admission to the senate and magistracies) at Rome has been partly preserved on the fragment of a bronze tablet found at Lyons in 1524; an imperial edict concerning the citizenship of the Anaunians (15th of March 46) was found in the southern Tirol in 1869 (C.I.L. v. 5050). Claudius was especially fond of building. He completed the great aqueduct (Aqua Claudia) begun by Caligula, drained the Lacus Fucinus, and built the harbour of Ostia. Nor were his military operations unsuccessful. Mauretania was made a Roman province; the conquest of Britain was begun; his distinguished general Domitius Corbulo (q.v.) gained considerable successes in Germany and the East. The intrigues of Narcissus caused Messallina to be put to death by order of Claudius, who took as his fourth wife his niece Agrippina, a woman as criminal as any of her predecessors. She prevailed upon him to set aside his own son Britannicus in favour of Nero, her son by a former marriage; and in 54, to make Nero’s position secure, she put the emperor to death by poison. The apotheosis of Claudius was the subject of a lampoon by Seneca called apokolokyntosis, the “pumpkinification” of Claudius.
Claudius was a prolific writer, chiefly on history, but his works are lost. He wrote (in Greek) a history of Carthage and a history of Etruria; (in Latin) a history of Rome from the death of Caesar, an autobiography, and an essay in defence of Cicero against the attacks of Asinius Gallus. He also introduced three new letters into the Latin alphabet: Ⅎ for the consonantal V, ) for BS and PS, ├ for the intermediate sound between I and U.
Authorities.—Ancient: the Annals of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius. Modern: H. Lehmann, Claudius und seine Zeit, with introductory chapter on the ancient authorities (1858); Lucien Double, L’Empereur Claude (1876); A. Ziegler, Die politische Seite der Regierung des Kaisers Claudius (1885); H. F. Pelham in Quarterly Review (April 1905), where certain administrative and political changes introduced by Claudius, for which he was attacked by his contemporaries, are discussed and defended; Merivale, Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, chs. 49, 50; H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit, i., pt. 1; H. Furneaux’s ed. of the Annals of Tacitus (introduction).
CLAUDIUS, the name of a famous Roman gens. The by-form Clodius, in its origin a mere orthographical variant, was regularly used for certain Claudii in late republican times, but otherwise the two forms were used indifferently. The gens contained a patrician and a plebeian family; the chief representatives of the former were the Pulchri, of the latter the Marcelli (see
Marcellus). The following members of the gens deserve particular mention.
1. Appius Saminus Inregillensis, or Regillensis, Claudius, so called from Regillum (or Regilli) in Sabine territory, founder of the Claudian gens. His original name was Attus or Attius Clausus. About 504 B.C. he settled in Rome, where he and his followers formed a tribe. In 495 he was consul, and his cruel enforcement of the laws of debtor and creditor, in opposition to his milder colleague, P. Servilius Priscus, was one of the chief causes of the “secession” of the plebs to the Sacred Mount. On several occasions he displayed his hatred of the people, although it is stated that he subsequently played the part of mediator.
Suetonius, Tiberius, i.; Livy ii. 16-29; Dion. Halic. v. 40, vi. 23, 24.
2. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Crassus, a Roman patrician, consul in 471 and 451 B.C., and in the same and following year one of the decemvirs. At first he was conspicuous for his aristocratic pride and bitter hatred of the plebeians. Twice they refused to fight under him, and fled before their enemies. He retaliated by decimating the army. He was banished, but soon returned, and again became consul. In the same year (451) he was made one of the decemviri who had been appointed to draw up a code of written laws. When it was decided to elect decemvirs for another year, he who had formerly been looked upon as the champion of the aristocracy, suddenly came forward as the friend of the people, and was himself re-elected together with several plebeians. But no sooner was the new body in office, than it treated both patricians and plebeians with equal violence, and refused to resign at the end of the year. Matters were brought to a crisis by the affair of Virginia. Enamoured of the beautiful daughter of the plebeian centurion Virginius, Claudius attempted to seize her by an abuse of justice. One of his clients, Marcus Claudius, swore that she was the child of a slave belonging to him, and had been stolen by the childless wife of the centurion. Virginius was summoned from the army, and on the day of trial was present to expose the conspiracy. Nevertheless, judgment was given according to the evidence of Marcus, and Claudius commanded Virginia to be given up to him. In despair, her father seized a knife from a neighbouring stall and plunged it in her side. A general insurrection was the result; and the people seceded to the Sacred Mount. The decemvirs were finally compelled to resign and Appius Claudius died in prison, either by his own hand or by that of the executioner. For a discussion of the character of Appius Claudius, see Mommsen’s appendix to vol. i. of his History of Rome. He holds that Claudius was never the leader of the patrician party, but a patrician demagogue who ended by becoming a tyrant to patricians as well as plebeians. The decemvirate, one of the triumphs of the plebs, could hardly have been abolished by that body, but would naturally have been overthrown by the patricians. The revolution which ruined Claudius was a return to the rule of the patricians represented by the Horatii and Valerii.
Livy iii. 32-58; Dion. Halic. x. 59, xi. 3.
3. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Caecus, Roman patrician and author. In 312 B.C. he was elected censor without having passed through the office of consul. His censorship—which he retained for five years, in spite of the lex Aemilia which limited the tenure of that office to eighteen months—was remarkable for the actual or attempted achievement of several great constitutional changes. He filled vacancies in the senate with men of low birth, in some cases even the sons of freedmen (Diod. Sic. xx. 36; Livy ix. 30; Suetonius, Claudius, 24). His most important political innovation was the abolition of the old free birth, freehold basis of suffrage. He enrolled the freedmen and landless citizens both in the centuries and in the tribes, and, instead of assigning them to the four urban tribes, he distributed them through all the tribes and thus gave them practical control of the elections. In 304, however, Q. Fabius Rullianus limited the landless and poorer freedmen to the four urban tribes, thus annulling the effect of Claudius’s arrangement. Appius Claudius transferred the charge of the public worship of Hercules in the Forum Boarium from the Potitian gens to a number of public slaves. He further invaded the exclusive rights of the patricians by directing his secretary Gnaeus Flavius (whom, though a freedman, he made a senator) to publish the legis actiones (methods of legal practice) and the list of dies fasti (or days on which legal business could be transacted). Lastly, he gained enduring fame by the construction of a road and an aqueduct, which—a thing unheard of before—he called by his own name (Livy ix. 29; Frontinus, De Aquis, 115; Diod. Sic. xx. 36). In 307 he was elected consul for the first time. In 298 he was interrex; in 296, as consul, he led the army in Samnium, and although, with his colleague, he gained a victory over the Etruscans and Samnites, he does not seem to have specially distinguished himself as a soldier (Livy x. 19). Next year he was praetor, and he was once dictator. His character, like his namesake the decemvir’s is not easy to define. In spite of his political reforms, he opposed the admission of the plebeians to the consulship and priestly offices; and, although these reforms might appear to be democratic in character and calculated to give preponderance to the lowest class of the people, his probable aim was to strengthen the power of the magistrates (and lessen that of the senate) by founding it on the popular will, which would find its expression in the urban inhabitants and could be most easily influenced by the magistrate. He was already blind and too feeble to walk, when Cineas, the minister of Pyrrhus, visited him, but so vigorously did he oppose every concession that all the eloquence of Cineas was in vain, and the Romans forgot past misfortunes in the inspiration of Claudius’s patriotism (Livy x. 13; Justin xviii. 2; Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 19). The story of his blindness, however, may be merely a method of
