accounting for his cognomen. Tradition regarded it as the punishment of his transference of the cult of Hercules from the Potitii.
Appius Claudius Caecus is also remarkable as the first writer mentioned in Roman literature. His speech against peace with Pyrrhus was the first that was transmitted to writing, and thereby laid the foundation of prose composition. He was the author of a collection of aphorisms in verse mentioned by Cicero (of which a few fragments remain), and of a legal work entitled De Usurpationibus. It is very likely also that he was concerned in the drawing up of the Legis Actiones published by Flavius. The famous dictum “Every man is the architect of his own fortune” is attributed to him. He also interested himself in grammatical questions, distinguished the two sounds R and S in writing, and did away with the letter Z.
See Mommsen’s appendix to his Roman History (vol. i.); treatises by W. Siebert (1863) and F. D. Gerlach (1872), dealing especially with the censorship of Claudius.
4. Claudius, Publius, surnamed Pulcher, son of (3). He was the first of the gens who bore this surname. In 249 he was consul and appointed to the command of the fleet in the first Punic War. Instead of continuing the siege of Lilybaeum, he decided to attack the Carthaginians in the harbour of Drepanum, and was completely defeated. The disaster was commonly attributed to Claudius’s treatment of the sacred chickens, which refused to eat before the battle. “Let them drink then,” said the consul, and ordered them to be thrown into the sea. Having been recalled and ordered to appoint a dictator, he gave another instance of his high-handedness by nominating a subordinate official, M. Claudius Glicia, but the nomination was at once overruled. Claudius himself was accused of high treason and heavily fined. He must have died before 246, in which year his sister Claudia was fined for publicly expressing a wish that her brother Publius could rise from the grave to lose a second fleet and thereby diminish the number of the people. It is supposed that he committed suicide.
Livy, Epit., 19; Polybius i. 49; Cicero, De Divinatione, i. 16, ii. 8; Valerius Maximus i. 4, viii. I.
5. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Pulcher, Roman statesman and author. He served under his brother-in-law Lucullus in Asia (72 B.C.) and was commissioned to deliver the ultimatum to Tigranes, which gave him the choice of war with Rome or the surrender of Mithradates. In 57 he was praetor, in 56 propraetor in Sardinia, and in 54 consul with L. Domitius Ahenobarbus. Through the intervention of Pompey, he became reconciled to Cicero, who had been greatly offended because Claudius had indirectly opposed his return from exile. In this and certain other transactions Claudius seems to have acted from avaricious motives,—a result of his early poverty. In 53 he entered upon the governorship of Cilicia, in which capacity he seems to have been rapacious and tyrannical. During this period he carried on a correspondence with Cicero, whose letters to him form the third book of the Epistolae ad Familiares. Claudius resented the appointment of Cicero as his successor, avoided meeting him, and even issued orders after his arrival in the province. On his return to Rome Claudius was impeached by P. Cornelius Dolabella on the ground of having violated the sovereign rights of the people. This led him to make advances to Cicero, since it was necessary to obtain witnesses in his favour from his old province. He was acquitted, and a charge of bribery against him also proved unsuccessful. In 50 he was censor, and expelled many of the members of the senate, amongst them the historian Sallust on the ground of immorality. His connexion with Pompey brought upon him the enmity of Caesar, at whose march on Rome he fled from Italy. Having been appointed by Pompey to the command in Greece, in obedience to an ambiguous oracle he crossed over to Euboea, where he died about 48, before the battle of Pharsalus. Claudius was of a distinctly religious turn of mind, as is shown by the interest he took in sacred buildings (the temple at Eleusis, the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Oropus). He wrote a work on augury, the first book of which he dedicated to Cicero. He was also extremely superstitious, and believed in invocations of the dead. Cicero had a high opinion of his intellectual powers, and considered him a great orator (see Orelli, Onomasticon Tullianum).
A full account of all the Claudii will be found in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, iii. 2 (1899).
CLAUDIUS, MARCUS AURELIUS, surnamed Gothicus,
Roman emperor A.D. 268–270, belonged to an obscure Illyrian
family. On account of his military ability he was placed in
command of an army by Decius; and Valerian appointed him
general on the Illyrian frontier, and ruler of the provinces of the
lower Danube. During the reign of Gallienus, he was called to
Italy in order to crush Aureolus; and on the death of the
emperor (268) he was chosen as his successor, in accordance,
it was said, with his express desire. Shortly after his accession
he routed the Alamanni on the Lacus Benacus (some doubt is
thrown upon this); in 269 a great victory over the Goths at
Naïssus in Moesia gained him the title of Gothicus. In the
following year he died of the plague at Sirmium, in his fifty-sixth
year. He enjoyed great popularity, and appears to have
been a man of ability and character.
His life was written by Trebellius Pollio, one of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae; see also Zosimus i. 40-43, the histories of Th. Bernhardt and H. Schiller, and special dissertations by A. Duncker on the life of Claudius (1868) and the defeat of the Alamanni (Annalen des Vereins für nassauische Altertumskunde, 1879); Homo, De Claudio Gothico (1900); Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, ii. 2458 ff. (Henze).
CLAUDIUS, MATTHIAS (1740–1815), German poet, otherwise
known by the nom de plume of Asmus, was born on the 15th
of August 1740 at Reinfeld, near Lübeck, and studied at Jena.
He spent the greater part of his life in the little town of Wandsbeck,
near Hamburg, where he earned his first literary reputation
by editing from 1771 to 1775, a newspaper called the Wandsbecker Bote (Wandsbeck Messenger), in which he published a large
number of prose essays and poems. They were written in pure
and simple German, and appealed to the popular taste; in many
there was a vein of extravagant humour or even burlesque,
while others were full of quiet meditation and solemn sentiment.
In his later days, perhaps through the influence of Klopstock,
with whom he had formed an intimate acquaintance, Claudius
became strongly pietistic, and the graver side of his nature
showed itself. In 1814 he removed to Hamburg, to the house
of his son-in-law, the publisher Friedrich Christoph Perthes,
where he died on the 21st of January 1815.
Claudius’s collected works were published under the title of Asmus omnia sua secum portans, oder Sämtliche Werke des Wandsbecker Boten (8 vols., 1775–1812; 13th edition, by C. Redich, 2 vols., 1902). His biography has been written by Wilhelm Herbst (4th ed., 1878). See also M. Schneidereit, M. Claudius, seine Weltanschauung und Lebensweisheit (1898).
CLAUSEL (more correctly Clauzel), BERTRAND, Count
(1772–1842), marshal of France, was born at Mirepoix (Ariège)
on the 12th of December 1772, and served in the first campaign
of the French Revolutionary Wars as one of the volunteers of
1791. In June 1795, having distinguished himself repeatedly
in the war on the northern frontier (1792–1793) and the fighting
in the eastern Pyrenees (1793–1794), Clausel was made a general
of brigade. In this rank he served in Italy in 1798 and 1799,
and in the disastrous campaign of the latter year he won great
distinction at the battles of the Trebbia and of Novi. In 1802
he served in the expedition to S. Domingo. He became a general
of division in December 1802, and after his return to France he
was in almost continuous military employment there until in
1806 he was sent to the army of Naples. Soon after this Napoleon
made him a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. In 1808–1809
he was with Marmont in Dalmatia, and at the close of 1809 he
was appointed to a command in the army of Portugal under
Masséna.
Clausel took part in the Peninsular campaigns of 1810 and 1811, including the Torres Vedras campaign, and under Marmont he did excellent service in re-establishing the discipline, efficiency and mobility of the army, which had suffered severely in the retreat from Torres Vedras. In the Salamanca campaign (1812) the result of Clausel’s work was shown in the marching powers
