he would shout. Yet many men of distinction continued to visit him, and he never lost the people's respect. Among Claudius's memorable acts as Censor was the purchase of a beautiful silver chariot, offered for sale in the Silversmiths' Street; he then had it hacked to pieces before his eyes! On the other hand, he attempted to transfer the Eleusinian Mysteries from Athens to Rome; and had the ruined Temple of Venus on Mount Eryx in Sicily restored at the expense of the Public Treasury. 8. A Guardsman, wandering vaguely through the Palace, noticed a pair of feet beneath the curtain, pulled their owner out for identification and recognized him. Before one case opened, it is said, he wrote out the following verdict, which he subsequently delivered: 'I decide in favour of the party which has told the truth.' Suetonius: Life of Claudius. According to many of my informants, he lost his power of speech, suffered frightful pain all night long, and died shortly before dawn. We both agreed that an immediate decision ought to be taken. Indeed, it was not until the end of his reign that he reluctantly gave up the practice of having women, boys, and girls pawed about during these routine examinations, and of removing the stylus-case from every caller's attendant or secretary. 2. The question is whether he has — shall I say? Tiberius's reply ran: 'The forty gold pieces I sent you were meant to be squandered on toys during the Saturnalian holidays.' Then, to forestall criticism, he gave out that Appius the Blind, who had founded the Claudian House and been appointed Censor, used to allow freedmen's sons into the Senate; yet this was to misread the word 'freedmen' which, in those days, meant the free-born sons of ex-slaves, not the ex-slaves themselves. No sooner had Claudius's power been established than he gave priority to the task of obliterating all records of those two days when there had been talk of a new Constitution. Lastly, Furius Camillus Scribonianus, Governor-general of Dalmatia, persuaded his legions to revolt; but, on being ordered to march off and rally around their new Emperor, they found that some divine intervention prevented them from dressing the Eagles with garlands and perfumes, and that the standards resisted all attempts to pull them out of the ground. Some say that the eunuch Halotus, his official taster, administered the drug while he was dining with the priests of Jupiter in the Citadel; others, that Agrippina did so herself at a family banquet, poisoning a dish of mushrooms, his favourite food. and: 'Very well, curse me if you like, but hard words break no bones!' Antonia the Younger bore Drusus several children, three of whom survived him: Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius. The Senate voted Drusus many honours, among them a marble arch on the Appian Way decorated with the trophies he had won, and the surname Germanicus to be held by himself and his descendants in perpetuity. He undertook the Fucine drainage scheme as much for profit as for glory: a group of businessmen had offered to shoulder the expense if he awarded them the reclaimed land. The plan worked; and the next day Claudius blandly told the Senate what had happened, incidentally thanking Narcissus for exercising such vigilance even while asleep. THE father of Claudius Caesar, Drusus, who at first had the forename Decimus and later that of Nero, was born of Livia within three months after her marriage to Augustus [38 B.C.] 39. to the debouchment of the Fucine Lake on the day it was emptied; but the water came rushing out in a deluge and almost drowned him. Several knights were also struck from the list, much to their surprise, on the novel charge of going abroad without a formal demand for leave of absence; since one of them had been acting as adviser to a petty king, Claudius brought up the classical case of Rabirius Postumus who had followed King Ptolemy to Alexandria in the hope of recovering a loan, and was held guilty of high treason when he came back. 45. This provoked the following epigram: Drusus, father of the future Emperor Claudius, commanded an army against the Raetians, and subsequently against the Germans, while holding the successive ranks of quaestor and praetor. He cancelled Tiberius's supplement to the Papian-Poppaean Law which implied that men over sixty years of age could not beget children; and authorized the Consuls as well as the proper authorities — the urban praetors and their provincial counterparts — to choose guardians for orphans; and ruled that no person who had been exiled from a province might enter Italy. Among Claudius's favourite freedmen were Posides the eunuch, to whom he actually awarded, at his British triumph, the honour of a headless spear, along with soldiers who had fought in the field. She had a niece's privilege of kissing and caressing Claudius, and exercised it with a noticeable effect on his passions: when the House next met, he persuaded a group of senators to propose that a union between him and her should be compulsorily arranged, in the public interest; and that other uncles should likewise be free to marry their nieces, though this had hitherto counted as incest. Claudius also added three new letters of his own invention to the Latin alphabet — to represent a vowel between u and i; for ps; and for consonantal v — maintaining that they were most necessary. But his firmest devotion was reserved for Narcissus, his secretary, and Pallas, his treasurer, whom he encouraged the Senate to honour with large gifts of money and the insignia of quaestors and praetors as well. There a waiting deputation of magistrates' clerks took it to a pyre on the Campus Martius. He was given a princely funeral and officially deified, an honour which Nero later neglected and then cancelled; but which Vespasian restored. I think it right not to suppress what seems to me a most improbable view; in point of fact, Augustus felt so deep a love for Drusus that, as he admitted to the Senate on one occasion, he considered him no less his heir than were Julia's sons, whom he had adopted; and his funeral speech in the House not only eulogized Drusus but included a prayer that the gods would make these young Caesars closely resemble him, and grant them as honourable a death. The Senate had already voted him triumphal regalia, but he thought it beneath his dignity to accept these, and decided that Britain was the country where a real triumph could be most readily earned. The emblems of his victory included the naval crown — ornamented with the beaks of ships and representing the crossing and conquest, so to speak, of the Ocean — which he set on the Palace gable beside a civic crown of oak-leaves. . It is very difficult, however, to believe that they tricked Claudius into signing the marriage contract between Messalina and her lover Silius by an assurance that the marriage was a mere fiction: a transference of portended dangers threatening 'Messalina's husband', from himself to someone else. Claudius so greatly enjoyed wild-beast shows and the fencing matches during the luncheon interval that, after he had spent the whole morning in the amphitheatre from daybreak until noon, he would dismiss the audience, keep his seat, and not only watch the regular combats but extemporize others between the stage carpenters, and similar members of the theatre staff, as a punishment for the failure of any mechanical device to work as it should. Whenever he concluded a treaty with foreign rulers, he sacrificed a sow in the Forum, using the ancient formula of the Fetial priests. He executed thirty-five senators and 300 Roman knights, with so little apparent concern that once, when a centurion reported that So-and-so the ex-Consul was now duly despatched, and Claudius denied having given any such command, his freedmen satisfied him that the soldiers had done right not to wait for instructions before taking vengeance on a public enemy. He even forced one of his pages to enter the arena and fight in his gown. One of his edicts banned travel through any Italian town except on foot, in a sedan-chair, or in a litter. Claudius did not presume to accept excessive honorifics, even refusing that of 'The Emperor Claudius'; and let the betrothal of his daughter, and the birthday of his grandson, be privately celebrated. Suffice it to record that he executed his father-in-law Appius Silanus; Julia, daughter of Tiberius's son Drusus; and Julia, daughter of his own brother Germanicus — all on unsupported charges and without the right to plead in self-defence.