed from the caresses of one lawful wife to those of a successor: of all the Cæsars Claudius stands, on the whole, the most nearly free from the charge of illicit and disgraceful indulgences.2 But now for the first time. 1 Suet. Claud. 31. I have read somewhere in Seneca, that the stone and the stomach-ache are the only ills of the flesh which justify the wise man in committing suicide. 2 Suet. Claud. 33. Two of his female favourites are named by Tacitus (Ann. xi. 30.), and Dion has a passing remark on his intemperance with regard both to wine and women. But the particulars of his alleged excesses, from which his gluttony has become so gene CHAP. XLIX. СНАР. at Rome the story of the prince's wives becomes the history of the principate; the city of Scipio and Augustus recedes for a moment from our view, and we seem to stray, as in a wayward dream, through the saloons of Versailles or Aranjuez. rally infamous, are confined to the scandalous chronicle of his biographer. X CHAPTER L. CLAUDIUS SUBJECT TO THE INFLUENCE, 1. OF WOMEN: HIS RIVALRY OF MES SALINA AND AGRIPPINA. MESSALINA'S AMOUR WITH SILIUS, TO POWER.—REMARKS ON THE CHARACTER OF CLAUDIUS. TOSIS. — FLATTERY OF NERO. (A. u. 794–807. A. D. 41—54.) CHAP. L. A. D. 41. A. U. 794. THE ruler to whom the conduct of affairs was now entrusted had been bred, beyond the usual term of infancy, by the women of the imperial household; for the weakness of his sickly frame still required Claudius the care of female nursing at an age when the young Roman was ordinarily transferred to his tutors and the masters of his athletic exercises. To the last he continued to feel the need of the petty attentions and ministrations of the gentler subjected to ence of the influ women. СНАР. A. D. 41. sex. In early adolescence his guardians proposed to provide for his domestic comfort by espousing him to consorts of their own selection; but of those who were successively selected for the honour two were lost to him before marriage; the one being rejected on account of the offence her parents had given to Augustus, the other dying untowardly on the day appointed for the nuptials.1 Claudius was at last united to Plautia Urgulanilla, who, to judge from the names she thus combined, was the daughter perhaps of Plautius Silvanus, a distinguished commander in Pannonia, whose tragic story has been related under the principate of Tiberius, and was descended from Urgulania, the proudest of the friends of Livia.2 By this noble bride Claudius became the father of two children: the first of them was the Drusus to whom the daughter of Sejanus was affianced almost at his birth, and who died in infancy; the second was a girl and received the name of Claudia. But when her mother was detected intriguing with a freedman of the household, and repudiated by her husband, Claudius disowned the wretched infant, and shocked the Romans by causing it, at the age of five months, to be ruthlessly abandoned. By 1 Suet. Claud. 26. The first was Emilia Lepida, the great granddaughter of Augustus, being the child of his granddaughter Julia by L. Paullus, and sister of M. Æmilius Lepidus, the friend and victim of Caius Caligula; the second, Livia Medullina, of the family of the Camilli. 2 For Plautius Silvanus, see Tac. Ann. iv. 22. ; Vell. ii. 112.; Dion, lv. 34. He was the grandson of Urgulania, the friend of Livia. See above, chap. xliii. p. 115. 3 Suet. Claud. 27. It seems not unlikely that this horrid act was perpetrated in imitation of Augustus, who forbade the infant of the L. A.D. 41. A. U. 794. Ælia Petina, the daughter perhaps of Ælius Tu- CHAP. bero, to whom he next united himself, he had one child only, whom he called after his mother Antonia, and who became affianced to Cnæus Pompeius Magnus, the son of a Crassus, who thus, by a strange favour of fortune, combined a descent from two triumvirs, with an alliance with the families of three others.' The union with Petina lasted probably some years; and it was in the reign of Caius, as we may suppose, that Claudius divorced himself from her on some trifling disagreement. A third marriage with Valeria Messalina speedily followed: the two children she bore him came into the world towards the commencement of his principate. The shamelessness of the women of the higher ranks at this period has been noticed on former occasions: the precariousness of the position they held in marriage seems to have made them despair of acquiring, or at least of long retaining, domestic influence; and they too often abandoned themselves without restraint to indulgences, from which they had no motives either of younger Julia to be nourished. But to cast away a child which had once been taken up, was an abuse of the paternal authority from which the feelings of the Romans revolted. 1 For Ælius Tubero, see Tac. Ann. xii. 1. 2 The son, who received a few years after his birth the surname of Britannicus, had completed, according to Tacitus, his fourteenth year in 808 (Ann. xiii. 15.), and was, therefore, born A. u. 794: if, however, he was only two years younger than Nero (see Ann. xii. 25.), he must have been born as early as 792 or 793. Suetonius also contradicts himself in saying that the child was born on the 20th day after his father's accession (i. e. in Feb. 794), and in his second consulship; for this did not commence till 795. I take the middle of these dates, viz. Feb. 794. It does not appear whether the daughter, called Octavia, was older or younger than her brother. |