Administrative innovations of Claudius

Claudius’s general policy increased the control of the emperor over the treasury and the provincial administration and apparently gave jurisdiction in fiscal matters to his own governors in the senatorial provinces. He created a kind of cabinet of freedmen, on whom he bestowed honours, to superintend various branches of the administration. An impressive series of documents, such as a speech for the admission of Gauls to the Senate recorded on a partly defective inscription at Lugdunum (Lyon), the edict for the Anauni (an Alpine population who had usurped the rights of Roman citizenship and whom Claudius confirmed in these rights), and the aforementioned letter to the city of Alexandria (41 ce), survive as evidence of his personal style of government: pedantic, uninhibited, alternately humane and wrathful, and ultimately despotic. The inscription from Lugdunum is an interesting comparison with the version of the historian Tacitus in his Annals, which gives an account of the same speech. The speech as recorded in the inscription, in spite of irrelevance, inconsequence, and fondness for digression (much of which is absent in the version of Tacitus), shows that Claudius knew what he wanted and that he appreciated the latent forces of Roman tradition.

His marriage with Messalina ended in 48, when she apparently conspired against him and, according to Tacitus, conducted a public marriage ceremony with her lover, Gaius Silius. Messalina and Silius were killed, and Claudius married his niece Agrippina, an act contrary to Roman law, which he therefore changed. To satisfy Agrippina’s lust for power, Claudius had to adopt her son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (later the emperor Nero), to the disadvantage of his own son Britannicus. In addition, the new commander of the guards, Afranius Burrus, was protected by Agrippina. Roman tradition is unanimous in stating that Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina on October 13, 54 ce, though the details differ. A version of poisoning by mushrooms prevailed. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the politician and satirist, who had been exiled by Claudius at his accession but had been recalled at Agrippina’s urging to educate Nero, derided the dead emperor and his apotheosis (duly decreed by the Senate) in the satire Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii (“The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius”; the title and its exact meaning are both subject to dispute).

The picture of Claudius that appears in this work has much in common with that of later Roman historians who give details of the unpopular side of Claudius’s administration. The Apocolocyntosis ridicules his physical appearance and his speaking ability and casts aspersions on his abilities as a judge, depicting him as arbitrary—of giving legal judgments without a fair hearing and of summarily ordering the executions of relatives, senators, and knights.

Tacitus, Suetonius, and the later historian Dio Cassius attribute Claudius’s mistakes to infirmity of character and the influence of his wives and freedmen. They echo the hostility of the upper classes against an emperor who, in spite of his words, had been unfavourable to them. That this tradition is one-sided is shown by the surviving documents of the reign and the energy with which Claudius carried out the affairs of government.