Claudius

Conscious of his own anger and resentment, he excused both in an edict and distinguished between them, promising that the one would be short and harmless, the other not unjust. Having severely upbraided the people of Ostia because they had not sent boats to meet him as he entered the Tiber, and indeed with such resentment that he wrote that he had been reduced to the status of a private citizen, he suddenly granted them pardon, almost in the manner of one making amends. Some who approached him in public at an unseasonable time he pushed away with his own hand. Likewise, he relegated a quaestor’s scribe and a senator of praetorian rank, unheard and innocent: because the former had appeared too impertinently against him when he was a private citizen, and the latter, during his aedileship, had fined the tenants of his estates for selling cooked food contrary to the prohibition, and had scourged his bailiff when he intervened. For which reason he also took away from the aediles the supervision of the cookshops. And indeed he did not keep silent about his own stupidity, but testified in certain short speeches that it had been counterfeited by him on purpose under Gaius, because otherwise he would not have escaped and reached the position he had undertaken; yet he did not convince people, since within a short time a book was published, the title of which was “The Resurrection of Fools”, and the argument of which was that no one feigns stupidity.

Among other things, people wondered at his forgetfulness and thoughtlessness, or to use the Greek terms, “meteoria” and “ablepsia”. When Messalina had been killed, shortly after he sat down in the dining room, he asked why the mistress was not coming. Many of those whom he had condemned to death, he ordered on the very next day to be invited both to his council and to a game of dice, and, as if they were delaying, rebuked them through a messenger as sleepy-headed. When he was about to marry Agrippina contrary to divine law, he did not cease in every speech to declare that she was his daughter, his foster-child, and born and brought up in his own lap. When he was about to adopt Nero into his name, as if he were not sufficiently criticized for adopting a stepson when he already had a grown son, he repeatedly publicized that no one had ever been introduced into the Claudian family by adoption.

Indeed, he often showed such great negligence in his speech and actions that he was thought not to know or consider who he was, or among whom, or at what time and place he was speaking. When the business of butchers and wine-sellers was being discussed, he cried out in the senate house: “I ask you, who can live without a little snack?” and described the abundance of the old taverns, from which he himself had formerly been accustomed to seek wine. Concerning a certain candidate for the quaestorship, he placed among the reasons for his support the fact that the candidate’s father had timely given him cold water when he was sick. When a female witness was introduced in the senate, he said: “This woman was my mother’s freedwoman and hairdresser, but she always regarded me as her patron; I have said this for the reason that there are still some in my household who do not think me their patron.” Moreover, having lost his temper before the tribunal when the people of Ostia were publicly petitioning him, he cried out that he had no reason to oblige them; and that if anyone else was free, he was too. For those daily sayings of his, indeed of every hour and moment, were: “What, do I seem to you to be a Telegenius?” and “Speak, and do not touch,” and many such things, disgraceful even for private citizens, let alone for a princeps, who was neither uneloquent nor unlearned, but on the contrary, persistently devoted to liberal studies.

Having attempted in his youth to write history, with Titus Livius encouraging him and Sulpicius Flavus even assisting him, and when he had first committed it to a crowded audience, he read it through with difficulty, having been frequently chilled by himself. For when, at the beginning of the reading, a laugh arose because several benches were broken by the fatness of a certain man, he could not, even when the tumult was quieted, refrain from repeatedly remembering the incident from time to time and renewing his laughter. During his reign also he both wrote very much and constantly recited through a reader. He began his history, however, after the murder of Caesar the dictator, but he also passed over to later times and began from the civil peace, since he felt that the power of transmitting the earlier history freely and truly was not left to him, having been frequently chided by both his mother and his grandmother. Of the earlier subject-matter he left two volumes, of the later forty-one. He also composed eight volumes “On His Own Life”, more foolishly than inelegantly; likewise a “Defense of Cicero against the Books of Asinius Gallus”, which was sufficiently learned. He also invented three new letters and added them to the number of the old ones as if they were highly necessary; concerning the principle of which he had published a volume while still a private citizen, and soon as princeps he easily obtained that they should also be in common use. Such writing is extant in most books, daily records, and inscriptions on public works.