Within these narrow limits is confined all the help that we can obtain NOTE. In this section many obligations have to be acknowledged to Dr. H. THE remaining fragment of our historian's narrative of the principate What is left to us cannot be justly estimated without reviewing at some 5 On his early history Suetonius is our sole authority. It is from him. in templo locare, arma potius sumpsere; 2 H. 1. 49, 3-8, 3 Id. 2. 50, I. 4 Id. 3. 86, 1-3. 5 Cl. 2-4. 6 Portentum eum hominis dicebat, nec and gifted brother was pushed forward rapidly in public life, and known by only one redeeming trait, his early passion for study. Augustus indeed, though by no means allowing him to make an exhibition of himself in public, showed some regard for him in private life, and had the insight to see that when he could command his faculties, he was by no means the fool he seemed1: yet even he, though thus showing more consideration than other and nearer relatives, was so far dissatisfied with him as to allow him no other distinction than an augurship, and to give him only a low position and trifling legacy in his will 2; while from the stern and ungenial Tiberius he had less indulgence to expect. He was now earnestly desirous of filling the magistracies of state, but was put off with the 'ornamenta consularia'; a further request was met with the contemptuous gift of a few gold pieces to spend at the Saturnalia; and he retired into shadow during the rest of this prince's rule, with no further distinction than that of a place among the sodales Augustales *.' Though now the head of the Claudian house 5, second only in dignity to the Julian, he had no position in the senate, and merely ranked as a knight. A trivial incident showing the tendency of all men to take no account of him gives Tacitus an opportunity for the bitter comment, 'the more I think on ancient or recent examples, the more is the mockery pervading human affairs in all matters made evident to me. By reputation, by promise, by the respect of men, any one seemed rather destined to imperial dignity than he whom fortune was reserving in secret as the future prince.' Thus to the twenty-four years of childhood and youth under Augustus, are to be added twenty-two more, passed in complete retirement under Tiberius, in which, despised by those of his own rank, and bashful in good society, he took refuge in low habits and low company. These surroundings 1 The letters of Augustus to Livia, preserved in Suet. Cl. 4, give by far the best evidence as to the condition of Claudius in early life. Distinction is drawn in them between his demeanour and his actual intelligence. In one he says “misellus ἀτυχεῖ, nam ἐν τοῖς σπουdaíois, ubi non aberravit eius animus, satis apparet ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ εὐγένεια. He will often ask him to dinner 'ne solus caenet cum suo Sulpicio et Athenodoro' (literary friends). In another letter he wonders how one who talked so inarticulately could declaim so well. 2 Suet. 4. 3 Suet. 5. I. 54, 2. 5 This he had become on the adoption intensified his natural vices and eccentricities, and permanently formed his character. Disgusting manners, gluttony, drink, lust, gambling', became the propensities of such a life, redeemed to some extent by the literary pursuits which alone kept him up to any higher level. Indications are not indeed altogether wanting that his nearness to the ruling house still made him a person of some consideration. He was married successively to two women of high family, Plautia Urgulanilla and Aelia Paetina; it was a valuable stepping-stone to Seianus to affiance a daughter to his young son Drusus; even Tiberius in his last moments considered him among possible heirs, were it not for the weakness of his mind 3, and left him a better position in his will than he had held in that of Augustus. On the accession of Gaius, he emerges from a position of obscurity and neglect, and of personal safety assured thereby, into one of greater outward dignity, combined with greater real degradation, and no slight actual peril. From a mere knight he becomes senator and consul, to be taken to task in his magistracy and all but deposed from it, and to be treated with studied contempt in the senate-house; he is promoted to a priesthood, to find himself ruined by the expenses of assuming it 1o; he is sent by the senate as spokesman of its deputation to Gaius in Gaul, to find the distinction go near to cost his life, and (according to some accounts) to be glad to escape with a ducking in the river "; he is not only the constant victim of the flouts and blows of Gaius himself 12, but also the butt for all the rude horseplay and practical jests of courtiers and buffoons at the imperial feasts 13. Tacitus would probably have shown us not only what was thus patent 1 See Suet. Cl. 33, and other places. 2. Bonarum artium cupiens erat' (6. 46, 2). On his literary works, see 13. 3, i and note. 3 The former is described in Suet. Cl. 36 as 'triumphali' (see note on 4. 22, 3), the latter as 'consulare patre.' On the pedigree of the former, see 2. 34, 3; 4. 22, 3 (and notes); Lehmann, p. 88. 4 3. 29, 3. 5 Imminuta mens eius obstitit' (6. 46, 2). 6 Suet. Cl. 6. always asked last of all the consulars, i.e. not only not above, but even somewhat below, his actual rank. 10 The expenses are put at the extraordinary sum of eight million H.S. (Suet. 1. 1.). The priesthood was that to Gaius himself as Jupiter Latiaris, for which other rich men were similarly victimized (Dio, 59. 28, 5). He was also a sodalis Titius' (Insc. Henzen, 5399) Gaius considered himself treated as a boy by having his uncle thus sent to him (Suet. 1. 1.). The latter incident is related with doubt (ut non defuerint qui traderent,' etc.). 12 Seneca (Lud. 15, 2) makes Gaius claim him as a slave in Hades: 'producit testes, qui illum viderant ab illo flagris, ferulis, colaphis vapulantem.' is Suet. 8. to all, but also what may have lain beneath the surface; whether not only this tame submission to every kind of insult, but even some studied exaggeration of his natural weakness and eccentricity, may not have been assumed for self-protection', as according to the old tale was the demeanour of Brutus under Tarquinius, or as had been the servility of Gaius himself under Tiberius 2. It can, indeed, be hardly doubted that his position had another side to it, at a time when all thinking men could foresee that the existing tyranny must needs be shortlived; that its outcome would not be (as some fondly dreamt) a return to the old Republic, but the succession of some other princeps; that while direct or collateral descendants of Augustus lived, their names would weigh powerfully in the scale against any others; and that within that circle Claudius, with all his drawbacks, was most prominent 3. It was not without political foresight that the freedman Callistus chose to pay court to Claudius rather than destroy him; that his old friend Herodes Agrippa still kept up his intimacy; that the senate as a body paid him what was evidently intended as a compliment by choosing him on the deputation above referred to. Nor can we suppose him to have been himself so obtuse as not to keep an eye on his own prospects throughout his apparent effacement; nor was it without a political motive that he contracted during this period a far higher matrimonial alliance than any of his previous ones, by taking to wife Valeria Messalina, who was a direct descendant, through both her parents, from Octavia 7, and might have added to the chance of any of his possible rivals by a similar connection. It is also easy to see that in his actual elevation to the principate deeper causes were working than a mere soldier's freak, however true may be the account which has come down to us of the circumstances of the moment when a sudden and terrible catastrophe brought him unawares in full view of the end for which he and his adherents may have been none the less deliberately laying their plans. Our most serious loss is that of the record and judgment of Tacitus respecting the first and best years of this principate, one which we can the better realise by reflecting how much less we should have known of the rule of Tiberius, if the first three Books of the Annals had not come down to us. As regards mere material, it is no doubt true that our other authorities here do more to fill the gap. Josephus, by large portions of his narrative, and especially by the original texts of edicts of the emperor and of Petronius, his legatus in Syria, preserved in it, has given us valuable information on many subjects, especially on the policy adopted towards the Jewish race': a few facts of historical interest may be found among those noted by the elder Pliny; to his nephew we owe the touching history of Paetus and Arria2; and the reader may derive entertainment, if not instruction, from Seneca, whose disregard, not only for truth, but even for his own consistency, allows us to find, in what he says of Claudius, an equally extreme instance of each of the kinds of falsification, in which Tacitus tells us that the histories of the whole period covered by his Annals abounded3. In the 'Consolatio' addressed from his place of exile to Polybius, the resources of language can hardly find terms for the gentleness and clemency of the prince under whom it was the freedman's happy lot to live; and under whom even exiles rested in peace. Fortune is prayed to preserve one granted to the relief of a worn-out age, and herself bidden to learn from him to be merciful'. He is himself imagined as drawing on the unrivalled stores of his eloquence and learning to address topics of consolation to his minister; whom the writer bids to seek his own solace in the sunshine of that presence, of that deity within whose influence no sorrow can reach him 1o. It is hard indeed to believe that we are reading from the same author whose pen has described a monster of cruelty to us in the 'Ludus.' Some allowance must be made for the difference in date of the two pictures 11; 5 1 It is also to Josephus that we owe the only account given with full detail of the death of Gaius and elevation of Claudius (Ant. 19. 1-4). For the edicts above referred to, see below, p. 29. 2 Ep. 3. 16; see also Mart. I. 14. Tacitus, who alludes to the story in 16. 34, 3, no doubt gave it full prominence in its place, and it is probably from him that the abridged version in Dio, 60. 16, 6 was derived. 12, 3. 10 8, I. 11 Even at the date of the earlier trea |