Claudius

Barbara Levick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317529088
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Claudius became emperor after the assassination of Caligula, and was deified by his successor Nero in AD 54. Opinions of him have varied greatly over succeeding centuries, but he has mostly been caricatured as a reluctant emperor, hampered by a speech impediment, who preferred reading to ruling.

Barbara Levick's authoritative study reassesses the reign of Claudius, examining his political objectives and activities within the constitutional, political, social and economic development of Rome. Out of Levick's critical scrutiny of the literary, archaeological and epigraphic sources emerges a different Claudius - an intelligent politician, ruthlessly determined to secure his position as ruler.

Now updated to take account of recent scholarship, Claudius remains essential reading for students and historians of the early Roman Empire.

1

Principate and Dynasty

Claudius came to power in AD 41. The Augustan Principate had been established nearly seventy years, but it was still developing. It owed its existence to the struggles of Republican dynasts: Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (the later Augustus), against each other and against the collective interests of the Senate. Rivalry was inherent in the Republic, exposed by a constitution that gave the supreme magistrate, the consul, power for a year with a colleague equal in power who could make him ineffective. Tradition had it that after the expulsion of the last king at the end of the sixth century BC the Senate itself became an assembly of ‘kings’, the heads of the clans to which they owed primary loyalty, and it kept its power as an oligarchy by restricting that of individual magistrates.

The tension between the authority of the Senate and the power of individuals did not end when Augustus established his own supremacy after the death of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BC. First, his claims to primacy rested in part on his relationship to Julius Caesar (his mother’s mother was Caesar’s sister!), reinforced by a spurious ‘testamentary adoption’, and in the last analysis on military force. Second, Augustus had to keep himself in power at first by holding existing offices, later by assuming the powers they conferred, as vehicles for his position: a consul’s imperium, that of a governor of provinces (imperium proconsulare), the power of a tribune in protecting the people (tribunicia potestas). Even when separated from the offices, granted for life, and enhanced as they were for Augustus, they still carried connotations of magistracy and could not be inherited by an heir.

Augustus overcame this problem by having powers like his own conferred on partners such as his contemporary Marcus Agrippa and on his stepson Tiberius, so that they would be able to maintain the dynasty’s position after his own death. As a result of assuming powers without taking offices limited to a tenure of one year, Augustus was able to transmit the formal and constitutional position that he held virtually unchanged to his eventual successor Tiberius and beyond. But the use that emperors made of these powers varied according to circumstance and temperament, and there was much that they could do outside their legal powers if they chose, for example securing the election to office of candidates they favoured. The way a ruler used this power to get things done without legal authorization (auctoritas) gave his principate much of its style. Auctoritas had always been characteristic of the Senate and leading men, principes.¹

In the course of a long supremacy – ‘principate’ was an acceptable informal term for it – the adaptable Augustus moved between the modest executive and defender of the constitution, anxious not to infringe the prerogatives of colleagues in office, the man who remitted decision-making to the Senate and people, as he expressly claimed to have done in 28–7 BC, and the autocrat, making extreme use of his powers and auctoritas, as he did in a period of political crisis, 24–3 BC, when for the first time he took powers in the Empire that were officially defined as superior to those of provincial governors (his imperium maius). One might informally term these two extremes ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ principate respectively.

But individual rivalry was only one factor in the making of a new form of government under Augustus. The rivals would have been helpless without the support of groups in Rome, Italy, the provinces and dependent states, whose needs were not catered for by senatorial government, either for lack of funds or because the body as a whole feared the power that would accrue to the individuals who would gain if they could pass measures satisfying these groups.

The dispossessed Roman peasantry were the first such group to emerge, attracting the attention of the tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who in 133 and 123 BC passed measures to provide them with plots from state land in Italy and Africa. Later legislators such as L. Appuleius Saturninus in 103 and 100 BC and Julius Caesar in 59 BC followed their example.

Some of the dispossessed went to swell the lower ranks of the population of Rome (the plebs urbana): the total population of Rome at the end of the first century BC has been estimated at between three quarters of a million and a million, with up to three hundred thousand men eligible for the distributions of free grain that had been introduced in 58 BC. The population now was made up partly of the descendants of enfranchised slaves, partly of country people who had not been allocated plots. On the spot in Rome, whether recent arrivals or at home there for several generations, they had their own officials, the plebeian tribunes created centuries before to look after the interests of ordinary citizens and to protect them from patrician outrages; they could take part in assemblies of the entire Roman people (Comitia Centuriata and Tributa) and at worst could demonstrate in the theatre or riot in the streets, often as members of hired gangs. Their demands for plots of land or, as they became more urbanized, adequate and cheap or free supplies of grain, and sometimes for a greater share in the running of the state, gave aristocratic politicians disgruntled with the Senate the chance to advance themselves as populares, supporters of measures put forward in the people’s interest despite opposition from the Senate.

The political importance of the plebs, even before the century of revolution ushered in by the Gracchi, has recently been given greater recognition. It could not stand up against an army that marched against Rome (as happened for the first time in 88 BC), but it was still a formidable political force during the Second Triumvirate under Mark Antony, M. Lepidus and Octavian, the later Augustus (43–33 BC). When his opponents cut Rome off from its grain supplies, Octavian was held responsible and nearly lost his life in a bread riot in the Forum.

Table 1.1 The family of Augustus.

As Princeps, Augustus continued to demonstrate solidarity with the plebs: after offending the Senate by misusing his powers as consul between 27 and 24 BC, he took the powers of a tribune for life in 23 BC, thus outclassing any annual holder of that office. In the four years that followed, the people showed during Augustus’ absence that they were ready to insist on his holding one of the consulships every year, and rioted on his and their own behalf, coming almost to the point of burning down the Senate house. Faced with chaos, the Senate had to call for Augustus’ help, giving him in 19 BC the final and decisive political success of his principate. Augustus was granted the powers of a consul within Rome and Italy and imperium superior to that of any provincial governor. At the same time he continued to look to the interests of the plebs by taking measures against flood and water shortage, fire and famine and by laying on entertainments in the theatre, circus and arena that he was careful to attend himself. In his last decade, when his position was entrenched and difficulties such as lack of funds, inconclusive warfare in Germany, political controversy over the succession, and a persistent shortage of grain were giving rise to discontent amongst all classes, he established the non-senatorial offices of Praefectus Vigilum (Officer in charge of the Watch) and Praefectus Annonae (Officer in charge of the Grain Supply), while unruly members of the plebs were drafted into the army in an attempt to meet desperate manpower shortages.²

Overlapping with the interests of the peasantry were those of the Roman citizen army, the legions: twenty-five since three were lost in Germany in AD 9, and so totalling about 137,500 men. Legionaries sprang from Italian farming stock; they wanted land as a secure livelihood that conferred status as well. Armed and organized as they were, they were far more formidable than the urban plebs, if less well placed to bring instant pressure to bear on political leaders at Rome. They had become a political force at the end of the second century BC, and in commands extorted from the Senate, or offered over their heads by the people, provided rival politicians with forceful backing and the means of acquiring enormous wealth, usually by extending the Empire, sometimes from victims of civil war. Military success, booty and welfare in service were also of concern to men who might serve for decades in the overseas wars of the first century BC; so was an early or at least predictable discharge.

Augustus, like Julius Caesar and other commanders before him, had trouble with his troops, who mutinied in support of their demand for discharge. He recognized their importance by establishing a fixed period of service, eventually twenty years, but found it hard to stand even by that. It was only after he had been in sole power for three decades, and by taking drastic measures, that he reached a permanent arrangement for discharge bounties: a special Military Treasury (Aerarium Militare) was set up in 6–7; but it had to be fed by new taxes, including a five per cent inheritance tax payable by Roman citizens on legacies to persons other than close relatives. This remained a bitter grievance with the well-to-do, who had paid no tax on their Italian land for more than a century and a half and regarded themselves as entitled to benefit from Rome’s empire.

Augustus’ superior imperium gave him the auspices – the right to ascertain the will of the gods: all victories were due in part to his mediation. He also tried to ensure the army’s loyalty by downgrading most of its commanders to the status of his subordinates (legati Augusti, entitled pro praetore if they governed entire provinces); he could overrule even independent commanders (proconsuls). The Triumph, a formal celebration of military success in which the commander paraded through Rome with his troops, captives and booty, came to an end for outsiders: Augustus’ restraint after his triple triumph of 29 BC and the ‘modesty’ of his colleague M. Agrippa intensified men’s inhibitions. Instead they were granted the distinctions and decorations of a general who had triumphed (ornamenta triumphalia). Augustus was the supreme commander (imperator, whence our ‘Emperor’ and the alternative name for the Principate, the ‘Empire’, both opposed to the Republic it had replaced); he was determined to bind the troops to himself and his family. The men who became Augustus’ partners in power, Agrippa and Tiberius, each won three triumphs and became the most successful generals of their generation; their intended heirs, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, were likewise destined for early military advancement through commands in the east and Spain. Gaius, like Tiberius’ younger brother Nero Drusus in 9 BC, actually died in AD 4 of injuries received on active service. Tiberius’ son Drusus Caesar won an ovation (a lesser form of triumph) in AD 20 for success in a Balkan command; but it was Drusus’ adoptive brother Germanicus Caesar whose aggressive expeditions in his father’s old territory in the years 13–16 and annexations in the east made him a military hero and conferred charisma on all his kinsmen, especially his only surviving son Gaius, who as ‘Bootsie’ (Caligula) had lived as an infant with the Rhine legions.

Apart from the legions and the numerically equivalent ‘auxiliary’ troops who were normally recruited in the provinces and were not Roman citizens, there was the élite force of the Praetorian Guard, which had not existed in permanent form before Augustus came to power, although there had always been men on duty at a commander’s headquarters (praetorium). By 2 BC Augustus had nine cohorts of five hundred men (so the equivalent of nearly a legion) stationed in Italy under two equestrian prefects. A single commander, Tiberius’ trusted minister L. Aelius Sejanus, held office from about 17 onwards; by 23 he had gathered the cohorts into one barracks adjoining the city walls: the nearest legionary troops were in Pannonia, ten days’ march away. Recruited from traditional sources of manpower, Etruria, Umbria and the old Latin towns, the Praetorian Guard had preferential pay and terms of service, as well as an easier life; hence strong esprit de corps and a determination to maintain their commander in power – or, if he fell, as Gaius Caligula did, to replace him.

Another factor in the development of one-man rule at Rome, though by no means so significant as army and people, were foreign protégés, who might offer a politician or commander support in money, influence or manpower in return for favours to themselves and (naturally strengthening their own position in it) their community. Legal privileges, exemptions from tax, even admission to the Roman citizenship, had played their part in securing loyalty, first to the Roman state, and later to one individual or another, since Rome’s expansion had begun.

The leaders of native levies in the early Principate could expect to be given Roman citizenship, if they had not received it already, in return for virtus (bravery) on the battlefield; on occasion entire troops of men were enfranchised. Julius Caesar was particularly generous during the Gallic and Civil wars of the fifties and forties, notably in his enfranchisement of a whole legion recruited as non-citizens, the Fifth Alaudae (‘Larks’). The principle that men who had served Rome had earned her citizenship was turned to the advantage of the individuals who were responsible for seeing that it was conferred: the last law known to have given the right to enfranchise deserving fighters was the Lex Titia passed in favour of the members of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC. Augustus and his successors continued to use this method of securing useful members of the citizen body, establishing centres of loyalty in the provinces, and showing that they knew how to acknowledge debts of gratitude.³

With the turmoil that marked the ending of the Republic, the pace of social mobility increased, and the Princeps’ opportunities for patronage were an important part of his power: sometimes openly exercised, as at elections, sometimes silently. It was no open revolution: outward forms were preserved, but gaps left in the Senate’s ranks by death, exile, impoverishment or boycott were rapidly filled, partly by the Princeps’ men. The Senate that the Dictator Sulla had re-established in power in 81 BC with a membership of six hundred, topped nine hundred at Caesar’s death and a thousand by the end of the Second Triumvirate. Augustus reduced it by stages finally to the Sullan level in 18 BC by forcing men to retire; it was replenished, as it had been before, by the entry of men who had held junior magistracies, normally the quaestorship, so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Key dates
• 1. Principate and dynasty
• 2. Education
• 3. Unfit for a public career?
• 4. Accession
• 5. Princeps and Imperator
• 6. Establishment of the court: Messalina
• 7. The dominance of Agrippina
• 8. Imperial policies?
• 9. Senate and knights: Claudius and the aristocracy
• 10. The people of Rome and Italy
• 11. Legislation, justice and society
• 12. Finance
• 13. Claudius’ invasion of Britain
• 14. Warfare on three continents
• 15. Claudius and his provincial subjects
• 16. Aftermath: Claudius in literature and history
• Bibliography of ancient texts
• Bibliography
• Index