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.
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