537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)

Following the bloody assassination of the twenty-eight year old Emperor Caligula, Rome found herself without a leader. Who then should fill the enormous power vacuum left by the death of an emperor? Should Rome return to a Republic? Then, one overlooked candidate - a scion of the hallowed family of Augustus long lurking in the wings of imperial power - unexpectedly rose to the fore: Claudius, Caligula’s uncle. Famed as a drooling idiot all his life, Claudius’ apparent shortcomings had kept him safe from the ruthless ambitions of his family and enemies. But his life of anonymity would now be brought to an abrupt end, with a shocking coup led by the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorians, one of the most potent forces in Rome, feared the loss of the emperor’s patronage, and so pulled him out from the curtain behind which he had been hiding, carried him to their camp, and declared him emperor. The reign that ensued - described in gory, glistening, salacious detail by the Roman historian Suetonius - would see Claudius dismantle his mask of imbecility to reveal himself clever and studious, but easily duped by his advisors, freemen, and wives alike. It would see him claim the conquest of Britain, increase the strength of the Roman army, fall foul of the senate, play cuckold in one of the most famous sexual scandals of all time, and marry his niece. All the while, the shadows of Nero’s rise to supreme power were lengthening… Join Tom and Dominic for the mighty conclusion of their journey through the lives of Rome’s first Caesars, as described in rich, technicolour by Suetonius, climaxing with the epic reign of Rome’s most unexpected emperor: Claudius. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Pre-order Tom Holland's new translation of 'The Lives of the Caesars' here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/279727/the-lives-of-the-caesars-by-suetonius/9780241186893 _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Editor: Jack Meek Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  When the conspirators who were lurking in wait for Caligula moved everyone else along, on the grounds that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius retreated to a wing of the palace known as the Hermaeum. And not long afterwards, alarmed by their distant shouts of “Murder!” crept away to a nearby balcony, where he hid himself behind the curtains hanging in front of the door. There he cowered. And as he did so, a soldier who happened to be wandering past noticed his feet and dragged him out intending to ask him who he was. But then, as he sank to his knees in terror, recognised him and hailed him as emperor. The soldier then led him away to where the other Praetorians were all milling around,

• 0:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  uncertain what to do. The soldiers put him in a litter, and because his own attendants had run away, took it in turns to carry the unhappy and fearful man on their shoulders to their camp. And all the crowds they passed on the way pitted him, on the assumption that he was an innocent being bundled off to execution. Received within the ramparts, he spent the night under the protection of the Praetorians, but in a mood of relief rather than of any great expectation. But as the next day passed, so large crowds of people gathered outside the Praetorian camp, agitating for a single man to be given rule and calling for Claudius by name.

• 1:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  These chants prompted him to allow an armed assembly of the Praetorians to swear allegiance to him, and to promise each one of them fifteen thousand sesterces, thereby becoming the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe.

• 1:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that last sentence, I'm not sure whether that's really true, but that's Suetonius in his Life of Claudius, as translated in the New Penguin Classics edition by our very own Tom Holland. And Tom there, Suetonius, is taking the story forwards from where we left it last time. We left it on a cliffhanger. The Emperor Caligula, mad or not, definitely a populist, has been assassinated by Cassius Caere and the Praetorian Guard. And the question is, is Rome going to turn back the clock 60 years to the time of the Republic and all the chaos at the end of the Republic? Or is it going to continue with the family of Augustus, known as the Caesars? So take us forward. What happens next?

• 2:41Tom Holland?

  Yeah, well, it's the pressing question. What happens next? Is there an eligible Caesar to hand? Or, as you were implying, might it be time to turn the clock back, to go back to the republican system of government? And what makes that question even more pressing is the fact that, as we've been saying throughout this series, the autocracy of the Caesars is not formally a hereditary monarchy. In fact, formally, it's not a monarchy at all. And so there are no rules governing the succession. That said, it has come to be accepted that the emperor should be a Caesar.

• 3:23Tom Holland?

  So that means an heir, either by adoption, as was the case with Tiberius, or by bloodline, as was the case with Caligula, of the deified Augustus, the first of the emperors, and who is now a god. So the question then is, what are the options? Who is there on hand? And I suppose the obvious question, which we didn't touch on in our episode on Caligula, is, has he left any children? And although he's only 28 when he gets murdered... He hasn't stinted when it comes to having wives. I mean, he's burned through a lot of them. And his last wife is the one that actually seems to have been his, his great love. And she's a woman called Melonia Sisonia.

• 4:09Tom Holland?

  And she isn't particularly young. She's not particularly attractive, but she does seem to have appealed to something very deep in Caligula. I mean, he really, well, actually, I think we can have a fairly good idea what it is. They both seem to certainly have had a taste for dressing up.

• 4:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's like Lucy Worsley.

• 4:29Tom Holland?

  Bit like, well, to a degree. So when he goes riding off to see soldiers, whatever, he dresses her up in a military outfit as well. So she clearly enjoys that. But I, he also gets her to pose nude for friends. So to that extent, she's not like Lucy Worsley. But she's clearly, she's a fun girl.

• 4:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 4:51Tom Holland?

  She gels well with Caligula's inimitable madcap sense of humour. I think it would be fair to say, she's a zany funster.

• 4:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 5:00Tom Holland?

  And she has given him one child, but unfortunately for fans of the bloodline of Caligula, that child is a daughter. And Caligula has named her after his, his beloved sister who died and whom he deified in his grief. So he calls her Julia Drusilla.

• 5:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she's a lovely, sweet natured girl, isn't she, by all accounts?

• 5:19Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So this again, I think is one of the, I mean, very funny bit from Suetonius. So this is Caligula talking about his, about Drusilla. There existed no surer evidence that she was indeed his child, he believed, than her temper, which was so violent, whenever she played with other little children, she would scratch at their faces and jab at their eyes with her fingers. So daddy watches on, oh, chip off the old block. So what happens to them? Well, according to Suetonius, they get murdered along with Caligula. He says that they've been accompanying him when they run into the Praetorians. But Josephus, the great Judean historian, who has very precise information about what happens.

• 6:00Tom Holland?

  He reports that they weren't with him, but when the news came that he'd been murdered, they come and seek out the body of their husband, stroke father, and they find him and they they kind of lie prostrated with grief, mourning him. And this is where they are found by a Praetorian who has been sent to dispatch them. And Cezonia looks up at the soldier and she's, you know, sobbing and she says, finish the last act of the drama. So again, this idea that everyone in the House of Caesar is an actor on a stage. And the Praetorian duly does as he's told. He slits Cezonia's throat and he picks

• 6:40Tom Holland?

  up little Druilla and he smashes out her brains on the side of a wall. So that's the end of them. So they have gone. And there are no male descendants of Augustus at all, full stop. And there's no male candidate with the blood of Augustus in their veins to succeed Caligula. And so it's not surprising that there are many in the Senate who do think, well, this might be the time to bring back the Republic, to kind of wake up from this terrible nightmare that we've been living through. And so that evening, you know, the soldiers come, the guards come, and they say to the consuls who've taken control of the city now that Caligula's gone, and they say, what's the watchword? And they say, liberty.

• 7:23Tom Holland?

  So it's all very noble and upstanding. And the next day, they have a kind of very grandiose, florid debate on the need to restore the Republic. Words like liberty and various other abstractions are bandied around with with great abandon. But while they are having this debate, they are forgetting the fact that there are other players in this crisis, one group of which, of course, is the Praetorians, the Imperial Guard, who, some of whom had been prompted to murder Caligula, but who absolutely do not want to see the overthrow of the monarchy because they depend on it for their status and their income. So obviously, they don't want a Republic. There'd be no role for them.

• 8:06Tom Holland?

  And the other kind of player in the in the drama, of course, is the people, the mass of the Roman people, who likewise mourn Caligula. They're very upset that he's gone. And they too want a Caesar, because it is Caesar who keeps them fed above all. It's Caesar who organizes the grain supply, and it's Caesar who keeps the masses entertained, who provides the gladiatorial shows and so on. So they likewise, they really want a republic.

• 8:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So let's get back to this moment of the curtain. This bloke in the Palatine, Praetorian, he sees these feet sticking out under the curtain. He takes Claudius to the Praetorian camp, and presumably the Praetorians at this point are thinking of Claudius purely as their puppet. He's somebody from the family, so they feel a sentimental attachment perhaps, and they think, we need a figurehead. Here's this bloke, who cares what his backstory is? He's got the right bloodline. Great, bring him in.

• 9:01Tom Holland?

  Well, we'll discuss in due course, I think, whether whether it's just luck, or whether it's perhaps something slightly more organised. But yes, you're right, they find Claudius. Claudius is a part of the August family. He's quite old by this point. He's born in 10 B.C. So Caligula's murdered in 41, so he's into his 50s.

• 9:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Tom Holland?

  And people may be wondering, well, I mean, if he's in his 50s, he's a member of the August family, why hasn't he become emperor before? Why isn't he the obvious candidate? And I suppose, you know, why hasn't Caligula killed him? If he's if he's an alternative emperor?

• 9:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, I said he's got the right bloodline, but that's not quite right, isn't it? Because now it comes back to this issue that Suetonius was very interested in with Caligula, which really loomed large for Suetonius then, and I guess must do now again, which is, exactly whom are you descended from?

• 9:57Tom Holland?

  Yeah, this really, really matters. So who is Claudius?

• 10:02Tom Holland?

  So to answer that, we need to go back to the scandalous marriage that Augustus had with this woman called Livia. So Livia is a Claudian. She had previously been married to another Claudian. She'd had a baby boy, Tiberius. She's then pregnant by her first husband when Augustus decides he really wants her and marries her. He's in a position to obviously impose his will. So Livia is massively pregnant when she marries Augustus, and shortly afterwards, she gives birth to a second son who is called Druusus. And Druusus, like Tiberius, is a tremendous war hero. He's entrusted by Augustus with assorted

• 10:47Tom Holland?

  German campaigns. He invades so far east that he reaches the line of the Elbe, where he sees the ghostly apparition of a huge woman telling him to turn back. But he's very dashing, very heroic. And then he dies young, which of course confirms his kind of reputation in the hearts of the Roman people. And it's all kind of very, you know, early years of Rome in a story by Livy. Tiberius escorts the corpse of his brother back to Rome on foot, weeping the whole way. Very, very kind of heroic tableau. So Druusus is much admired, much loved. And fortunately, he has given the Roman people another war hero, because Druusus is the father of Germanicus, who we talked about in the previous episode,

• 11:31Tom Holland?

  the father of Caligula. Very dashing, perfect in every way, apart from his spindly legs, absolute war hero again. And everyone loves him. However, Germanicus is not Druusus's only son. So he has a second son, and this is Claudius. And Claudius, as we said, is born in 10 B.C., 1st of August, at Lucdonum, which is Lyon in Gaul, the kind of the great cult centre for the Augustan cult in Gaul. And Claudius is born, Druusus dies the following year in 9 B.C. And so the infant Claudius is raised by his mother, Antonia, who is the daughter of Mark Antony.

• 12:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So just to recap, for people who don't have the family tree in front of them. Claudius is the nephew of Tiberius. He is the brother of Germanicus, who never got to become emperor. He's also the grandson of Mark Antony. I mean, he's very well connected.

• 12:31Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's the, he's, he's the step-grandson of Antony's great rival, the first emperor, Augustus. So he has all kinds of connections, although the crucial one, the one with Augustus, is not a blood connection.

• 12:46Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and that wouldn't be an absolutely hopeless problem because Tiberius wasn't, but he gets adopted. And in the Roman system, if you get adopted, then you do become the son. I mean, there's no, you know, I mean, as good as being a kind of blood, a blood son.

• 12:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 12:58Tom Holland?

  So it would have been possible for Augustus or Tiberius at some point to have adopted Claudius, but they don't. And why do they not? Well, the words of Suetonius. For almost the entire length of his childhood and adolescence, he suffered from a range of chronic illnesses. These left him so impaired, both mentally and physically, that even once he had come of age, he was regarded as unfitted for either public or private duties.

• 13:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And what are these illnesses?

• 13:30Tom Holland?

  Well, so Suetonius goes on to list them. He has weak knees, which gives him a kind of hobbling, almost kind of limping gait. His laughter, Suetonius says, is an unbecoming bray. So a bit like Kamala Harris.

• 13:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was about to say Kamala Harris. People gave her a lot of hard time, but I didn't mind her laugh, actually. I thought it was, I thought it was quite endearing.

• 13:48Tom Holland?

  Well, you might have liked Claudius's then.

• 13:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  I wouldn't say hers was a bray. If his was a bray, I would dislike it because I don't like a braying laugh.

• 13:55Tom Holland?

  Okay, well, Suetonius says it was a bray, so obviously it was because Suetonius is never wrong.

• 13:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Suetonius says he stammers and twitches.

• 14:01Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And when he gets angry, he drooled and snorted mucus. And I hate that in a man, Tom, the snorting of mucus.

• 14:07Tom Holland?

  And apparently Claudius gets angry quite a lot. So there's quite a lot of snot flying around the Palatine.

• 14:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Tom Holland?

  So clearly he, he suffers from various ailments and disadvantages. And people might be wondering, well, do his grandmother, Livia, and his mother, Antonia, show him? Sympathy and compassion, or are they monstrously ableist? And I'm afraid to say that they are monstrously ableist.

• 14:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that's disappointing.

• 14:36Tom Holland?

  So Livia is so mortified by having this grandson who kind of twitches and limps and blows snot everywhere, that she can barely bring herself to talk to him and generally communicates with him by kind of sending him written missives. And again, to quote Suetonius, "His mother Antonia used to describe him as a monstrosity of a human being, begun by nature but only half-finished, and would accuse anyone whose stupidity she particularly wished to emphasise of being a bigger fool than her son Claudius."

• 15:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, but actually, I'll tell you who's really nice to him, and this bears out my view that actually I think you're very hard on this person and you paint him in an unduly dark light, and that is Augustus. Augustus is ultimately a kind man, and is lovely to Claudius.

• 15:22Tom Holland?

  Except when slaughtering senators.

• 15:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but who cares about them? He's very nice to Claudius, isn't he? He's very nice to Claudius.

• 15:28Tom Holland?

  He's not very nice to Claudius.

• 15:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but compare with the rest of the family, Tom.

• 15:33Tom Holland?

  I mean, he's nicer than his mother, for sure. I mean, Augustus agrees that it would be embarrassing to his regime to have Claudius kind of exposed to the public eye, but he does kind of recognise qualities in Claudius.

• 15:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Read, Tom, to the listeners, what Augustus wrote about him.

• 15:50Tom Holland?

  Right, so this is a letter quoted by Suetonius. I mean, I love it when Suetonius quotes letters, you feel, you know, really up close. And yeah, Augustus wrote to Livia, "The poor boy has been cheated by fortune. For in significant matters, when he can hold his concentration, then the ability of his spirit is evident enough."

• 16:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Quodрат demonstrandum.

• 16:07Tom Holland?

  There's another letter where he says, it's amazing, I went to hear Claudius give a talk about some academic subject, and it was brilliant, amazing.

• 16:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, now, you said to give a talk about this academic subject. Now, it's true, you can be academically very prominent and a complete and utter fool, and I think we can all think of people who tick that particular box. But you, this business that Antonia said, oh, anyone who's really stupid, I call him a bigger fool than Claudius, and Claudius is an absolute dribbling idiot. If he's a dribbling idiot, how is it he's giving academic lectures? I mean, again, people who've spent time at our great universities may find that question easy to answer, but no doubt you'll have your own answer, Tom.

• 16:49Tom Holland?

  I think that it is a kind of general assumption in the Greek and Roman world that... If you look like an idiot, you are an idiot.

• 16:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 17:00Tom Holland?

  That's, that's the kind of core assumption. They're not very woke at all on such matters. But it's evident that Claudius, despite sending streams of snot everywhere when he gets cross, is very intellectual, academically able. So he's fluent in Greek, he's very knowledgeable about literature. And precisely because he's not allowed to enjoy a public life, you know, he's not allowed to go and follow in the footsteps of Germanicus and lead expeditions into Germany. So that gives him the chance to spend, or I guess if you're a Roman aristocrat, waste his time.

• 17:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Tom Holland?

  On scholarly pursuits. And the mark, I guess, of, of how much he wastes his time, of how, you know, how contemptible a figure he is by the standards of the Roman aristocracy, is that actually he becomes a historian. So he's a total loser.

• 17:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, a slobbering, twitching, socially incompetent historian. Who would have thought it?

• 17:58Tom Holland?

  I mean.

• 18:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thank goodness there are none of those left anymore, Tom.

• 18:01Tom Holland?

  Well, and Dominic, the other, the other, I mean, possible point of comparison with, with historians that certainly I know, is that he writes enormously long books.

• 18:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  No way.

• 18:12Tom Holland?

  So his editor says, so here's a commission to write a history of the Etruscans. Could you keep it down to two books? And he writes 20 books.

• 18:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  No way.

• 18:19Tom Holland?

  And he gets commissioned to write history of Carthage, make it one book, eight books.

• 18:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sometimes it's good to write an improperly immersive, well textured history. And that takes multiple volumes, what can I say?

• 18:30Tom Holland?

  With chapters on snooker.

• 18:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Tom Holland?

  And do you know, Claudius would have loved all that because he's very, he's, he writes a book about dice.

• 18:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 18:38Tom Holland?

  You know, he's interested in pretty much everything.

• 18:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he's a historian, he's a contemporary historian.

• 18:43Tom Holland?

  He is a contemporary.

• 18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  He writes about things within living memory.

• 18:45Tom Holland?

  Yes, he does, which is very foolish of him, or brave. And I think this may be one of the reasons why his mother and grandmother think that he's an idiot. Because he writes a history of Rome from the assassination of Caesar. And Suetonius says he was regularly criticised by his mother and grandmother for covering the events that followed the murder of Caesar. And so because he felt unable to write about them frankly or truthfully, skipped to the subsequent period of peace which followed the civil wars. So obviously, the story of how Augustus comes to power, there's a lot of murder, there's a lot of killing, there's a lot of bloodshed. And basically, Livia is saying to him, you know, just don't go there. We have drawn a veil over all of that. And here you are trying to-

• 19:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's mad from Claudius.

• 19:27Tom Holland?

  Just, just don't do it. Just don't do it.

• 19:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's absolute rank idiocy. I mean, that is rank idiocy from him to-

• 19:32Tom Holland?

  Yes, I think it is.

• 19:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  To rape all that up again.

• 19:35Tom Holland?

  But he does write it. And he actually, you know, he gets to give a public reading. So it's like he gets invited to, you know, a literature festival or something. And he, he starts reading it. Then just, just, just as he started reading, this, I'll quote again, quote Suetonius, "A great gust of laughter swept the audience when a bench broke under the weight of an enormously fat man. And even after everybody else had calmed down, Claudius found it impossible to put the incident from his mind and would periodically collapse into fits of giggles."

• 20:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh my God. So I'll tell you one thing, Theo would never forgive me if I didn't remind everybody that this is actually what happened to our erstwhile producer, Don Johnson, when we went to New Zealand. Remember, he sat on that bench and it collapsed?

• 20:19Tom Holland?

  Yes, I do. Yes, outside of the home of a New Zealand farmer who had just been showing us around a cave complex with glow worms. And it's been in the family for 150 years.

• 20:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  That was literally the best, that's literally the best thing that's ever happened to Theo, watching Don break that bench. Anyway, let's move on.

• 20:37Tom Holland?

  So Claudius leaves, you know, he leads this kind of essentially inoffensive life of a scholar, except, you know, watching people break benches and, you know, he has to be told often about writing on sensitive subjects. But he doesn't get into trouble. There's no kind of risk to him or anything. But then in 37, Caligula, who is of course Claudius's nephew, and I'm aware for listeners that it is quite complicated keeping all these relations in the head, but Claudius is Caligula's uncle. So Caligula comes to power and, and by this stage Claudius is in his late 40s.

• 21:13Tom Holland?

  Caligula's accession is both good and bad news for Claudius. So it's good news because Caligula doesn't really respect the Senate. And so he doesn't mind having Claudius enter it.

• 21:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 21:29Tom Holland?

  He appoints Claudius to be his co consul when he comes to power. And so at last Claudius has become a senator. And in due course, later in Caligula's reign, he gets a second consulship. And when Caligula is absent, Claudius presides over kind of public entertainments, public games and so on.

• 21:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which must be proof that Caligula thinks of his uncle as a harmless fool. Because he wouldn't be promoting him in this way as a potential rival if he thought he was a serious formidable person.

• 22:00Tom Holland?

  Yes, I think that's, I think that's right. And I think that Caligula finds it funny to have Claudius in the Senate and also on hand, because then he can bully him. So there are lots of stories that again have the kind of the smack of truth.

• 22:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Tom Holland?

  That Caligula will invite Claudius to a dinner party. Claudius is quite old, he's also very, very fond of a drink. And so he's very prone to kind of falling asleep. And when he does, all the other, either Caligula and the lads will pelt him with olive stones and bread rolls and that kind of thing.

• 22:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Flashman style.

• 22:32Tom Holland?

  Flashman style. And there's also this great gag, which, which Suetonius reports, that they, people will put slippers on his hands and then abruptly wake him. So that he'll wake with a jolt, rub his eyes and have fine slippers.

• 22:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  I actually find that genuinely funny.

• 22:46Tom Holland?

  Is that the kind of jape you got up to in the dawns?

• 22:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I genuinely think that I'd love to see that.

• 22:51Tom Holland?

  Well, so Suetonius writes, and this is my translation, very influenced, obviously, by the experience of being on The Rest is History. "Just for the banter" was the excuse.

• 23:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh dear. Some people who listen to this podcast say there's too much banter, but I think if anything, there is not enough.

• 23:05Tom Holland?

  Well, it's not as much as, it's not banter on the level of Caligula's court. I think that's safe to say. There is one moment where Claudius might be in, in serious danger, which is, people may remember that there's been this conspiracy against Caligula. He's gone to Germany, he's gone to Gaul, he's coming back to Rome and he tells the Senate. I hate you. And the person he says this to is a delegation of senators led by Claudius. And Caligula is furious that Claudius has come. And he basically says, you know, you, you, you think that you're playing the role of a tutor, disciplining me like I'm a kind of naughty boy or something. And so Caligula's response to this, it is said, is to pick Claudius up and throw him into the, into the rone. So the meeting takes place in Lyon, fully clothed.

• 23:50Tom Holland?

  So that's not looking good for Claudius. And there are also, it is said, kind of portents that seem to prophesy the golden future that Claudius can look forward to. So that very first time when he becomes consul and he walks out into the forum and he has all his, you know, his, his lictors with the, the kind of the rods and axes on their shoulders, the markers of Claudius's status. It is said that an eagle descends and lands on his shoulder.

• 24:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is said that. That's doing a lot of work.

• 24:22Tom Holland?

  But the fact this story is told.

• 24:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Is worrying for Claudius.

• 24:26Tom Holland?

  Worrying for Claudius.

• 24:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because Caligula want to get rid of him.

• 24:30Tom Holland?

  So is it possible that Claudius could become emperor? I mean, you know, the, the big problem is he's not descended from Augustus and everyone thinks he's an idiot. But it's still a risk if people are even contemplating the possibility that he might be, you know, capable of becoming the emperor, that, that Caligula will then have him killed because the evidence suggests that's what happens to people who are in the line of descent. In the event, of course, Caligula is murdered. The Praetorian finds him hiding behind a curtain. They take him to the camp and Claudius becomes emperor. And the whole way through this, you know, this two day sequence of events, Claudius is saying, I don't want to be emperor. It's mad. I'm wholly unsuited to it.

• 25:13Tom Holland?

  People will remember that passage that you read. Suetonius ends by saying, he is the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe. Now, that's not true. I mean, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, they'd all recognised what their security depended on. But with Claudius, it's very, very overt. The amount of money he gives is obscene and it's paid, you know, when he's in their camp. And it enables him to become emperor.

• 25:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So is it possible the stuff about the curtain is nonsense and an invention, a folk tale, too good to be true, and that actually he's in the conspiracy from the beginning? He's been paying these blokes and actually all this. He may not be acting out of ambition so much as fear.

• 25:54Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  But he thinks, I'm next to the chopping block. Basically, I've got to act now. I'm not such an idiot. I'm going to act now because otherwise Caligula is going to have me killed.

• 26:02Tom Holland?

  I mean, we'll never know because we don't have the sources. But I think when you weigh them up, I think you'd have to say that's very, very probable.

• 26:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 26:10Tom Holland?

  Because otherwise, I mean, the sequence of events has the faint kind of quality of a, you know, a kind of myth or something.

• 26:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. They find him behind a curtain. His feet sticking out.

• 26:20Tom Holland?

  Curtain, yeah. You know, they, they, they know to find him. They know to take him to the camp and Claudius knows, you know, he's got the money ready to pay them.

• 26:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  The cash, yeah.

• 26:30Tom Holland?

  He's got the cash ready to pay them.

• 26:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Tom Holland?

  So I think it's pretty likely that, that he was involved. And of course, you know, the fact that he's come to power in that way, protesting that he doesn't want to be a part of it disguises the fact that what has happened is basically a coup. You know, it is, it is a coup, plain and simple. It's the first coup really since Augustus came to power. There's not been a kind of peaceful handover of power. And the consequences of that, the consequence of how he comes to power, and the fact that he's neither a blood nor an adoptive descendant of Augustus, will crucially shape the course of his, his rule and its character. So Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, they had ruled as, as a princeps, as a, as a first man, as a first citizen.

• 27:17Tom Holland?

  Even Caligula, who had despised the notion that Rome might have any republican traditions. Nevertheless, I mean, that was officially the role that he was playing. But the thing is that what Caligula had kind of drawn attention to, the, the brute underpinnings of the, the imperial system, the fact that it's dependent on military power. There is another aspect to it, which is that if that's the case, if it is a monarchy, a military monarchy, then it's becoming an institution. It's something that, you know, you can inherit not just the title, but an entire way of administering and, and governing the empire.

• 27:59Tom Holland?

  And it's Claudius because he doesn't have this family link. Because when he gets the name of Caesar, it has to be voted to him by the senate. It's not his by right. What that does is to reveal to people that this is now something that you can inherit as in the form of an institution. And Claudius's ability to make that work, to make, you know, the the imperial institution, the imperial office work as an institution, will be absolutely fundamental to the question of whether he will be a success and ultimately whether, you know, whether the autocracy will be a success and whether Rome itself will endure and prosper.

• 28:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 28:44Tom Holland?

  So, high stakes.

• 28:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  High stakes. So, come back after the break to see if this stammering, twitching, socially inept historian turns out to be a good emperor.

• 28:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So, go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 29:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Claudius, written off for half a century, an idiot, a fool, a stammerer, unfit to be exhibited in public, is now the master of the Roman world. And Tom, how does he do? The answer is actually, he does all right, doesn't he?

• 29:56Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he does. He's very proactive. He's full of ideas. He's willing to experiment. And I think you get the sense of a man who has profited from his study of history.

• 30:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  God.

• 30:09Tom Holland?

  And from his ringside view of the court of the Caesars. I think he's been sitting there and thinking, well, you know, this is what I do. This is what I try. And he puts these various plans into into action. And he's a, I think he's a pretty good emperor. And because he's grown up in the court of Augustus. And because he studied the reign of Augustus in the context of what had gone before, the kind of the republican traditions, I think he is alert to a degree that his predecessors kind of hadn't really thought through just how cleverly Augustus had fused these kind of rival traditions that we've been talking about, the kind of the the elite traditionalist

• 30:52Tom Holland?

  approach and the kind of populist approach. And Augustus had been brilliant at playing to both galleries, wearing kind of both the masks. He had attempted to appeal to the Senate as Tiberius had done and to the people as Caligula had done. Claudius, his aim is to try and repeat that trick, to to try and get both the Senate and the people on board. Now, in doing that, he faces an obvious problem, which is that he lacks the prestige of Augustus. He doesn't have the background, he doesn't have the range of achievements. And of course, everyone thinks he's an idiot, which is a kind of ongoing challenge. And on top of that, there's also the fact that there are lots of senators who who just really resent him being emperor, partly because lots of them had wanted to restore the Republic, and partly also because there were lots in the Senate who think that they could be

• 31:36Tom Holland?

  a much better emperor than this guy who kind of dribbles and shakes and, you know, blows snot.

• 31:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Tom Holland?

  And so behind his back, they're constantly mocking him. And Claudius is well aware of this. But of course, you know, Claudius is has been mocked all his life. And here he is, he's emperor.

• 31:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there are plenty of examples of politicians who are laughed at a lot of the time, but actually are are big enough to ignore it and end up being pretty successful.

• 32:04Tom Holland?

  So Claudius is, I mean, you know, he he rules for almost 14 years.

• 32:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:10Tom Holland?

  And despite the fact that there are kind of repeated displays of resentment and contempt from the Senate, and in fact, even as we'll see the occasional conspiracy, he he shrugs it all aside. Now, it's true that he is a kind of, he's a bit paranoid. So he's the first emperor to, to institute friskings of people who are brought into his private presence. And when he first enters the senate house, it's a month after he's come to power, he does so accompanied by guards. And that's a reminder of the fact that, just as Caligula had done, he's identified what the real source of his power within the capital is. And he is unembarrassed about this.

• 32:54Tom Holland?

  So he minces various coins that kind of flatter the Praetorians. So there's one that's stamped with an image of their camp. There's another that shows Claudius shaking hands with the Praetorian standard bearer. Of course, he's given them massive donatives. He also gives massive donatives and pay rises to the legions. And, you know, senators can laugh at him all they like, but it's Claudius who's in charge of the legions. So ultimately, that is the bedrock of his rule. And I think it's fair to say that even though they may feel resentful, even though they may kind of despise him, obviously, he's not Caligula. And so it is very hard for any senator not to feel a certain measure of relief. Right. That they've got someone who isn't going to try and get off with their wives, or, Yeah.

• 33:39Tom Holland?

  you know, all the other things that he was, he was getting up to. And Claudius, of course, is, you know, he's a historian, so he, he understands the role the senators played in Roman history. He, he respects it. He, he basically kind of shares their values. He's a, he's, he's an aristocrat, you know, and more than that, he's a Claudian. And so he knows the rules. He knows how to dress. He knows how to speak. He knows how to act the part of a traditional republican Roman aristocrat. And we've talked the whole way through how being a successful emperor really. Is as much as anything about working out what role you're going to play and then playing it well.

• 34:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ronald Reagan.

• 34:22Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Being an actor. It's a really important thing for any politician and any point in history, I would say. Massively important.

• 34:30Tom Holland?

  Yeah, and if you if you lack the charisma and the self-confidence to play a part that will be appealing to people who it's important to influence, then you're not going to be basically a good politician.

• 34:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 34:40Tom Holland?

  And on that level, Claudius is a good politician. Now, of course, you know, he has this limp, he has his infirmities, but when he sits down or when he just kind of stands still, he looks impressive. And Suetonius clearly recognizes that this is important. So he says, especially while lying down, he did not fail to give an impression of majesty and dignity. You know, he looks good, he looks impressive.

• 35:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, probably the most single most famous thing that he does, that people who've listened to a lot of the rest of his history will remember, is he orders the invasion of Britain. He doesn't personally lead it because he's hardly a kind of obvious military man, but he, you know, he associates, he's associated with it.

• 35:22Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 35:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's his invasion. And presumably, he's doing that because he knows from his study of history that nothing is better calculated to stir the emotions of the populace than a military victory, even if it's against a people as useless as the Britons.

• 35:36Tom Holland?

  Exactly. And more than that, that this is what a Claudian and a Caesar, so these, you know, the Julians, that these two great kind of families who've been conjured in the house of Augustus, that that's what their ancestors did. They went out and they conquered people. It's what Julius Caesar had done. It's what various Claudian generals had done. And so Claudius is saying, I am their heir. And again, as you say, he doesn't actually lead it himself, but once Britain has, you know, the bridgehead has been established and Colchester is on the verge of falling, Claudius goes over and he does it with elephants to create as big a splash as possible. And then when he comes back, he reenacts it.

• 36:17Tom Holland?

  So he presides over kind of various reenactments on the Campus Martius, showing highlights from the campaign in Britain. You know, Colchester being stormed, various British kings surrendering. And Across the Mediterranean, he has himself portrayed as a kind of buff rapist. He, so there's this frieze from Aphrodite's ass in what's now Turkey, which shows him, which shows Britannia as a woman whose robes have been torn from her and Claudius as this kind of muscle bound guy who's forcing her to the ground. And obviously, that's not how

• 36:59Tom Holland?

  a politician today would want to be represented. But that's how, you know, plays well with, with Roman audiences. And it's clearly how Claudius wanted to be seen. He's, you know, he's no longer the kind of elderly, stammering, twitching historian. He's a man of action who subdues provinces, subdues women. And he's a Caesar.

• 37:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. But it's not just military. He likes, he likes a grand projet, public works, sort of a lot of hydraulic action. I think it's fair to say.

• 37:30Tom Holland?

  So he's very into hydrology. Another thing he'd written a book about, he'd written a book about canals in Mesopotamia.

• 37:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  God, that sounds fascinating.

• 37:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah, except, you know, grand projet, again, I mean, Caesar had been into that, Augustus had been into that, and the Claudians definitely had been into that. So one of his most famous ancestors, Appius Claudius, had built the Appian Way, the great road that joins Rome to the kind of the heel of Italy. And Claudius seems to be genuinely enthusiastic about taking up that battle of improving infrastructure in Rome. So the obvious thing that every emperor has to worry about is the grain supply. And historically, it's been a problem that Rome does not have a deep sea port. So at the mouth of the Tiber, this is Port Ostia, which I know, Dominic, you're a big fan of.

• 38:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Brilliant.

• 38:17Tom Holland?

  Yeah, you love it, don't you?

• 38:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think Ostia is one of the best places you can go. If you go to Rome, my single recommendation to the listeners is to go to Ostia Antica. It's as good as Pompeii, and there's nobody else there. There you go. You've heard it.

• 38:29Tom Holland?

  Okay, well Claudius would be thrilled to hear that because because he decides that he's going to he's going to build a massive deep sea port at the mouth of the Tiber. And when he summons engineers and tells them this is what he's going to do, they throw up their hands in horror and and say, you know, on no account attempt this, it'll be a disaster, it'll be a kind of HS2 fiasco. But, you know, Claudius is Caesar, he can do what he likes. And if it serves the good of the Roman people to to remould the land, to to gouge out to the bottom of the sea, then that's what he's going to do. And so he goes ahead. He also, he's a great man for an aqueduct. He builds two enormous aqueducts, and one of them, the Aqua Claudia, is probably the

• 39:13Tom Holland?

  greatest of all Rome's aqueducts. And what's fascinating about them is that they, like Claudius, are simultaneously very modern and very ancient. So they're kind of cutting edge engineering, but they have the cladding of a kind of old school aqueduct. And I think that's a beautiful summation of what Claudius is about. Efficiency, modernity, but dress it up to look old. I mean, that's basically what I'd like as well, I have to say. I'd be all in favour of that. And, you know, these are recognised by contemporaries as being astonishing achievements. So Pliny the Elder, he writes that they are wonders without rival in the world. And so obviously this redounds, again, greatly to Claudius's credit.

• 39:57Tom Holland?

  Makes him very, very popular with the people who look to Caesar, to keep them watered, to keep them fed. And it's also popular because it gives them jobs. So it's not slaves who are doing the work, it's it's, you know, it's the mass of the people. And it's a kind of Keynesian scheme, I guess.

• 40:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, putting money into the economy.

• 40:14Tom Holland?

  Putting money into the economy.

• 40:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the other thing is that Claudius is not, although he's quite old school, he's not like a Tiberius kind of duh, killjoy, who who sneers at the at the pleasures of the populace. So you said Claudius would like a chapter on snooker. He'd enjoy a night out at a at a smoke-filled snooker hall.

• 40:35Tom Holland?

  He absolutely would, yes, he absolutely would. So as I said, you know, he writes a book on gambling, which is seen as being a very de classe occupation. You know, he enjoys the pleasures of the masses. And in fact, he's he's so keen on gladiatorial combat that

• 40:52Tom Holland?

  Suetonius writes that he is shockingly obsessed by executions, which in a kind of a day of spectacles in an amphitheatre, the climax would be gladiators, then before that you'd have the wild beasts, and before that you would have the executions. And the executions is kind of, you know, you've got to be an obsessive fan to go and watch them. Yeah. And Claudius is a kind of, you know, he does like to go and watch them. So it's like, you know, going to, going to see a famous band or something and going to see the warm-up act. The warm-up act. So going to the Olympics and going to watch like some terrible sport that you've known just him. Yeah, exactly. It's unsurprising that, that a lot of the shows that he puts on are very, very famous. And in fact, one of them gives rise to perhaps one of the most

• 41:35Tom Holland?

  famous sayings from the whole of Roman history. He's trying to drain this lake in the countryside above Rome. And to mark the final completion of this project, before the canal is open that will drain the lake, he has a great sea battle staged there. And all the gladiators who've been assembled onto the boats to, to stage this, turn to Claudius, where he's looking very kind of splendid, you know, he's sat down looking tremendously imperious. And they say, hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you. And that's where this is from. That is where that phrase is come from. Although it's, I mean, it's very, very Claudius

• 42:16Tom Holland?

  that he then totally messes it up. So when they say, we're about to die salute you, he replies, or not. Because, you know, maybe some of them will, won't die. I mean, it's kind of very Donish, very WASPish humour, or not. No. And so all the gladiators hear him say that. And so they think, brilliant, he's pardoning us. We don't have to fight. And so they kind of put down their weapons and refuse to fight. And Claudius is so outraged by this, that he gets up out of his throne and hurries down to yell at them and tell them to get a move on. And of course, when he does that, he hobbles and limps. Oh, no. And the impression of majesty and splendor is, is compromised. However, he does manage to persuade the guys to, the gladiators to pick up their weapons. And so the fight goes ahead. That's good news for the crowd.

• 43:02Tom Holland?

  Good news for the crowd, absolutely. Maybe less good news for the gladiators. Now, There is, of course, a problem with this, which is that it's very expensive. And that is compounded by the fact that Claudius's predecessor, Caligula, had also been very keen on lavishing money on extravaganzas. So the treasury is pretty bare. But Claudius is very proactive. And again, I think he's clearly thought about what he's going to do. And he wants to set the administration of the household of Caesar on as firm a footing as he can, because he recognizes that that administration is also effectively the administration of the entire empire.

• 43:44Tom Holland?

  So until Claudius, the fact that Caesar needs money, because the money that he has is basically the income that keeps the empire running, had been disguised, or at least hadn't properly been acknowledged. But Claudius, perhaps because the circumstances in which he's come to power, he's more like a military strongman who's come to power in a coup than a kind of hereditary monarch. He's kind of unabashed about the need to make his administration as streamlined and efficient as possible. And so the people he turns to for that are the people that any wealthy Roman who needs specialists would turn to. And these are people who are slaves or freedmen. Because as Caesar, he has the pick of the ablest, smartest people, Greeks with particular

• 44:29Tom Holland?

  specialisms in various fields of finance or whatever. And so these freedmen are basically entrusted by Claudius with the running of the empire. And they proved to be very, very effective at it.

• 44:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  So these are the people like, anyone who's read I, Claudius, will remember Narcissus and Pallas and people like that, who presumably, they're very bright and they're very good, but I would guess they must attract a lot of haters.

• 44:52Tom Holland?

  Of course, because everyone in the Senate's massively resentful. And of course, it also plays into the stereotype of Claudius as a foolish old man who is easily manipulated and dominated by people who properly... Should, you know, be kept firmly under thumb, of whom slaves and freedmen would be the paradigm. So, under the thumb as he was of these men, so that's the freedmen, the favourites, he played the part not of a princeps, but of a flunky, dispensing magistracies here and military commands there, pardoning and punishing people, largely oblivious to how much he was the creature of this or that favourite's interests. So, this is a

• 45:33Tom Holland?

  crucial part of the image of Claudius, that he's an idiot who essentially is so feeble-minded that he's become the plaything of his favourites. Now, we know that's not true, because in Egypt, we found, when I say we, I mean scholars, archaeologists, have found documentary evidence for the close attention that Claudius plays to the administration of his empire, and the kind of the evident intelligence with which he corresponds to people in provinces across the span of the Roman world. He's a very smart, able guy, and actually, the fact he has all these freedmen serving him, now this isn't evidence of his senility or imbecility, it's evidence of his astute ability to martial innovation.

• 46:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 46:18Tom Holland?

  But, part of what makes his contemporaries and posterity assume that Claudius is feeble-minded is that there's a sense that he's under the thumb not just of freedmen, but also even worse, of women, and particularly of a succession of wives, of whom perhaps the most notorious is a woman called Messalina.

• 46:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, I was hoping we'd get on to Messalina. So, Messalina is, he basically has his pick, I guess, does he? And he picks a very, a young, beautiful, and crucially, very blue-blooded wife.

• 46:59Tom Holland?

  I think it's the blue-blooded that matters. I think the beauty and youth is a, you know, these are perks.

• 47:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's the great-grandniece of Augustus, right? So, she helps him to, to sort of say, "I'm the heir to the greatest emperor, the first emperor."

• 47:15Tom Holland?

  And that is a crucial role that she plays. And it gives her a certain degree of independent power because everyone, I mean, Claudius knows and everyone else knows that being married to Messalina, who is the great grand niece of Augustus, you know, this is a crucial buttressing of his status and prestige. And her significance and her, her kind of independence of operation is enhanced by the fact that in AD 41, she gives him crucially a male heir. So he now has a son who can inherit this, you know, his role in the House of Caesar.

• 47:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  With a great name.

• 47:50Tom Holland?

  Right. So two years later, Claudius presides over the conquest of Britain. And so this little boy gets given the name of Britannicus. And Messalina's role in this, you know, crucial. And so she has basically made herself fundamental, not just to the status of Claudius's regime as it exists in the present, but its prospects in the future. Basically, it's kind of, it's perpetuation. And so it's unsurprising that she is portrayed in statues as the very model of a sober, respectable Roman matron. And she's praised as the absolute model of Roman

• 48:28Tom Holland?

  womanhood. But Dominic, dear listeners, here's the question. Is she the model of Roman womanhood? Or is she an outrageous strumpet?

• 48:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, if you've seen or indeed read I Claudius, you will remember that there is, I mean, it's one of the great scandals, not just in Roman history, but all history, when Claudius, he's, he's at Ostia, isn't he? He's looking around that splendid sight that I was recommending to the listeners. And if the Ostia tourist board want to get in touch, I'd be very keen to hear from them. So he's looking around Ostia and somebody, a concubine of his, comes up to him and says, Messalina is, is carrying on behind your back. And not just carrying on, she's up to all sorts, Tom.

• 49:13Tom Holland?

  Yeah. Well, she's having an affair with this very good looking young senator who's also very ambitious. And the story is, is that they're conspiring to replace Claudius as emperor. And in fact, that, that Messalina has married this guy.

• 49:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Tom Holland?

  You know, she's the great grand niece of Augustus and she's the mother of Britannicus. So this is potentially, you know, if it's true, very, very dangerous for Claudius. And the measure of of his alarm is that he goes speeding back to Rome. And he doesn't go to the Palatine, but he goes to the Praetorian camp because he's got to. Clearly, he's worried, you know, he needs to make sure that that's secure because only if that's secure can he then take measures to deal with this threat. And his worry must have been that, you know, Messalina and her her toy boy have might have suborned the Praetorians. I mean, in the event they haven't, which perhaps suggests that the story has been slightly overblown, but we'll come to that in a minute. But anyway, Claudius is in a position to send the Praetorians out and suppress the coup,

• 50:13Tom Holland?

  which they do. So all the various conspirators are arrested and executed. Messalina has vanished. It turns out that she's gone to find to find her mother, which is, you know, in her moment of crisis, she wants mummy and they are kind of closeted together in in one of their kind of beautiful gardens that all the aristocracy in Rome have. And she's cornered there, run through by the Praetorians and dumped at the feet of her mother. And that is the end of Messalina. And so the question is, well, what, you know, what is going on here? Now, I think it's evident from contemporaneous sources that Messalina is a very proficient player in power politics, that she's very ruthless in getting rid of potential rivals

• 50:57Tom Holland?

  or anyone who seems to threaten her position, that she's very ambitious, certainly, certainly ambitious for her son. And, I mean, maybe she's been cheating on Claudius, can't be sure. But, you know, was she really conspiring against him?

• 51:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, maybe people have, there's been a bit of an internal power struggle we don't that we can't really glimpse and that maybe the bureaucrats, the the freedmen have, you know, turned against her. Is that possible?

• 51:27Tom Holland?

  Definitely. That concubine who goes to see Claudius at Ostia, she is prompted by one of Claudius' most powerful freedmen and they are lurking in the background of this whole episode. So it is, I think, likelier that Messalina is destroyed in a kind of faction fight between her supporters and kind of over mighty freedmen than that she really was kind of.

• 51:53Tom Holland?

  Getting up to kind of all kinds of sexual shenanigans.

• 51:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  So like the last days of Boris Johnson, where there was rival briefing between his wife Carrie and some of his aides, remember? I mean, that kind of.

• 52:04Tom Holland?

  I mean, I think from the point of view of Roman history, this is a key moment because, you know, this is, this is a huge event. There are clearly all kinds of political interests at stake. But we just don't know what the truth is. And it points to the way in which rivalries that for centuries and centuries have been played out on the floor of the Senate House are now being conducted in side rooms and passageways and bedrooms in the Palatine. And it means that certainty is impossible. And the lack of certainty in turn breeds scandalous gossip.

• 52:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that's what explains these incredibly lurid stories. Again, I, Claudius, has great fun with these, that she has been, you know, you describe it in your notes as an all day sexathon.

• 52:55Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 52:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  With Rome's most hot courtesan.

• 52:58Tom Holland?

  Yes. So Rome's most, most experienced and seasoned whore, and they go head to head, it is said, as it were.

• 53:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 53:05Tom Holland?

  And Messalina wins. And.

• 53:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  That obviously didn't happen.

• 53:09Tom Holland?

  No, it obviously didn't happen. And also what obviously didn't happen is what Juvenal claims in his poems. He's a satirist writing, kind of maybe half a century or so after Messalina's death. And he describes her as kind of nostalgia de la boue, going off and working incognita in a low rent brothel. And Juvenal says that he, you know, she gilds her nipples and wears a blonde wig over her hair and kind of lies in this dirty, dirty room where plebeians come and have their way with her. And this is clearly not true, but it suggests the kind of.

• 53:49Tom Holland?

  Titillation that these faction fights in the Palatine are now capable of generating. And of course, it's very bad for Messalina's posthumous reputation, but it's also terrible for Claudius's posthumous reputation. And in fact, his reputation when he's still alive, because it leaves him with a double problem. It leaves him looking kind of weak, cuckolded, deluded, and that plays into all the stories that are being told about him as the kind of the plaything of his freedmen. But it's also deprived him of a kind of crucial buttress upholding his regime, because he no longer has a marital link to the bloodline of Augustus. And he clearly feels that this is so important that he is prepared to offend some of the

• 54:31Tom Holland?

  most sacred laws of Rome to deal with the problem. Because there is a suitable candidate on hand. There is a woman who, you know, she's not just a great granny, she's a great granddaughter of Augustus. And this is one of the two surviving sisters of Caligula. The pair of them, people may remember, had been exiled to prison island by their brother. And when Claudius came to power, he'd allowed them to return. And he'd become very close to one of them, a woman called Agrippina, so like her mother, confusingly. So she's called Agrippina the Younger by historians. And she's very beautiful, very smart.

• 55:12Tom Holland?

  Claudius thinks she's great, but I think unless his need had been what it was, he would not have passed a law revoking the taboo against an uncle marrying his niece. And he says, no, this is absolutely legitimate. And he goes ahead and he marries Agrippina. And Suetonius says, as he was getting ready to marry Agrippina in defiance of all morality, he kept describing her in every speech he gave as his daughter, his ward, born and raised in his loving embrace. So it's very creepy, but more than that, it's evidence of his desperation. Still, even though he's now about a decade into his reign.

• 55:53Tom Holland?

  The sense of insecurity, the anxiety that he's not a real Caesar, and he needs a wife who will make him feel a real Caesar.

• 56:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Just to give people a sense of it, he is 59, she is 34. So a 25 year, exactly 25 year age gap. And she already has a son of her own, who is much older than Britannicus, right?

• 56:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah, four or five years older, which when you're 12, as Agrippina's son is, I mean, that's quite an age gap.

• 56:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Tom Holland?

  And this is a young lad called Lucius Domitius Henna Barbis, after his father. And he, of course, has two advantages over Britannicus. So one of them, we've just mentioned, the fact that he's older. And, you know, when you're, when you're in your teens, being four or five years older is a considerable advantage.

• 56:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 56:40Tom Holland?

  And the other thing, of course, is that he's a direct descendant of Augustus. And there's a third advantage, which is that Agrippina is really, really ambitious to see him rather than Britannicus on the throne. And she presses Claudius to adopt this young lad. And sure enough, on the 25th of February 50, so very shortly after his marriage to Agrippina, Claudius adopts the young Lucius Domitius Henna Barbis. And the boy formally becomes Claudius's eldest son. And as a marker of this, he takes on a new name. And this new name is Nero Claudius Caesar, or as we know him, Nero.

• 57:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so this isn't going to end well. I mean, to be fair to Agrippina, she might well be thinking, if I don't do this, one day Britannicus will become emperor and he'll probably kill my son because my son will be a rival claimant.

• 57:34Tom Holland?

  I think that's exactly what she thinks. And I think that, that even if the name of Nero didn't cast the shadow that it does, I think just listening to that setup, you know, it has the quality of a kind of folk tale. And you can see, you know, it's kind of Cinderella story, the befuddled father, you know, obsessing over a new wife, the child who gets abandoned. All these kind of elements are there. And sure enough.

• 58:06Tom Holland?

  Of 13th October 54, so Claudius has been powered by this point, just under 14 years, an announcement is released from the Palatine to the Roman people. And this announcement is that Claudius is dead. And shortly afterwards, Nero, who by this point is 16 years old, he comes out from the Palatine, he's hailed by a Praetorian escort as Caesar, he's placed in a litter, and as Claudius had been some 14 years previously, he is taken to the Praetorian camp. So Agrippina and Nero likewise have recognised that this is the key to seizing power of the capital. Within a year, Britannicus is dead, supposedly

• 58:45Tom Holland?

  of a seizure, but of course, everyone assumes that Nero has had him poisoned. Agrippina herself dies in 59, she is definitely murdered by Nero, I mean Nero makes no bones about that. And Nero himself, of course, dies in 68, as we heard in the, you know, the details of how he died, we heard in the very opening reading of this series. And with him dies Augustus's bloodline, that's it, there are, there are no more heirs of Augustus.

• 59:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's go back to Claudius for a second. He died in October 54. So that's what, four years after he'd adopted Nero as his heir. And it's always thought, isn't it, thanks largely probably to Suetonius and also to I. Claudius, that he was poisoned by Agrippina and Nero with mushrooms. Suetonius says he was poisoned with a dish of mushrooms. Do you think that's true?

• 59:38Tom Holland?

  Well, so, so I think when Suetonius is the first to report something, that's when you need to be on your guard, that's suspicious. Suetonius is not the first to report that Claudius was murdered by, with a dish of poisoned mushrooms. So Pliny the Elder mentions it. But, I mean, having said that, we don't know. I mean, maybe he dies of natural causes. I mean, he'd been sickly all his life. He's had a good innings, you know, he's 63 when he, he finally pops his clogs. And there's Jezar Osgood, he's written a brilliant book on Claudius, Claudius Caesar. In that, he points out that

• 1:00:16Tom Holland?

  There had been a lot of plague in Rome at the time. He points to evidence from Tacitus of people, large number of high ranking people who died. So that suggests that there's quite a lot of sickness around. And the honest truth is, is that we can't know. And I guess that, I mean, you would say as a historian who has, you know, I mean, think of all the episodes we did on 1968 or Kennedy or whatever. I mean, it's so much material that this is a cause of frustration. But I think it's also, it breeds what to me is part of the fascination of this period and of Suetonius's biographies, which is the way that

• 1:00:52Tom Holland?

  recorded fact and myth kind of blur into one another. And sometimes you can distinguish the lineaments of history and other times you see the lineaments of mythology. And trying to make sense of that, for me, is what makes this whole story so fascinating. You know, we talked about it. This is the ultimate dynastic story. It's why Claudius, you know, as a novel, but even more as a TV drama, kind of lies at the head of all these great dynastic epics that we've had on TV over the past decades. And the fact that Suetonius's account has this kind of mythic folkloric quality,

• 1:01:31Tom Holland?

  as well as kind of quoting letters and, you know, citing laws and things, I think is a crucial part of that.

• 1:01:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, I'd agree. I agree completely. But actually, where I'd slightly probably disagree with you is I don't necessarily think this is actually as different from modern history as you would think. Because modern history too is freighted with all kinds of assumptions, folk myths, urban myths. And actually teasing out what really happened is the impossible goal for any historian of any period.

• 1:02:00Tom Holland?

  I was just thinking about the, you know, when I was thinking about the death of Claudius and, you know, was he murdered, was he not? And then, of course, thinking about that series we did on Kennedy. And kind of yearning for the equivalent of a Warren Report or something. You know, all the kind of the whole range of of pieces of evidence that you could bring to bear and thinking how frustrating it is we don't have that. But of course Kennedy is a myth, isn't he?

• 1:02:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. And also which wouldn't solve the, you know, wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't end the conversation. I mean, because, because these things don't. So if people want to make up their own minds, what they should do is to buy Tom's new translation of Suetonius's book, The Lives of the Caesars, which is available now from all good bookshops with Penguin Classics. It's Tom, a great translation, a great series, I have to say. A tour de force, I think, is the approved rest of history terminology. So that was absolutely tremendous. And by the way, the book is brilliant. So people should absolutely go and buy the book. And we will be back next week with something very different, another of history's great monsters,

• 1:03:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  actually, and another story in which is actually quite difficult to get at, as it were, the truth of what really happened, because there are so many different accounts. And that is the story of King Leopold and the Belgian Congo. So we will be telling that story next week, the heart of darkness, indeed. Okay, on that bombshell, goodbye.

• 1:03:24Tom Holland?

  Bye bye.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  There we are getting a statement from number 10. Bomb that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  The Great Game, Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 1:04:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not?

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 1:04:18Tom Holland?

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:04:29Speaker 06

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:36Speaker 06

  New from Goldhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy?

• 1:04:45Speaker 06

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 1:04:54Tom Holland?

  We have two tight friendly KIA.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.