The World

While he purported to be uninterested in power, and even privately hoped to restore the late republic, this was all designed to stay alive and contrast him with Caligula. Ambition was bred into the Julio-Claudians. Claudius embraced the crown and proved almost as vicious and capricious as Caligula.

Claudius started his reign with surprising rigour, bribing the praetorians, forgiving Caligula’s assassins (though executing Chaerea) and promising the Senate to respect its privileges. Abroad, he granted his friend Herod Agrippa an enlarged Jewish kingdom encompassing much of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Then he ordered a prestigious little war: the conquest of Britannia. The empire was run by three efficient freedmen, led by his trusted Narcissus, who became so powerful that before the British invasion, when some legions became restless, he addressed them himself in the emperor’s name.

At the centre of his court was his wife Messalina. Claudius was fifty-three; Messalina, aged twenty-three, was born into the imperial family. She had already delivered a daughter, and now, just as Claudius conquered Britannia, she delivered a son, Britannicus.

Once southern Britannia had been pacified, Claudius travelled to accept the surrender of eleven Britannic kings and parade through his new colony, in the town of Camulodunum, riding an elephant (quite a sight for Colchester high street then and now), but this left Messalina in Rome. Encouraged by Claudius’ freedmen, she started to sell governorships and toy with power.

The young empress embraced what we might today called a swinging lifestyle, yet this was not just about her capacity for pleasure; her thrill-seeking was also an expression of power gone to a young person’s head. Experiencing wild crushes on her fancies, she was in a position to enforce her wishes. But she also regarded anyone who did not support her as an enemy – and she was a dangerous enemy to have. One of her favourites was the actor Mnester, sometime lover of Caligula. When he resisted her, she supposedly got Claudius to tell him innocently to obey all her orders – and he became her lover, delighting her so much she had a bronze cast made of him. When the crowds in the theatre called out that Mnester was with Messalina in the palace, Claudius naively waved them away. She saved the life of one of Caligula’s German bodyguards, condemned to die in the gladiatorial ring, because he had slept with her. She was said to have won a sexual endurance competition by having twenty-five men in twenty-four hours, her exploits protected by a ring of silence. But the omertà was unlikely to last.

Claudius’ crown was recent and vulnerable. ‘This man, fellow senators, who looks to you as if he couldn’t hurt a fly,’ Seneca wrote, ‘used to kill people as easily as a dog shits.’ The fuddled princeps killed thirty-five senators.

Messalina meanwhile was threatened by Caligula’s sisters. She exposed Julia Livilla for having an affair with Seneca, and both of them were exiled. Claudius later had the recently returned Julia Livilla and her sister Julia Livia killed for plotting, supposedly on Messalina’s advice. Messalina also feared Agrippina, the last of Caligula’s sisters, and her son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus – the future emperor Nero – who was becoming popular. It was said that when she went to suffocate baby Nero, a snake slithered out from under the pillow. She later tried to have Agrippina exiled and the boy killed, but Nero was cheered more at the Games than her own son Britannicus.

Around AD 47, Messalina, now thirty, started to overreach herself. When she framed the powerful freedman Callistus, his colleagues Narcissus and Pallas realized they were in danger themselves, just as Messalina was moving from shameless sex to political conspiracy. Her favourite lover, Gaius Silius, was a dashing senator: she felt so invulnerable she started to plan an actual seizure of power, hoping to retire (more likely kill) Claudius and rule with Silius on behalf of Britannicus.