Malachi Smith's List: BIOGRAPHY

• Francis Walsingham
• From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532 – April 6, 1590) is usually remembered as the "spymaster" of Queen Elizabeth I of England.
• Walsingham is frequently cited as one of the earliest practitioners of modern intelligence both for espionage and for domestic security.
• He oversaw operations which penetrated the heart of Spanish military preparation, gathered intelligence from across Europe, and disrupted a range of plots against the queen, securing the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
• Walsingham was one of the small coterie who directed the Elizabethan state, overseeing foreign, domestic and religious policy, and the subjugation of Ireland.
• He worked to bring Scotland and England together. Overall, his foreign policy demonstrated a new understanding of the role of England as a maritime, Protestant power in a global economy.
• He was an innovator in exploration, colonisation and the use of England's potential maritime power.
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   Francis Walsingham by John de Critz (detail)
• Early years
• Francis Walsingham was born at the Walsingham family seat, Scadbury Park near Chislehurst, Kent to William Walsingham and Joyce Denny.
• His father died the following year, and later, his mother married Sir John Carey, a relative by marriage of Queen Anne Boleyn.
• Walsingham studied at King's College, Cambridge from 1548 with many Protestants but as an undergraduate of high social status did not sit for a degree.
• Upon the death of Edward VI and accession of Catholic Queen Mary, he fled to continue his studies as a law student at the University of Padua.
• In 1550, he travelled abroad, returning two years later to enroll at Gray's Inn.
• Between April 1556 and November 1558, he visited Switzerland. He cultivated contacts among the leading Protestant statesmen on the continent.
• Serving Elizabeth I
• When Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558, Walsingham returned to England and, through the support of Sir William Cecil, was elected to the House of Commons for Banbury in 1559 and then Lyme Regis in 1563.
• He also married a widow, Ann Carteill, who died two years later leaving Walsingham the care of her two children.
• In 1566, he married Ursula St. Barbe, widow of Sir Richard Worsley, and they had a daughter, Frances.
• In 1569, Cecil assigned Walsingham to unravel the Ridolfi plot, his first government role.
• In the following years, Walsingham became active in soliciting support for the Huguenots in France.
• Walsingham also had links to the Earl of Leicester, to Nicholas Throckmorton and to the second tier of Protestant officials now serving the Queen.
• In 1570, the Queen chose Walsingham to support the Huguenots in their negotiations with Charles IX.
• Later that year, he succeeded Sir Henry Norris as ambassador to France, seeking to prosecute a close alliance between England, Charles IX, the Huguenots, and other European Protestant interests in support of the nascent revolt of the Netherlands, provinces of the Spanish Crown.
• When Catholic opposition to this course resulted in the death of Coligny and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, his house in Paris became a temporary sanctuary of Protestant refugees, including Philip Sidney.
• He returned disappointed to England in April 1573. But he had established himself as someone the Queen could trust. A century later his dispatches would be published as a portrait of "the Complete Ambassador".
• After his return, Walsingham was appointed joint principal secretary ("of state": the phrase was not used at this time in England) with Sir Thomas Smith, succeeding Sir William Cecil. Smith retired unexpectedly in 1576, leaving Walsingham in sole charge.
• Elizabeth called him her "Moor", perhaps due to his small, dark frame or a preference for sombre clothes. She put up with his blunt, often unwelcome, advice because she valued his competence and industry, his passion for her security, and his grasp of foreign affairs.
• He spent the years between 1574 and 1578 consolidating his control of the routine business of the English state, foreign and domestic. This included the substantial rebuilding of Dover Harbour, and the coordination of support for Martin Frobisher's attempts to discover the north west passage and exploit the mineral resources of Labrador.
• On December 1, 1577, Walsingham received a knighthood.
• Walsingham was among the major promoters of the career of Sir Francis Drake and was a major shareholder in his 1578–1581 circumnavigation of the world.
• Walsingham's participation in this venture was calculated to promote the Protestant interest by provoking the Spanish and demonstrating the vulnerability of their Pacific possessions.
• He was sent on special embassies to the Netherlands in 1578, and again in 1581 to the French Court, suggesting both the Queen's high confidence in his abilities, and also that she knew how to exploit his standing as a committed Protestant statesman to threaten the Catholic powers.
• Between 1578 and 1581, Walsingham was at the forefront of debate on the attempt by a group at court to encourage the Queen to marry the Duke of Anjou, heir to the French throne. Walsingham passionately opposed the marriage, perhaps to the point of encouraging public opposition.
• He believed that it would serve England better to seek a military alliance with France against Spanish interests.
• Walsingham would have preferred more direct English intervention in the Low Countries, and eventually, after the deaths of both Anjou and William of Orange in 1584, English military intervention was agreed at the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585.
• From 1585 to his death, Walsingham was deeply engaged, working closely with Cecil (now Baron Burghley), in preparing England for the war with Spain that could no longer be avoided.
• He also worked to prepare for the arrival of the Spanish Armada, in particular by victualling the navy, organising a domestic county militia, and fostering the Protestant aggression of the Bond of Association.
• Walsingham secured in 1584 the overthrow of a non-aligned government in Scotland after years of reverses since the 1578 overthrow of the pro-English Regent Morton. Walsingham himself visited the Scottish court in 1583.
• This lurch towards Anglo-Scottish Protestant amity was at first tentative, but proved to be stable and to pave the way to the succession of James VI to the throne of England.
• These were years of tension in policy towards France, with Walsingham sceptical of the unpredictable Henry III, while the flamboyant English ambassador in Paris, Edward Stafford, argued the case for building on Henry's good intentions. This too was a battle Walsingham won; Stafford found Walsingham's grip of the bureaucratic machine, the Queen's confidence in him, and Walsingham's network of contacts, too formidable.
• Espionage
• In the realm of counter-espionage, Walsingham was behind the discovery of the Throckmorton and Babington plots to overthrow Elizabeth I, return England to Catholicism and place Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne.
• In November 1583, after months of surveillance, Walsingham had Throckmorton arrested.
• He extracted, under torture, Throckmorton's confession — an admission that he had plotted against Elizabeth with the Spanish ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, and others.
• The plot, which may not have been known by Mary, called for a two-pronged invasion of England and Scotland along with a domestic uprising. Throckmorton was executed in 1584, and Mendoza was expelled from England.
• although Mary was not prosecuted, Walsingham became so concerned about her influence that he was determined to hold her responsible for any further conspiracies. Babington's Plot was the result of that determination.
• Walsingham drew deeply on his spies among the English Catholic community, and abroad, on whose divisions he was adept at playing. This led to Mary's execution in 1587, for which Walsingham had worked since before his advent to power.
• He was an active participant at her trial and briefly experienced the Queen's displeasure in its aftermath, due to Elizabeth's concern that executing a fellow monarch would undermine the authority of her monarchy.
• Prior to the attack of the Spanish Armada, he received a large number of dispatches from his agents from mercantile communities and foreign courts.
• Walsingham's recruitment of Anthony Standen in particular represented an intelligence triumph, and Standen's dispatches were deeply revealing.
• However the close security enforced by Philip II meant that Walsingham remained in the dark about the Spanish strategy and the planned destination of the Armada. This, plus his naturally bold spirit, lay behind his regular encouragement of the more aggressive strategies advocated by Drake in particular.
• The Cadiz raid in 1587 wrought havoc on Spanish logistics, and Walsingham would have repeated this the following year if more cautious counsels had not prevailed.
• In foreign intelligence, the full range of Walsingham's network of "intelligencers" (of news as well as secrets) may never be known, but it was substantial.
• While foreign intelligence was part of the principal secretary's duties, Walsingham brought to it flair and ambition, and large sums of his own money. He also cast his net more widely than others had done hitherto, exploiting the insight into Spanish policy offered at the Italian courts; cultivating contacts in Constantinople and Aleppo, building complex connections with the Catholic exiles.
• Recent detective work by John Bossy has suggested that he recruited Giordano Bruno, although this remains controversial.
• Among his more minor spies may have been the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who seems to have been one of a stream of false converts whom Walsingham planted in foreign seminaries for gathering intelligence and insinuating counter-intelligence
• A more central figure was the cryptographer Thomas Phelippes, expert in deciphering letters, creating false handwriting and breaking and repairing seals without detection.
• Legacy
• Walsingham was the first English statesman fully to embrace the challenges of the post-Reformation diplomatic world and the new European threats and alliances it offered.
• Meanwhile, closely linked to the mercantile community, he actively supported the most ambitious trade promotion schemes, including the Muscovy Company and the Levant Company. He supported Davis' voyages to the north west frontier, and sought to follow Drake's circumnavigation with a military-diplomatic mission to the Far East to be led by his beloved stepson, Christopher Carteill.
• In other affairs, Walsingham acquired a Surrey county seat in Parliament which he retained until his death, but he was not a major participant.
• In 1584, he was part of the committee that considered letters patent granted to Sir Walter Raleigh.
• He nominated some of his servants to prominent positions.
• He also received the appointments of Chancellor of the Order of the Garter
• and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
• As an advisor on whom Elizabeth depended during the central part of her reign, Walsingham received large sums of money from the Queen over the years. He spent his wealth prodigally in the the service of the Queen and the Protestant cause.
• Elizabeth knew this, complaining that he would not prosper. He obtained land grants, grants for the export of beer and cloth, and leases of customs in the northern and western outposts.
• His primary residences, apart from the court, were at Seething Lane by the Tower of London, at Barn Elms in Surrey, and farther afield at Odiham in Hampshire. Nothing remains of any of his houses.
• Francis Walsingham died on April 6, 1590, leaving great debts, in part arising from his having underwritten the debts of his son-in-law and colleague, Sir Philip Sidney.
• His daughter Frances received only £300 annuity. However, she married well, to the Earl of Essex, and Walsingham's widow lived comfortably until her death.
• After his death, his friends reflected that poor bookkeeping had left him further in the crown's debt than was fair, and a compromise was eventually agreed upon with his heirs. His public papers were seized by the government and his private papers, which would have revealed much, not least about his finances, were lost.
• Walsingham attracts controversy still.
• Catholics, from the Victorian era onwards, have sorted through the various histories surrounding him to portray a ruthless, devious man driven by an excessive love for intrigues.

  • I suppose they don't like him..
• So thoroughly did he cover his tracks that it is still impossible to determine the extent of his use of agents provocateurs in creating politically desirable events. He regularly features in fringe debates particularly about the authorship of Shakespeare and the death of Christopher Marlowe, and is the subject of conspiracy theories to this day.

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• Henry VIII of England
• Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547)
• was King of England and Lord of Ireland, later King of Ireland and claimant to the Kingdom of France, from 21 April 1509 until his death.
• Henry was the second monarch of the House of Tudor, succeeding his father, Henry VII.
• Henry VIII was a significant figure in the history of the English monarchy.
• Although in the first parts of his reign he energetically suppressed the Reformation of the Anglican Church, which had been building steam since John Wycliffe of the fourteenth century, he is more often known for his ecclesiastical struggles with Rome.
• These struggles ultimately led to him separating the Anglican Church from Roman authority, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and establishing the English monarch as the Supreme Head of the Church of England.
• Although some claim he became a Protestant on his death-bed, he advocated Catholic ceremony and doctrine throughout his life;
• royal backing of the English Reformation was left to his heirs, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, while his daughter Mary I fought to return papal authority over the church.
• Henry also oversaw the legal union of England and Wales (see Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542).
• Early years (1491-1509)
• Of the young Henry's six siblings, only three — Arthur (the Prince of Wales), Margaret, and Mary — survived infancy.
• Born in Greenwich Palace, Henry VIII was the third child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York.^[1]
• In 1493, Henry was appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.
• He was subsequently appointed Earl Marshal of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
• In 1494, he was created Duke of York.
• Henry was given a first-rate education from leading tutors, becoming fluent in Latin, French, and Spanish.^[2
• As it was expected that the throne would pass to Prince Arthur, Henry's older brother, Henry was prepared for a career in the Church.^[3]
• Death of Arthur
• In 1502, Arthur died suddenly of an unknown disease which may have been tuberculosis.
• Arthur's death thrust all his duties upon his brother Henry, who then became Prince of Wales.
• Henry VII renewed his efforts to seal a marital alliance between England and Spain, by offering Henry, Prince of Wales, in marriage to Prince Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, the youngest surviving child of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.^[4]
• In order for the new Prince of Wales to marry his brother's widow, a dispensation from the Pope was normally required to overrule the impediment of affinity.
• Catherine swore that her marriage to Prince Arthur had been unconsummated. Still, both the English and Spanish parties agreed that an additional papal dispensation of affinity would be prudent to remove all doubt regarding the legitimacy of the marriage.
• The impatience of Catherine's mother, Queen Isabella, induced Pope Julius II to grant dispensation in the form of a Papal bull, and fourteen months after her young husband's death, Catherine found herself betrothed to his even younger brother, Henry, the new Prince of Wales.
• Yet by 1505, King Henry VII lost interest in a Spanish alliance, and the younger Henry declared that his betrothal had been arranged without his consent.
• Continued diplomatic maneuvering over the fate of the proposed marriage lingered until the death of Henry VII in 1509. Only 17 years old, Henry married his brother's widow, Catherine, on 11 June 1509, and on 24 June 1509, the two were crowned at Westminster Abbey.
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   Katherine as a young widow, by Henry VII's court painter, Michael Sittow, c.1502
• Two days later, he arrested his father's two most unpopular ministers, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. They were groundlessly charged with high treason and in 1510, the king had them executed.
• This was to become Henry's primary tactic for dealing with those who stood in his way.^[1]
• France and the Habsburgs (1509-1525)
• Henry was a Renaissance Man and his court was a centre of scholarly and artistic innovation and glamourous excess, epitomised by The Field of the Cloth of Gold.
• He was an accomplished musician, author, and poet.
• His best known musical composition is Pastime with Good Company or The Kynges Ballade. He was also known to have been an avid gambler and dice player.
• The king was also known for his strong dedication to the Christian faith.^[2]
• He excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and tennis.
• In 1511, Pope Julius II proclaimed a Holy League against France. This new alliance rapidly grew to include not only Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, but also England.
• Henry decided to use the occasion as an excuse to expand his holdings in northern France. He concluded the Treaty of Westminster, a pledge of mutual aid against the French with Spain, in November 1511 and prepared for involvement in the War of the League of Cambrai.
• In 1513, Henry invaded France and his troops defeated a French army at the Battle of the Spurs.
• James IV of Scotland invaded England at the behest of Louis,^[5] but he failed to draw Henry's attention from France. The Scots' disastrous defeat at the Battle of Flodden Field took place on 9 September 1513.
• Among the dead were the Scottish King and the battle ended Scotland's brief involvement in the war.
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   Eighteen year-old Henry VIII after his coronation in 1509
• On 18 February 1516, Queen Catherine bore Henry one of his four children to reach adulthood, Princess Mary, who later reigned as Mary I.
• Mistresses
• Historians are sure of the names of only two of Henry's mistresses: Elizabeth Blount (usually referred to as Bessie) and Mary Boleyn (Anne's sister).
• Elizabeth Blount gave birth to Henry's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. The young boy was made Duke of Richmond in June 1525 in what some thought was one step on the path to legitimatizing him.
• In 1533, he married Mary Howard, Anne Boleyn's first cousin, but died only three years later without any successors.
• At the time of FitzRoy's death, the king was trying to get a law passed that would allow his otherwise illegitimate son to become king.
• Historians have speculated that Mary Boleyn's two children, Catherine and Henry were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proven and the King never acknowledged them as he did Henry Fitzroy.
• Mary Boleyn was the sister of Anne Boleyn. She is thought to have been his mistress at some point between 1519 and 1526.
• The king also had a brief, six-month affair with Mary Shelton sometime in 1535. Mary has also been confused with her sister, Margaret. However, it has been confirmed that it was in fact Mary and not Margaret Shelton with whom Henry had the affair.
• Henry's "great matter" (1525-1533)
• In 1525, Henry's impatience with what he perceived to be Catherine's inability to produce the desired heir increased when he became attracted to a charismatic young woman in the Queen's entourage, Anne Boleyn.
• Boleyn resisted his attempts to seduce her and she refused to become his mistress, as her sister Mary Boleyn had. Henry was all the more attracted to her because of this refusal and he pursued her relentlessly.
• Henry became enamoured with her and began his pursuit.^[
• Boleyn continued to reject the King’s initial advances by saying, “I beseech your highness most earnestly to desist, and to this my answer in good part. I would rather lose my life than my honesty.”^[7]
• It is possible that the idea of annulment had suggested itself to the King much earlier than this, and it is highly probable that it was motivated by his desire for a male heir.
• Before Henry's father Henry VII ascended the throne, England had been beset by civil warfare over rival claims to the English crown and Henry wanted to avoid a similar uncertainty over the succession.
• The King had no sons due to the death in infancy of all Catherine of Aragon's children except his daughter Mary.^[8] Anne saw her opportunity in Henry's infatuation and determined that she would only yield as his acknowledged queen.^[9]
• Henry set his hopes upon a direct appeal to the Holy See, acting in this independently of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, to whom he at first communicated nothing of his plans so far as they related to Anne.
• It soon became the one absorbing object of the King's desires to secure an annulment from Catherine.
• William Knight, the king's secretary, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment of his marriage with Catherine. The grounds were that the dispensing bull of Pope Julius II was obtained by false pretenses, because Catherine's brief marriage to the sickly Arthur had in fact been consummated.
• Henry also petitioned, in the event of his becoming free, a dispensation to contract a new marriage with any woman even in the first degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or unlawful connection. This clearly had reference to Anne.^[9]
• As the pope was at that time the prisoner of Emperor Charles V, Knight had some difficulty in obtaining access to him. In the end the king's envoy had to return without accomplishing much, though the conditional dispensation for a new marriage was granted
• Henry had now no choice but to put his great matter into the hands of Thomas Wolsey, and Wolsey did all he could to secure a decision in the King's favour.^[9]
• How far the pope was influenced by Charles V in his resistance is difficult to say, but it is clear Henry saw that the Pope was unlikely to give him an annulment from the Emperor's aunt.
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   Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII.
• The pope forbade Henry to proceed to a new marriage before a decision was given in Rome. Convinced that he was treacherous, Anne Boleyn maintained pressure until Wolsey was dismissed from public office in 1529.
• After being dismissed, the cardinal begged her to help him return to power, but she refused. He then began a secret plot to have Anne forced into exile and began communication with Queen Catherine and the Pope to that end. When this was discovered, Henry ordered Wolsey's arrest and had it not been for his death from a terminal illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason.
• His replacement, Sir Thomas More, initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful.
• As Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.
• A year later, Queen Catherine was banished from court and her old rooms were given to Anne.
• With Wolsey gone, Anne now had considerable power over government appointments and political matters. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne had the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position.
• Through the intervention of the King of France, this was conceded by Rome, the pallium being granted to him by Clement.^[13]
• The breaking of the power of Rome in England proceeded little by little.
• In 1532, a lawyer who was a supporter of Anne, Thomas Cromwell, brought before Parliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church.
• Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister.
• Second marriage
• Henry attended a meeting with the French king at Calais in the winter of 1532, in which he hoped he could enlist the support of Francis I of France for his new marriage.
• The conference at Calais was a political triumph, since the French government gave its support for Henry's re-marriage.
• Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry and Anne went through a secret wedding service.^[16] She soon became pregnant and, as was the custom with royalty, there was a second wedding service, which took place in London on 25 January 1533.
• Events now began to move at a quick pace.
• On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void.
• Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be good and valid.^[17]
• Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen and Anne was consequently crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533.
• The queen gave birth slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. Anne had given birth to a girl who was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York.^[18]
• Catherine's daughter, the Lady Mary, was declared illegitimate, and Anne's issue were declared next in the line of succession.
• Rejecting the decisions of the Pope, Parliament validated the marriage between Henry and Anne with the Act of Succession 1533.
• Included in this declaration was, most notably, a clause repudiating "any foreign authority, prince or potentate".
• All adults in the Kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions by oath and those who refused to do so were subject to imprisonment for life. The publisher or printer of any literature alleging that Henry's marriage to Anne was invalid was automatically guilty of high treason and could be punished by death.
• English Reformation (1533-1540)
• Meanwhile, the House of Commons had forbidden all appeals to Rome and exacted the penalties of præmunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England.
• The Commons also prevented the Church from making any regulations without the King's consent. It was only then that Pope Clement at last took the step of launching sentences of excommunication against the King and Cranmer,^[19] declaring at the same time the archbishop's decree of annulment to be invalid and the marriage with Anne null and void.
• The papal nuncio was withdrawn from England and diplomatic relations with Rome were broken off.^[13
• Several more laws were passed in England. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534 required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse to acknowledge the King as such.
• In response to the excommunications, the Peter's Pence Act was passed in and it reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope.^[20
• In defiance of the Pope, the Church of England was now under Henry’s control, not Rome's.
• Personal troubles
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   Anne Boleyn, Henry's second queen, painted after her death.
• The king and queen were not pleased with married life.
• The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Henry's frequent infidelities greatly upset his new wife, who reacted with tears and rage to each new mistress.
• For his part, Henry disliked Anne’s constant irritability and violent temper.
• After a false pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine.^[21]
• A number of dissenting monks were tortured and executed. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chancellor, both of whom refused to take the oath to the King and were subsequently convicted of high treason and beheaded at Tower Hill, just outside the Tower of London, while the usual punishment for such traitors would have been to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
• Opposition to Henry's religious policies was quickly suppressed in England.
• These suppressions in turn contributed to further resistance among the English people, most notably in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a large uprising in northern England in October of the same year.
• Henry VIII promised the rebels he would pardon them and thanked them for raising the issues to his attention, then invited the rebel leader, Robert Aske to a royal banquet. At the banquet, Henry asked Aske to write down what had happened so he could have a better idea of the problems he would 'change'.
• Aske did what the King asked, although what he had written would later be used against him as a confession.
• The King's word could not be questioned (as he was held as God's chosen, and second only to God himself) so Aske told the rebels they had been successful and they could disperse and go home. However, because Henry saw the rebels as traitors, he did not feel obliged to keep his promises.
• The rebels realised that the King was not keeping his promises and rebelled again later that year, but their strength was less in the second attempt and the King ordered the rebellion crushed. The leaders, including Aske, were arrested and executed for treason.
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   Thomas Cromwell arranged the plot that brought down Boleyn.
• Dissolution of the remaining, larger monasteries followed a subsequent authorising act by Parliament in May 1539.
• Execution of Anne Boleyn
• On 8 January 1536 news reached the king and the queen that Catherine of Aragon had died. Upon hearing the news of her death, Henry and Anne reportedly decked themselves in bright yellow clothing. Henry called for public displays of joy regarding Catherine's death.
• The queen was pregnant again, and she was aware of the consequences if she failed to give birth to a son. Her life could be in danger, as with both wives dead, Henry would be free to remarry and no one could claim that the union was illegal.
• Later that month, the King was unhorsed in a tournament and was badly injured. It seemed for a time that the King's life was in danger.
• When news of this accident reached the queen she was sent into shock and miscarried a male child that was about 15 weeks old. This happened on the very day of Catherine’s funeral, 29 January 1536.
• For most observers, this personal loss was the beginning of the end of the royal marriage.^[22]
• Author Mike Ashley speculated that Anne had two stillborn children after Elizabeth's birth and before the birth of the male child she miscarried in 1536.^[23
• Given the King's desperate desire for a son, the sequence of Anne's pregnancies has attracted much interest.
• Most sources attest only to the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533, a possible miscarriage in the summer of 1534, and the miscarriage of a male child, of almost four months gestation, in January 1536.^[24
• As Anne recovered from what would be her final miscarriage, Henry declared that his marriage had been the product of witchcraft.
• The King's new mistress, Jane Seymour, was quickly moved into new quarters. This was followed by Anne's brother being refused a prestigious court honour, the Order of the Garter, which was instead given to Jane Seymour's brother.^[25]
• Five men, including Anne's own brother, were arrested on charges of incest and treason, accused of having sexual relationships with the queen.
• On 2 May 1536 Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. She was accused of adultery, incest and high treason.^[27] Although the evidence against them was unconvincing, the accused were found guilty and condemned to death by the peers.
• George Boleyn and the other accused men were executed on May 17, 1536. On the morning of May 19 1536 at 8 o'clock, the queen was executed before the public.
• This was the first public execution of an English queen.^[28] She knelt upright, in the French style of executions. The execution was swift and consisted of a single stroke.^[29]
• Birth of a prince
• One day after Anne's execution in 1536 Henry became engaged to Jane Seymour, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting to whom the king had been showing favour for some time.
• They were married 10 days later. At about the same time as this, his third marriage, Henry granted his assent to the Laws in Wales Act 1535, which legally annexed Wales, uniting England and Wales into one unified nation.
• This was followed by the Act of Succession 1536, which declared Henry's children by Queen Jane to be next in the line of succession and declared both the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth illegitimate, thus excluding them from the throne.
• Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward the future Edward VI, in 1537.
• The king was granted the power to further determine the line of succession in his will.
• The birth was difficult and the queen died at Greenwich Palace on 24 October 1537 from an infection.
• After Jane's death, the entire court mourned with Henry for an extended period. Henry considered Jane to be his "true" wife, being the only one who had given him the male heir he so desperately sought. He was buried next to her at his death.
• Final years (1540-1547)
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   Jane Seymour would become Henry's third wife
• At this time, Henry desired to marry once again to ensure the succession. Thomas Cromwell, promoted to 1st Earl of Essex, suggested Anne, the sister of the Protestant Duke of Cleves, who was seen as an important ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack on England.
• In 1540, Henry sanctioned the destruction of shrines to saints.
• Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the king. Although it has been said that he painted her in a more flattering light, it is unlikely that the portrait was highly inaccurate, since Holbein remained in favour at court.
• After regarding Holbein's portrayal, and urged by the complimentary description of Anne given by his courtiers, Henry agreed to wed Anne. On Anne's arrival in England, Henry is said to have found her utterly unattractive, privately calling her a "Flanders Mare."
• The Duke of Cleves had become engaged in a dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor, with whom Henry had no desire to quarrel. Queen Anne was intelligent enough not to impede Henry's quest for an annulment.
• Henry wished to annul the marriage in order to marry another.
• Upon the question of marital sex, she testified that her marriage had never been consummated. Henry was said to have come into the room each night and merely kissed his new bride on the forehead before retiring. All impediments to an annulment were thus removed.
• The marriage was subsequently dissolved and Anne received the title of "The King's Sister," and was granted Hever Castle, the former residence of the Boleyn family.
• Cromwell, meanwhile, fell out of favour for his role in arranging the marriage and was subsequently attainted and beheaded. The office of Viceregent in Spirituals, which had been specifically created for him, was not filled.
• On 28 July 1540, (the same day Cromwell was executed) Henry married the young Catherine Howard (also found as Katherine), Anne Boleyn's first cousin.
• Soon after her marriage, however, Queen Catherine had an affair with the courtier, Thomas Culpeper. She also employed Francis Dereham, who was previously informally engaged to her and had an affair with her prior to her marriage, as her secretary.
• He was absolutely delighted with his new queen.
•  

   

  

   Henry was shown the above picture of Anne of Cleves
• Thomas Cranmer, who was opposed to the powerful Roman Catholic Howard family, brought evidence of Queen Catherine's activities to the king's notice.
• Though Henry originally refused to believe the allegations, he allowed Cranmer to conduct an investigation, which resulted in Queen Catherine's implication. When questioned, the queen could have admitted a prior contract to marry Dereham, which would have made her subsequent marriage to Henry invalid, but she instead claimed that Dereham had forced her to enter into an adulterous relationship.
• Dereham, meanwhile, exposed Queen Catherine's relationship with Thomas Culpeper. As was the case with Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard could not technically have been guilty of adultery, as the marriage was officially null and void from the beginning. Again, this point was ignored, and Catherine was executed on 13 February 1542.
•  

   

  

   A picture of Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife
• She was only about eighteen years old at the time.
• That same year, England's remaining monasteries were all dissolved, and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops came to comprise the ecclesiastical element of the body.
• The Lords Spiritual, as members of the clergy with seats in the House of Lords were known, were for the first time outnumbered by the Lords Temporal.
• Henry married his last wife, the wealthy widow Catherine Parr, in 1543.
• She argued with Henry over religion; she was a reformer, but Henry remained a conservative.
• This behaviour nearly proved her undoing, but she saved herself by a show of submissiveness.
• She helped reconcile Henry with his first two daughters, the Princess Mary and the Lady Elizabeth.
• In 1544, an Act of Parliament put the daughters back in the line of succession after Edward, Prince of Wales, though they were still deemed illegitimate. The same act allowed Henry to determine further succession to the throne in his will.
• An alternative version is "King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded: One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded". (Or, more succinctly, "Two beheaded, one died, two divorced, one survived.")
• A mnemonic for the fates of Henry's wives is "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived".
• The phrase may be misleading. Firstly, Henry was never divorced from any of his wives; rather, his marriages to them were annulled. Secondly, four marriages—not two—ended in annulments. The marriages to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were annulled shortly before their executions and, although her marriage to Henry was annulled, Anne of Cleves survived him, as did Catherine Parr.
•  

   

  

   Catherine Parr, Henry's sixth and final wife
• The cruelty and tyrannical egoism of Henry became more apparent as he advanced in years and his health began to fail.
• A wave of political executions, which had commenced with that of Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk in 1513, ended with Henry Earl of Surrey, in January, 1547, underlined it. According to Holinshed, the number of executions in this reign amounted to 72,000—higher figures are given by some authorities.
• Death and succession
• Late in life, Henry became grossly overweight (with a waist measurement of 54 inches/137 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical inventions.
• He was covered with suppurating boils and possibly suffered from gout.
• His obesity dates from a jousting accident in 1536 in which he suffered a leg wound. This prevented him from exercising and gradually became ulcerated.
• It undoubtedly hastened his death at the age of 55, which occurred on 28 January 1547 in the Palace of Whitehall, on what would have been his father's 90th birthday. He expired soon after uttering these last words: "Monks! Monks! Monks!"^[30]
• The well known theory that Henry suffered from syphilis was first promoted approximately 100 years after his death^{[citation needed]}. A more recent theory suggests that Henry's medical symptoms, and those of his older sister Margaret Tudor, are also characteristic of untreated Type II diabetes.
• Henry VIII was buried in St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, next to his wife Jane Seymour.
• Almost a hundred years later Charles I was buried in his grave. Within a little more than a decade after his death, all three of his royal heirs sat on the English throne, and all three left no descendants.
• Under the Act of Succession 1543, Henry's only surviving legitimate son, Edward, inherited the Crown, becoming Edward VI.
• Since Edward was only nine years old at the time, he could not exercise actual power. Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a council of regency until Edward reached the age of 18.
• The executors chose Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour's elder brother, to be Lord Protector of the Realm.
• In default of heirs to Edward, the throne was to pass to Henry VIII's daughter by Catherine of Aragon, the Princess Mary and her heirs.
• If Mary's issue also failed, the crown was to go to Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Princess Elizabeth, and her heirs.
• Finally, if Elizabeth's line also became extinct, the crown was to be inherited by the descendants of Henry VIII's deceased younger sister, Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk.
• The descendants of Henry's sister Margaret Tudor - the royal family of Scotland - were therefore excluded from succession according to this act.
• The children of Henry VIII
• Henry Fitzroy, son of Henry's mistress, Elizabeth Blount.
• 

   

   

   

  Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn.
• 

   

   

   

  Mary I, daughter of Catherine of Aragon.
• 

   

   

   

  Edward VI, son of Jane Seymour.
• Legacy
• Henry is known to have been an avid gambler and dice player. In his youth, he excelled at sports, especially jousting, hunting, and real tennis. He was also an accomplished musician, author, and poet; his best known piece of music is Pastime with Good Company ("The Kynges Ballade").
• The King was also involved in the original construction and improvement of several significant buildings, including Nonsuch Palace, King's College Chapel, Cambridge and Westminster Abbey in London.
• Many of the existing buildings Henry improved were properties confiscated from Wolsey, such as Christ Church, Oxford, Hampton Court Palace, the Palace of Whitehall, and Trinity College, Cambridge.
• He founded Christ Church Cathedral School, Oxford in 1546.
• The only surviving piece of clothing worn by Henry VIII is a cap of maintenance awarded to the Mayor of Waterford, along with a bearing sword, in 1536.
• In the centuries since his death, Henry has inspired or been mentioned in numerous artistic and cultural works.
• It currently resides in the Waterford Museum of Treasures. A suit of Henry's armor is on display in the Tower of London
• Church of England
• Though mainly motivated by dynastic and personal concerns, and despite never really abandoning the fundamentals of the Roman Catholic Church, Henry ensured that the greatest act of his reign would be one of the most radical and decisive of any English monarch.
• His break with Rome in 1533-34 was an act with enormous consequences for the subsequent course of English history beyond the Tudor dynasty.
• Not only in making possible the transformation of England into a powerful (albeit very distinctive) nation; but also in the seizing of economic and political power from the Church by the aristocracy, chiefly through the acquisition of monastic lands and assets -- a short-term strategy with long-term social consequences.
• Henry's decision to entrust the regency of his son Edward's minor years to a decidedly reform-oriented regency council, dominated by Edward Seymour, was most likely for the simple tactical reason that Seymour seemed likely to provide the strongest leadership for the kingdom ensured that the English Reformation would be consolidated and even furthered during his son's reign. Such ironies marked other aspects of his legacy.
• He fostered humanist learning and yet was responsible for the deaths of several outstanding English humanists.
• Obsessed with securing the succession to the throne, he left no legitimate heirs but a young son (who died before his sixteenth birthday) and two daughters adhering to adversarial religions.
• The power of the state was magnified, yet so too (at least after Henry's death) were demands for increased political participation by the middle class.
• Henry worked with some success to once again make England a major player on the European scene but depleted his treasury in the course of doing so, a legacy that has remained an issue for English monarchs ever since.
• English navy
• Together with Alfred the Great and Charles II, Henry is traditionally called one of the founders of the Royal Navy.
• His reign featured some naval warfare and, more significantly, large royal investment in shipbuilding (including a few spectacular great ships such as Mary Rose), dockyards (such as HMNB Portsmouth) and naval innovations (such as the use of cannon on-board ship - although archers were still deployed on medieval-style forecastles and bowcastles as the ship's primary armament on large ships, or co-armament where cannon were used).
• However, in some ways this is a misconception since Henry did not bequeath to his immediate successors a navy in the sense of a formalised organisation with structures, ranks, formalised munitioning structures but only in the sense of a set of ships.
• Elizabeth I still had to cobble together a set of privately owned ships to fight off the Spanish Armada (which consisted of about 130 warships and converted merchant ships) and in the former, formal sense the modern British navy, the Royal Navy, is largely a product of the Anglo-Dutch naval rivalry of the seventeenth century.
• Still, Henry's reign marked the birth of English naval power and was a key factor in England's later victory over the Spanish Armada.
• Henry's break with Rome incurred the threat of a large-scale French or Spanish invasion.
• To guard against this he strengthened existing coastal defence fortresses (such as Dover Castle and, also at Dover, Moat Bulwark and Archcliffe Fort he personally visited for a few months to supervise, as is commemorated in the modern exhibition in Dover Castle's keep there).
• He also built a chain of new 'castles' (in fact, large bastioned and garrisoned gun batteries) along Britain's southern coast from East Anglia to Cornwall, largely built of material gained from the demolition of monasteries. These were also known as Henry VIII's Device Forts.
• Style and arms
• Henry VIII was the first English monarch to regularly use the style "Majesty", though the alternatives "Highness" and "Grace" were also used.

•       

  English Royalty
  House of Tudor
  Royal Coat of Arms
• Several changes were made to the royal style during his reign.
• Henry originally used the style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Lord of Ireland". In 1521, pursuant to a grant from Pope Leo X rewarding a book by Henry attacking Martin Luther, the royal style became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Ireland".
• Following Henry's excommunication, Pope Paul III rescinded the grant of the title "Defender of the Faith", but an Act of Parliament declared that it remained valid; and it continues in royal usage to the present day.
• In 1535, Henry added the "supremacy phrase" to the royal style, which became "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head".
• In 1536, the phrase "of the Church of England" changed to "of the Church of England and also of Ireland".
• In 1541, Henry had the Irish Parliament change the title "Lord of Ireland" to "King of Ireland" with the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, after being advised that many Irish people regarded the Pope as the true head of their country, with the Lord acting as a mere representative.
• The reason the Irish regarded the Pope as their overlord was because Ireland had originally been given to the English King Henry II by Pope Adrian IV in the twelfth century as a feudal territory under papal overlordship
• The meeting of Irish Parliament that proclaimed Henry VIII King of Ireland was the first meeting attended by the Gaelic Irish chieftains as well as the Anglo-Irish aristocrats.
• The style "Henry the Eighth, by the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith and of the Church of England and also of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head" remained in use until the end of Henry's reign.
• Henry's motto was Coeur Loyal (true heart) and he had this embroidered on his clothes in the form of a heart symbol and with the word "loyal". His emblem was the Tudor rose and the Beaufort portcullis.
• As Duke of York, Henry used the arms of his father (i.e. those of the kingdom), differenced by a label of three points ermine. As king, Henry VIII's arms were the same as those used by his predecessors since Henry IV: Quarterly, Azure three fleurs-de-lys Or (for France) and Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or (for England).

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• Claudius (41-54 A.D.)

• Garrett G. Fagan

    Pennsylvania State University 
• Introduction
• Ti. Claudius Nero Germanicus (b. 10 BC, d. 54 A.D.; emperor, 41-54 A.D.) was the third emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
• His reign represents a turning point in the history of the Principate for a number of reasons, not the least for the manner of his accession and the implications it carried for the nature of the office.
• During his reign he promoted administrators who did not belong to the senatorial or equestrian classes, and was later vilified by authors who did.
• He followed Caesar in carrying Roman arms across the English Channel into Britain but, unlike his predecessor, he initiated the full-scale annexation of Britain as a province, which remains today the most closely studied corner of the Roman Empire.
• His relationships with his wives and children provide detailed insights into the perennial difficulties of the succession problem faced by all Roman Emperors. His final settlement in this regard was not lucky:
• he adopted his fourth wife's son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was to reign catastrophically as Nero and bring the dynasty to an end.
• Claudius's reign, therefore, was a mixture of successes and failures that leads into the last phase of the Julio-Claudian line.
• Early Life (10 BC - 41 A.D. )
• he was the son of Drusus Claudius Nero, the son of Augustus's wife Livia, and Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony.
• Claudius was born on 1 August 10 BC at Lugdunum in Gaul, into the heart of the Julio-Claudian dynasty:
• His uncle, Tiberius, went on to become emperor in AD 14 and his brother Germanicus was marked out for succession to the purple when, in AD 4, he was adopted by Tiberius.
• It might be expected that Claudius, as a well-connected imperial prince, would have enjoyed the active public life customary for young men of his standing but this was not the case. In an age that despised weakness, Claudius was unfortunate enough to have been born with defects.
• He limped, he drooled, he stuttered and was constantly ill.
• His family members mistook these physical debilities as reflective of mental infirmity and generally kept him out of the public eye as an embarrassment.
• Suetonius, in particular, preserves comments of Antonia, his mother, and Livia, his grandmother, which are particularly cruel in their assessment of the boy. From the same source, however, it emerges that Augustus suspected that there was more to this "idiot" than met the eye.
• A sign of this familial disdain is that he remained under guardianship, like a woman, even after he had reached the age of majority.
• Nevertheless, Claudius spent his entire childhood and youth in almost complete seclusion.
• The normal rites de passage of an imperial prince came and went without official notice, and Claudius received no summons to public office or orders to command troops on the frontiers.[[4]] When he assumed the toga virilis, for instance, he was carried to the Capitol in a litter at night; the normal procedure was to be led into the Forum by one's father or guardian in full public view.
• How he spent the voluminous free time of his youth is revealed by his later character: he read voraciously. He became a scholar of considerable ability and composed works on all subjects in the liberal arts, especially history; he was the last person we know of who could read Etruscan.
• These skills, and the knowledge of governmental institutions he acquired from studying history, were to stand him in good stead when he came to power.
• His father died on campaign when Claudius was only one year old, and his beloved brother, Germanicus, succumbed under suspicious circumstances in AD 19. His only other sibling to reach adulthood, Livilla, became involved with Sejanus and paid the ultimate price in the wake of the latter's fall from grace in AD 31.
• It should not be forgotten that Claudius's wing of the family suffered terribly in the internal struggles for succession that racked the imperial house.
• Through all this turmoil Claudius survived, primarily through being ignored as an embarrassment and an idiot.[[6]]
• Gaius, it seems, liked to use his bookish, frail uncle as the butt of cruel jokes and, in keeping with this pattern of behavior, promoted him to a suffect consulship on 1 July 37 A.D. At 46 years of age, it was Claudius's first public office.
• Despite this sortie into public life, he seemed destined for a relatively quiet and secluded dotage when, in January 41, events overtook him.
• Accession (24-25 January, 41 A.D.)
• The events surrounding his accession are worthy of detailed description, since they revealed much about the true nature of the Augustan Principate.
• Arguably the most important period of Claudius's reign was its first few hours.
• Claudius was present. Shortly before lunch time, Claudius took his leave and the emperor decided that he, too, would adjourn for a bath. As Gaius was making his way down an isolated palace corridor he was surrounded and cut down by discontented members of his own bodyguard.
• In the early afternoon of 24 January 41 A.D., the emperor Gaius was attending a display of dancers in a theater near the palace.
• In the aftermath of the assassination -- the first open murder of a Roman emperor -- there was widespread panic and confusion.
• The German elements of the emperor's bodyguard, who were fiercely loyal to their chief, went on the rampage and killed indiscriminately.
• Soldiers of the larger Praetorian Guard began looting the imperial palace. According to the best-known tradition, some Guardsmen found Claudius cowering behind a curtain and, on the spot, they declared him their emperor and carried him off to their camp.
• In this story, a hapless Claudius falls into power entirely as a result of accident, and very much against his will. It is not hard to see why, with its implicit theme of recusatio imperii, it is the story of his accession that Claudius himself favored.
• Vestiges, however, can be traced of another tradition that paints a somewhat different picture. In this version, the Guardsmen meet in their camp and discuss the situation facing them in light of Gaius's murder. Their pleasant, city-based terms of military service were in jeopardy. They needed an emperor. Fixing their intentions on Claudius as the only surviving mature member of the Julio-Claudian house, they sent out a party of troops to find him and bring him back to their camp so he could be acclaimed emperor, which is what happened.
• In this story, the elevation of Claudius to the purple was a purposeful plan on the part of the soldiers, even if Claudius remains a passive and reluctant partner in the whole process.
• The possibility has to be entertained that Claudius was a far more active participant in his own elevation than either of these traditions let on.
• There is just reason to suspect that he may even have been involved in planning the murder of Gaius -- his departure from the theater minutes before the assassination appears altogether too fortuitous.
• These possibilities, however, must remain pure speculation, since the ancient evidence offers nothing explicit in the way of support for them. On the other hand, we can hardly expect them to, given the later pattern of events. The whole issue of Claudius's possible involvement in the death of Gaius and his own subsequent acclamation by the Praetorian Guard must, therefore, remain moot.
• Despite the circumstances that brought him there, the hours following Claudius's arrival at the Praetorian Camp and his acceptance as emperor by the Senate are vital ones for the history of the Principate. Events could have taken a very different course, but that they worked out as they did speaks volumes as to how far seven decades of the Augustan Principate had removed Rome from the possibility of a return to the so-called free Republic.
• News of Gaius's death prompted a meeting of the Senate. Initially, there was talk of declaring the Republic restored and dispensing with emperors altogether. Then, however, various senators began proposing that they be chosen as the next princeps. Debate was in progress when news reached the senators that the Guard had made the decision for them: Claudius, the soldiers' choice, was sitting in the Praetorian Camp.
• The main historical difficulty in what happened next is due to confusion in Josephus's account (which is the fullest). In one version, the Senate sent two tribunes to the Camp to demand that Claudius step down. Once in the Camp, however, the tribunes were cowed by the ardent support for Claudius among the soldiers and instead requested that he come to the Senate to be ratified as emperor.
• In Josephus's alternate version, however, Herod Agrippa is summoned by the senators and employed as an envoy between the Camp and the Senate.[[12]] Clearly, Josephus is conveying two traditions about these events, one Roman (featuring the tribunes), the other Jewish (highlighting the role of Herod Agrippa). Suetonius, naturally enough, follows the Roman tradition, as does Dio in his main account; interestingly, the latter shows awareness of some participation on the part of Herod Agrippa in a later passage.[[13]]
• Regardless of how the negotiations were conducted, the Senate quickly realized it was powerless in the presence of several thousand armed men supporting Claudius's candidacy.
• The impotence that the esteemed council had experienced time and again when dealing with the military dynasts of the Late Republic was once more revealed to all, and the meeting dissolved with the fate of the Empire left undecided. When the Senate met again later that night in the Temple of Jupiter Victor, it found its numbers much depleted, since many had fled the city to their country estates.
• The senators assessed their military strength: they had three or four urban cohorts under the command of the City Prefect, numbering perhaps 3,000 men. With these, they occupied the Forum and Palatine. Plans were laid to arm some ex-slaves to provide reinforcements.
• By these actions the senators were accepting that supreme power in post-Augustan Rome could be achieved only by military force; all questions of legal niceties were irrelevant. But the Senate could not control their troops -- they all deserted to the Praetorian Guard, with whom they shared the Camp.
• On 25 January 41 A.D. Claudius was formally invested with all the powers of the princeps, becoming Ti. Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. (Since Claudius had no legal claim to it whatsoever, the appearance of "Caesar" in his imperial name marks the first step in this word's transmutation from a family name to a title denoting ruler, and so begins a tradition that stretches into the modern era with "Kaiser," "Czar," and possibly "Shah.")
• Now completely powerless, the senators hurried off to the Praetorian Camp to pay their respects to Claudius.
• These events have been treated in some detail because of their immense historical importance.
• Gaius was the first emperor of Rome to be openly murdered, and Claudius's accession marks the first overt and large-scale intrusion of the military into post-Augustan politics. The basic fact of the Principate, which had always been implicit in the Augustan settlement but heretofore carefully disguised, was now made plain: the emperor's position ultimately rested not on consensus but on the swords of the soldiers who paid him homage.
• From one perspective, the Principate had been revealed for what it truly was -- an exercise in managing the military's loyalties, and not a form of government rooted in law and consensus.
• The Senate, in attempting to block Claudius with troops of their own, had acquiesced in this structure of power.
• For ever afterward, emperors sat on the throne on the sufferance of the troops they commanded, and a loss of army loyalty necessarily entailed a loss of power, usually accompanied by the loss of the incumbent's life. But the harder lessons in these realities lay in the future; for the moment order had been restored, and Claudius embarked on his reign in relative security.
• The Early Years: Britain, Freedmen, and Messalina (AD 41 - 48)
• Among Claudius's first acts was the apprehension and execution of Gaius's assassins.
• Whatever his opinion of their actions, politics and pietas required that Claudius not be seen to condone men who murdered an emperor and a member of his own family.
• He also displayed immediate understanding of the centrality of the military to his position and sought to create a military image for himself that his prior sheltered existence had denied him. Preparations got under way soon after his accession for a major military expedition into Britain, perhaps sparked by an attempted revolt of the governor of Dalmatia, L. Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus, in 42 A.D..
• The invasion itself, spearheaded by four legions, commenced in the summer of 43 and was to last for decades, ultimately falling short of the annexation of the whole island (if indeed that was Claudius's final objective at the outset). This move marked the first major addition to the territory of the Roman empire since the reign of Augustus.
• Claudius himself took part in the campaign, arriving in the war zone with an entourage of ex-consuls in the late summer of 43 A.D. After a parade at Camulodunum (Colchester) to impress the natives, he returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph in 44 A.D. His military credentials had been firmly established.
• The sources are united in portraying Claudius as a dupe to his imperial freedmen advisors as well as to his wives.
• It is possible that the hostile stance of the elite toward Claudius extended back into his reign -- he was, after all, a usurper who had been foisted on the aristocrats by the soldiers. If so, Claudius's reliance on his freedmen may have stemmed from this circumstance, in that the ex-slaves were (as far as he was concerned) more trustworthy than the sullen aristocracy.
• For whatever reasons, there is no doubt that Claudius's reign is the first era of the great imperial freedman.
• To be sure, the secretariat had existed before Claudius and members of it had achieved some prominence (notably Helicon and Callistus under Gaius), but the rise of powerful individuals like Narcissus, Polybius, and Pallas was a distinctive mark of Claudius's reign.
• The power of these men was demonstrated early on when the emperor chose Narcissus as his envoy to the legions as they hesitated to embark on their invasion of Britain.[[18]] According to our sources, the freedmen were frequently to exert less beneficent influences throughout Claudius's reign.
• In 38 A.D. Claudius had married Valeria Messalina, a scion of a noble house with impressive familial connections.
• Messalina bore him a daughter (Octavia, born in 39) and a son (Britannicus, born in 41): she was therefore the mother of the heir-apparent and enjoyed influence for that reason.
• In the sources, Messalina is portrayed as little more than a pouting adolescent nymphomaniac who holds wild parties and arranges the deaths of former lovers or those who scorn her advances; and all this while her cuckolded husband blunders on in blissful ignorance. Recently, attempts have been made to rehabilitate Messalina as an astute player of court politics who used sex as a weapon, but in the end we have little way of knowing the truth.
• What we can say is that either her love of parties (on the adolescent model) or her byzantine scheming (on the able courtier model) brought her down.
• While Claudius was away in Ostia in AD 48, Messalina had a party in the palace in the course of which a marriage ceremony was performed (or playacted) between herself and a consul-designate, C. Silius. Whatever the intentions behind it, the political ramifications of this folly were sufficiently grave to cause the summary execution of Messalina, Silius, and assorted hangers-on (orchestrated, tellingly, by the freedman Narcissus).[[20]] Claudius was now without a wife.
• The Rise of Agrippina and Claudius's Death (48-54 A.D.)
• In our sources, the death of Messalina is presented as initiating a scramble among the freedmen, each wishing to place his preferred candidate at Claudius's side as the new empress. In the end, it was Pallas who prevailed when he convinced Claudius to marry Agrippina the Younger.
• The marriage took place within months of Messalina's execution.
• Agrippina was a colorful figure with extensive and far-reaching imperial connections: she was the daughter of Claudius's brother, Germanicus, and a sister of Gaius Caligula, by whom she had been exiled for involvement in the conspiracy of Gaetulicus; moreover, she had been married before.
• She therefore brought to the marriage with Claudius -- which necessitated a change in the law to allow uncles to marry their brothers' daughters -- a son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus. Agrippina's ambitions for this son proved the undoing of Claudius.[[21]]
• Whether or not sources are right to portray him as a dupe of his wives and freedmen throughout his reign, there can be little doubt that Agrippina's powerful personality dominated Claudius's last years. Her position, openly influential in a manner unlike any previous empress, was recognized by those attuned to imperial politics, and she appears more and more prominently in official inscriptions and coins.
• The years between his marriage to Agrippina in 48 and his death in 54 were difficult ones for Claudius.
• In 50 the Senate voted her the title "Augusta," the first prominent imperial woman to hold this title since Livia -- and the latter had only held it after Augustus's death.
• She greeted foreign embassies to the emperor at Rome from her own tribunal, and those greetings were recorded in official documents; she also wore a gold-embroidered military cloak at official functions.
• It is a sign of her overt influence that a new colony on the Rhine bore her name.[[22]]Agrippina's powerful position facilitated the advancement of her son Domitius and was, in turn, strengthened by it.
• Domitius, at 13, was three years older. Now Claudius began to advance Domitius through various signs of favor, the most important being his adoption as Claudius's son on 25 February AD 50.
• Claudius already had a natural son, Britannicus, who was still a minor.
• Henceforth Domitius was known as Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar and known to posterity simply as "Nero".
• But Claudius openly advanced Nero in other ways, too: the emperor held the consulship in 51, which was the year Nero took the "toga of manhood," and that event was itself staged several months before the customary age for Roman teenagers; Nero was granted imperium proconsulare outside the city, addressed the Senate, appeared with Claudius at circus games (while Britannicus appeared still in the toga of a minor), and was hailed as "Leader of the Youth" (princeps iuventutis) on the coinage;
• in AD 53 Nero married Claudius's daughter, Octavia.[[23]] All of these are sure signs of preference in the ever-unstable imperial succession schemes.
• The main difficulty for modern scholars lies in how to explain Claudius's favoring of Nero over his natural son, Britannicus; the reasons remain a matter of intense debate.[[24]]
• Agrippina, according to Tacitus, now decided it was time to dispose of Claudius to allow Nero to take over. The ancient accounts are confused -- as is habitual in the cases of hidden and dubious deaths of emperors -- but their general drift is that Claudius was poisoned with a treated mushroom, that he lingered a while and had to be poisoned a second time before dying on 13 October 54 A.D.
• No matter what the reasons were, there can be little doubt that Nero, despite his tender age, had been clearly marked out as Claudius's successor.
• At noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Already familiar to the army and the public, he faced no serious challenges to his authority.
• Claudius and the Empire
• The invasion and annexation of Britain was by far the most important and significant event in Claudius's reign.
• But several other issues deserve attention: his relationship with and treatment of the aristocracy, his management of the provinces and their inhabitants, and his judicial practices, and his building activities.
• Before looking at these subjects, however, we should note that the long-lived notion that Claudius initiated a coherent policy of centralization in the Roman Empire -- evidenced in the centralization of provincial administration and judicial actions, in the creation of a departmental bureaucracy, his interference in financial affairs, and so on -- has been decisively disproven by a recent biography of Claudius.
• Whatever actions Claudius took in regard to the various wings of government, he did so without any unifying policy of centralization in mind.
• Claudius's relationship with the Senate did not get off to a good start -- given the nature of his succession and the early revolt of Scribonianus with its ensuing show trials -- and it seems likely that distrust of the aristocracy is what impelled Claudius to elevate the role of his freedmen.
• During his reign, however, Claudius made efforts to conciliate Rome's leading council, but he also embarked on practices that redounded to his detriment, especially those of sponsoring the entrance men considered unworthy into the Order and hearing delicate cases behind closed doors (in camera).
• In the last analysis, the figures speak for themselves: 35 senators and several hundred Knights were driven to suicide or executed during the reign.
• The posthumous vilification of Claudius in the aristocratic tradition also bespeaks a deep bitterness and indicates that, ultimately, Claudius's relationship with the Senate showed little improvement over time.
• His reviving and holding the censorship in 47-48 is typical of the way the relationship between Senate and emperor misfired: Claudius, no doubt, thought he was adhering to ancient tradition, but the emperor-censor only succeeded in eliciting odium from those he was assessing.
• Claudius was remembered (negatively) by tradition as being noticeably profligate in dispensing grants of Roman citizenship to provincials; he also admitted "long-haired" Gauls into the senatorial order, to the displeasure of the snobbish incumbents.
• Both of these practices demonstrate his concern for fair play and good government for the provinces, despite his largely sedentary reign: under Claudius are attributed the first issues of standing orders (mandata) from emperor to governor.
• In the organization of the provinces, Claudius appears to have preferred direct administration over client kingship. Under him the kingdoms of Mauretania, Lycia, Noricum, and Thrace were converted into provinces.
• Stable kingdoms, such as Bosporus and Cilicia, were left untouched.
• A good example of the pattern is Herod Agrippa I. This client prince had grown up at Rome and had been awarded tetrarchic lands in Galilee by Gaius (Caligula). As we saw above, he had been involved in the accession of Claudius and, as a reward for services rendered, he was granted Judaea and Samaria in addition to his former holdings.

  • Herod Agrippa I under Claudius
• He fell from grace, however, when he suspiciously extended Jerusalem's walls and invited other eastern kings to a conference at Tiberias.
• He died suddenly in 44 A.D., after which his former kingdom again came under direct Roman rule.
• One feature of Claudius's reign that the sources particularly criticize is his handling of judicial matters.
• While he was certainly diligent in attending to hearings and court proceedings -- he was constantly present in court and heard cases even during family celebrations and festal days -- the sources accuse him of interfering unduly with cases, of not listening to both sides of a case, of making ridiculous and/or savage rulings, and of hearing delicate cases in closed-door private sessions with only his advisors present.
• The most celebrated and infamous of the latter cases is that of Valerius Asiaticus, the Gallic ex-consul and one-time friend of Claudius, who fell from grace in 47, reputedly at Messalina's instigation. His case was heard in the emperor's bedroom and Asiaticus was forced to suicide.
• Even if a survey of surviving rulings by Claudius do not show him making silly decisions, his judicial practices caught such attention that Seneca's Apocolocyntosis ends with a courtroom scene with Claudius as the accused: he is not allowed to make his defence, is convicted, and condemned to be a powerless courtroom clerk. Such an image must have been most pleasing to the senatorial imagination.
• Finally, there is Claudius's building activities.
• Conclusion
• Robert Graves' fictional characterization of Claudius as an essentially benign man with a keen intelligence has tended to dominate the wider public's view of this emperor.
• Close study of the sources, however, reveals a somewhat different kind of man. In addition to his scholarly and cautious nature, he had a cruel streak, as suggested by his addiction to gladiatorial games and his fondness for watching his defeated opponents executed.
• He conducted closed-door (in camera ) trials of leading citizens that frequently resulted in their ruin or deaths -- an unprecedented and tyrannical pattern of behavior.
• While he cannot be blamed for the disastrous way Nero's rule turned out, he must take some responsibility for putting that most unsuitable youth on the throne.
• He abandoned his own son Britannicus to his fate and favored the advancement of Nero as his successor.
• At the same time, his reign was marked by some notable successes: the invasion of Britain, stability and good government in the provinces, and successful management of client kingdoms. Claudius, then, is a more enigmatic figure than the other Julio-Claudian emperors: at once careful, intelligent, aware and respectful of tradition, but given to bouts of rage and cruelty, willing to sacrifice precedent to expediency, and utterly ruthless in his treatment of those who crossed him.
• Augustus's suspicion that there was more to the timid Claudius than met the eye was more than fully borne out by the events of his unexpected reign.

120 more annotations...

• Suetonius,   The Lives of the Caesars
• The Life of Claudius
• The father of Claudius Caesar, Drusus, who at first had the forename Decimus and later that of Nero, was born of Livia within three months after her marriage to Augustus1 (for she was with child at the time) and there was a suspicion that he was begotten by his stepfather in adulterous intercourse.

• Certain it is that this verse at once became current:  

     

  "In three months' time come children to the great."
• He was the first of Roman generals to sail the northern Ocean, and beyond the Rhine with prodigious labour he constructed the huge canals which to this very day are called by his name.
• This Drusus, while holding the offices of quaestor and praetor, was in charge of the war in Raetia and later of that in Germany.
• Even after he had defeated the enemy in many battles and driven them far into the wilds of the interior, he did not cease his pursuit until the apparition of a barbarian woman of greater than    p5human size, speaking in the Latin tongue, forbade him to push his victory further.
• For these exploits he received the honour of an ovation4 with the triumphal regalia; and immediately after his praetorship he became consul and resumed his campaign, but died in his summer camp, which for that reason was given the name of "Accursed."
• The body was carried by the leading men of the free towns and colonies to Rome,5 where it was met and received by the decuries of scribes,6 and buried in the campus Martius.
• But the army reared a monument in his honour, about which the soldiers should make a ceremonial run7 each year thereafter on a stated day, which the cities of Gaul were to observe with prayers and sacrifices.
• The senate, in addition to many other honours, voted him   a marble arch   adorned with trophies on the Appian Way, and the surname Germanicus for himself and his descendants.
• It is the general belief that he was as eager for glory as he was democratic8 by nature; for in addition to victories over the enemy he greatly desired to win the "noble trophies,"9 often pursuing the leaders of the Germans all over the field at great personal risk; and he made no secret of his intention of restoring the old-time form of government, whenever he should have the power.

  • Drusus aka "Germanicus", Claudius' father was apparently a Republican at heart, who wished to restore the old order.
•  ºIt is because of this, I think, that some have made bold to write that he was an object of suspicion to Augustus; that the emperor recalled him from his province, and when he did not obey at once, took him off by poison.
• This    p7I have mentioned, rather not to pass it by, than that I think it true or even probable; for as a matter of fact Augustus loved him so dearly while he lived that he always named him joint-heir along with his sons, as he once declared in the senate; and when he was dead, he eulogized him warmly before the people, praying the gods to make his Caesars10 like Drusus, and to grant him, when his time came, as glorious a death as they had given that hero.
• And not content with carving a laudatory inscription on his tomb in verses of his own composition, Augustus also wrote a memoir of his life in prose.
• Drusus had several children by the younger Antonia, but was survived by only three, Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius.
• Claudius was born at Lugdunum on the Kalends of Augustus in the consulship of Iullus Antonius and Fabius Africanus, the very day when an altar was first dedicated to Augustus in that town,11 and he received the name of Tiberius Claudius Drusus.
• Later, on the adoption of his elder brother into the Julian family, he took the surname Germanicus.
• He lost his father when he was still an infant, and throughout almost the whole course of his childhood and youth he suffered so severely from various obstinate disorders that the vigour of both his mind and his body was dulled, and even when he reached the proper age he was not thought capable of any public or private business.
• For a long time, even after he reached the age of independence,12 he was in a state of pupillage and under a guardian, of whom he himself makes complaint in a book of his, saying that he was a barbarian and a former chief of muleteers, put in charge of him for the express    p9purpose of punishing him with all possible severity for any cause whatever.
• It was also because of his weak health that contrary to all precedent he wore a cloak when he presided at the gladiatorial games which he and his brother gave in honour of their father; and on the day when he assumed the gown of manhood he was taken in a litter to the Capitol about midnight without the usual escort.
• Yet he gave no slight attention to liberal studies from his earliest youth, and even published frequent specimens of his attainments in each line. But even so he could not attain any public position or inspire more favourable hope of his future.
• His mother Antonia often called him "a monster of a man, not finished but merely begun by Dame Nature"; and if she accused anyone of dulness, she used to say that he was "a bigger fool than her son Claudius."
• His grandmother Augusta always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely speaking to him; and when she admonished him, she did so in short, harsh letters, or through messengers.
• When his sister Livilla heard that he would one day be emperor, she openly and loudly prayed that the Roman people might be spared so cruel and undeserved a fortune. Finally to make it clearer what opinions, favourable and otherwise, his great uncle Augustus had of him, I have appended extracts from his own letters:
• "I have talked with Tiberius,14 my dear Livia, as you requested, with regard to what is to be done with your grandson Tiberius15 at the games of Mars.16 Now we are both agreed that we must decide once for all what plan we are to adopt in his case. For if    p11he be sound and so to say complete,17 what reason have we for doubting that he ought to be advanced through the same grades and steps through which his brother has been advanced?
•  But if we realize that he is wanting and defective in soundness of body and mind, we must not furnish the means of ridiculing both him and us to a public which is wont to scoff at and deride such things. Surely we shall always be in a stew, if we deliberate about each separate occasion and do not make up our minds in advance whether we think he can hold public offices or not.
• However, as to the matters about which you ask my present advice, I do not object to his having charge of the banquet of the priests at the games of Mars, if he will allow himself to be advised by his kinsman the son of Silvanus, so as not to do anything to make himself conspicuous or ridiculous.
• That he should view the games in the Circus from the Imperial box18 does not meet with my approval; for he will be conspicuous if exposed to full view in front of the auditorium.
• I am opposed to his going to the Alban Mount or being in Rome on the days of the Latin festival; for why should he not be made prefect of the city, if he is able to attend his brother to the Mount? 4 You have my views, my dear Livia, to wit that I desire that something be decided once for all about the whole matter, to save us from constantly wavering between hope and fear.
• Moreover, you may, if you wish, give this part of my letter to our kinswoman Antonia also to read."

• Again in another letter:  

    5  "I certainly shall invite the young Tiberius to dinner every day during your absence, to keep him    p13from dining alone with his friends Sulpicius and Athenodorus. I do wish that he would choose more carefully and in a less scatter-brained fashion someone to imitate in his movements, bearing, and gait. The poor fellow is unlucky; for in important matters, where his mind does not wander, the nobility of his character is apparent enough."

• Also in a third letter:  

    6  "Confound me, dear Livia, if I am not surprised that your grandson Tiberius could please me with his declaiming. How in the world anyone who is so unclear in his conversation can speak with clearness and propriety when he declaims, is more than I can see."  
• There is no doubt at all what Augustus later decided, and that he left him invested with no office other than the augural priesthood, not even naming him as one of his heirs, save in the third degree19 and to a sixth part of his estate, among those who were all but strangers; while the legacy that he left him was not more than eight hundred thousand sesterces.
• His paternal uncle Tiberius gave him the consular regalia, when he asked for office; but when he urgently requested the actual position, Tiberius merely replied by a note in these words: "I have sent you forty gold-pieces for the Saturnalia and the Sigillaria."
• Then at last Claudius abandoned all hope of advancement and gave himself up to idleness, living in obscurity now in his house and gardens in the suburbs, and sometimes at a villa in Campania;
• moreover from his intimacy with the lowest of men he incurred the reproach of drunkenness and gambling, in addition to his former reputation for dulness.    p15Yet all this time, despite his conduct, he never lacked attention from individuals or respect from the public.
• The equestrian order twice chose him as their patron, to head a deputation on their behalf: once when they asked from the consuls the privilege of carrying the body of Augustus to Rome on their shoulders, and again when they offered them their congratulations on the downfall of Sejanus.
• They even used to rise when he appeared at the public shows and put off their cloaks.
• The senate too voted that he be made a special member of the priests of Augustus,21 who were usually chosen by lot; when he later lost his house by fire, that it should be rebuilt at the public expense, and that he should have the honour of giving his opinion among the consulars. This second decree was however repealed, since Tiberius urged Claudius's infirmity as a reason, and promised that he would make the loss22 good through his own generosity.
• Yet when Tiberius died, he named Claudius only among his heirs in the third degree, to a third part of his estate, although he gave him in addition a legacy of about two million sesterces, and expressly commended him besides to the armies and to the senate and people of Rome with the rest of his kinsfolk.
• It was only under his nephew Gaius, who in the early part of his reign tried to gain popularity by every device, that he at last began his official career, holding the consulship as his colleague for two months; and it chanced that as he entered the Forum for the first time with the fasces, an eagle that was flying by lit upon his shoulder.
• He was    p17also allotted a second consulship, to be held four years later,23 and several times he presided at the shows in place of Gaius, and was greeted by the people now with "Success to the emperor's uncle!" and now with "All hail to the brother of Germanicus!"
• But all this did not save him from constant insults; for if he came to dinner a little after the appointed time, he took his place with difficulty and only after making the round of the dining-room.
• Whenever he went to sleep after dinner, which was a habit of his, he was pelted with the stones of olives and dates, and sometimes he was awakened by the jesters with a whip or cane, in pretended sport.
• They used also to put slippers on his hands as he lay snoring, so that when he was suddenly aroused he might rub his face with them.
• But he was exposed also to actual dangers.
• First in his very consulship, when he was all but deposed, because he had been somewhat slow in contracting for and setting up the statues of Nero and Drusus, the emperor's brothers.
• Afterwards he was continually harassed by all kinds of accusations, brought against him by strangers or even by the members of his household. Finally, when the conspiracy of Lepidus and Gaetulicus24 was detected and he was sent to Germany as one of the envoys to congratulate the emperor, he was really in peril of his life, since Gaius raged and fumed because his uncle of all men had been sent to him, as if to a child in need of a guardian.
• So great, indeed, was his wrath that some have written that Claudius was even thrown into the river25 clothes and all, just as he had come.
• Moreover, from that time on he always gave    p19his opinion in the senate among the consulars, having the question put to him after all the rest by way of humiliation.
• A case involving the forgery of a will was even admitted, in which Claudius himself was one of the signers.
• At last he was forced to pay eight million sesterces to enter a new priesthood,26 which reduced him to such straitened circumstances that he was unable to meet the obligation incurred to the treasury;27 whereupon by edict of the prefects28 his property was advertised for sale to meet the deficiency,29 in accordance with the law regulating confiscations.
• Having spent the greater part of his life under these and like circumstances, he became emperor in his fiftieth year by a remarkable freak of fortune.
• When the assassins of Gaius shut out the crowd under pretence that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius was ousted with the rest and withdrew to an apartment called the Hermaeum; and a little later, in great terror at the news of the murder, he stole away to a balcony hard by and hid among the curtains which hung before the door.
• As he cowered there, a common soldier, who was prowling about at random, saw his feet, intending to ask who he was, pulled him out and recognized him; and when Claudius fell at his feet in terror, he hailed him as emperor.
• Then he took him to the rest of    p21his comrades, who were as yet in a condition of uncertainty and purposeless rage. These placed him in a litter, took turns in carrying it, since his own bearers had made off, and bore him to the Camp in a state of despair and terror, while the throng that met him pitied him, as an innocent man who was being hurried off to execution.
• Received within the rampart, he spent the night among the sentries with much less hope than confidence;30 for the consuls with the senate and the city cohorts had taken possession of the Forum and the Capitol, resolved on maintaining the public liberty.
• When he too was summoned to the House by the tribunes of the commons, to give his advice on the situation, he sent word that "he was detained by force and compulsion." 4 But the next day, since the senate was dilatory in putting through its plans because of the tiresome bickering of those who held divergent views, while the populace, who stood about the hall, called for one ruler and expressly named Claudius, he allowed the armed assembly of the soldiers to swear allegiance to him, and promised each man fifteen thousand sesterces; being the first of the Caesars who resorted to bribery to secure the fidelity of the troops.
• As soon as his power was firmly established, he considered it of foremost importance to obliterate the memory of the two days when men had thought of changing the form of government.
• Accordingly he made a decree that all that had been done and said during that period should be pardoned and forever forgotten; he kept his word too, save only that a few of the tribunes and centurions who had conspired against Gaius were put to death, both to make an example of them and because he knew    p23that they had also demanded his own death.
• Then turning to the duties of family loyalty, he adopted as his most sacred and frequent oath "By Augustus."
• He had divine honours voted his grandmother Livia and a chariot drawn by elephants in the procession at the Circus,32 like that of Augustus; also public offerings to the shades of his parents and in addition annual games in the Circus on his father's birthday and for his mother a carriage to bear her image through the Circus and the surname of Augusta, which she had declined during her lifetime.
• In memory of his brother,33 whom he took every opportunity of honouring, he brought out a Greek comedy in the contest at Naples34 and awarded it the crown in accordance with the decision of the judges.
• He did not leave even Mark Antony unhonoured or without grateful mention, declaring once in a proclamation that he requested the more earnestly that the birthday of his father Drusus be celebrated because it was the same as that of his grandfather Antony.
• He completed   the marble arch to Tiberius   near Pompey's theatre, which had been voted some time before by the senate, but left unfinished.
• Even in the case of Gaius, while he annulled all his acts, yet he would not allow the day of his death to be added to the festivals, although it was also the beginning of his own reign.
• But in adding to his own dignity he was modest and unassuming, refraining from taking the forename Imperator,35 refusing excessive honours, and passing over the betrothal of his daughter and the birthday of a grandson in silence and with merely private ceremonies.
• He recalled no one from exile except with the approval of the senate. He obtained from the    p25members as a favour the privilege of bringing into the House with him the prefect of the praetorian guard and the tribunes of the soldiers, and the ratification of the judicial acts of his agents in the provinces.
•  He asked the consuls for permission to hold fairs on his private estates. He often appeared as one of the advisers at cases tried before the magistrates; and when they gave games, he also arose with the rest of the audience and showed his respect by acclamations and applause.
• When the tribunes of the commons appeared before him as he sat upon the tribunal, he apologised to them because for lack of room he could not hear them unless they stood up.
• By such conduct he won so much love and devotion in a short time, that when it was reported that he had been waylaid and killed on a journey to Ostia, the people were horror stricken and with dreadful execrations continued to assail the soldiers as traitors, and the senate as murderers, until finally one or two men, and later several, were brought forward upon the rostra by the magistrates and assured the people that Claudius was safe and on his way to the city.
• Yet he did not remain throughout without experience of treachery, but he was attacked by individuals, by a conspiracy, and finally by a civil war.
• A man of the commons was caught near his bed-chamber in the middle of the night, dagger in hand; and two members of the equestrian order were found lying in wait for him in public places, one ready to attack him with a sword-cane as he came out of the theatre, the other with a hunting knife as he was sacrificing in the temple of Mars.
•  Asinius Gallus and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons    p27of the orators Pollio and Messala, conspired to overthrow him, aided by a number of his own freedmen and slaves.
• The civil war was set on foot by Furius Camillus Scribonianus, governor of Dalmatia; but his rebellion was put down within five days, since the legions which had changed their allegiance were turned from their purpose by superstitious fear; for when the order was given to march to their new commander, by some providential chance the eagles could not be adorned36 nor the standards pulled up and moved.37
• He held four consulships in addition to his original one. Of these the first two were in successive years, while the other two followed at intervals of four years each, the last for six months, the others for two; and in his third he was substituted for one of the consuls who had died, a thing which was without precedent in the case of an emperor.
• He administered justice most conscientiously both as consul and when out of office, even on his own anniversaries and those of his family, and sometimes even on festivals of ancient date and days of ill-omen.
• He did not always follow the letter of the laws, but modified their severity or lenity<!-- sic --> in many cases according to his own notions of equity and justice; for he allowed a new trial to those who had lost their cases before private judges by demanding more than the law prescribed, while, overstepping the lawful penalty, he condemned to the wild beasts those who were convicted of especially heinous crimes.
• But in hearing and deciding cases38 he showed strange inconsistency of temper, for he was now careful and shrewd, sometimes hasty and inconsiderate, occasionally silly and like a crazy man.
• In revising    p29the lists of the divisions of jurors39 he disqualified a man who had presented himself without mentioning that he was immune because of the number of his children,40 on the ground that he had a passion for jury-duty. Another, who was challenged by his opponents about a suit of his own, said that it did not come before Caesar's tribunal, but the ordinary courts; whereupon Claudius compelled him at once to bring the case before him, saying that the man would show in a case affecting his own interests how just a juror he would be in the affairs of others.
• When a woman refused to recognise her son, the evidence on both sides was conflicting, he forced her to admit the truth by ordering her to marry the young man.
• Whenever one party to a suit was absent, he was prone to decide in favour of the one who was present, without considering whether his opponent had failed to appear through his own fault or from a necessary cause.
• On a man's being convicted of forgery, some one cried out that his hands ought to be cut off; whereupon Claudius insisted that an executioner be summoned at once with knife and block.
• In a case involving citizenship a fruitless dispute arose among the advocates as to whether the defendant ought to make his appearance in the toga42 or in a Greek mantle, and the emperor, with the idea of showing absolute impartiality, made him change his garb several times, according as he was accused or defended.
•  In one case he is credited with having rendered the following decision, which he had actually written out beforehand: "I decide in favour of those who have told the truth." By such acts as these he so discredited himself that he was held in general and open contempt.
• All the world knows that a Roman knight who was tried for improper conduct towards women, but on a false charge trumped up by unscrupulous enemies, seeing common strumpets called as witnesses against him and their testimony admitted, hurled the stylus and tablets which he held in his hand into the emperor's face with such force as to cut his cheek badly, at the same time loudly reviling his cruelty and stupidity.
• He also assumed the censorship, which had long been discontinued, ever since the term of Plancus and Paulus, but in this office too he was variable, and both his theory and his practice were inconsistent.
• Another who was notorious for corruption and adultery he merely admonished to be more    p33restrained in his indulgence, or at any rate more circumspect, adding, "For why should I know what mistress you keep?"
• When he had removed the mark of censure affixed to one man's name, yielding to the entreaties of the latter's friends, he said: "But let the erasure be seen."
• He not only struck from the list of jurors a man of high birth, a leading citizen of the province of Greece, because he did not know Latin, but even deprived him of the rights of citizenship; and he would not allow anyone to render an account of his life save in his own words, as well as he could, without the help of an advocate. And he degraded44 many, some contrary to their expectation and on the novel charge that they had left Italy without consulting him and obtaining leave of absence; one man merely because he had been companion to a king in his province, citing the case of Rabirius Postumus, who in bygone days had been tried for treason because he had followed Ptolemy to Alexandria, to recover a loan.
• When he attempted to degrade still more, he found them in most cases blameless; for owing to the great carelessness of his agents, but to his own greater shame, those whom he accused of celibacy, childlessness, or lack of means proved that they were married, or fathers, or well-to‑do. In fact, one man, who was charged with having stabbed himself, stripped off his clothing and showed a body without a scar.
• Other noteworthy acts of his censorship were the following: he had a silver chariot of costly workmanship, which was offered in the Sigillaria,45 bought and cut to pieces in his presence; in one single day he made twenty proclamations, including these two: "As the yield of the vineyards is bountiful, the wine jars    p35should be well pitched"; and "Nothing is so effective a cure for snake-bite as the juice of the yew tree."
• He made but one campaign and that of little importance. When the senate voted him the triumphal regalia, thinking the honour beneath the imperial dignity and desiring the glory of a legitimate triumph, he chose Britain as the best place for gaining it, a land that had been attempted by no one since the Deified Julius and was just at that time in a state of rebellion because of the refusal to return certain deserters.
•  On the voyage thither from Ostia he was nearly cast away twice in furious north-westers, off Liguria and near the Stoechades islands. Therefore he made the journey from Massilia all the way to Gesoriacum by land, crossed from there, and without any battle or bloodshed received the submission of a part of the island, returned to Rome within six months after leaving the city, and celebrated a triumph of great splendour.
• To witness the sight he allowed not only the governors of the provinces to come to Rome, but even some of the exiles; and among the tokens of his victory he set a naval crown on the gable of the Palace beside the civic crown, as a sign that he had crossed and, as it were, subdued the Ocean.
• His wife Messalina followed his chariot in a carriage, as did also those who had won the triumphal regalia in the same war; the rest marched on foot in purple-bordered togas, except Marcus Crassus Frugi, who rode a caparisoned horse and wore a tunic embroidered with palms, because he was receiving the honour for the second time.
• He always gave scrupulous attention to    p37the care of the city and the supply of grain.
• On the occasion of a stubborn fire in the Aemiliana47 he remained in the Diribitorium48 for two nights, and when a body of soldiers and of his own slaves could not give sufficient help, he summoned the commons from all parts of the city through the magistrates, and placing bags full of money before them, urged them to the rescue, paying each man on the spot a suitable reward for his services.
• When there was a scarcity of grain because of long-continued droughts, he was once stopped in the middle of the Forum by a mob and so pelted with abuse and at the same time with pieces of bread, that he was barely able to make his escape to the Palace by a back door; and after this experience he resorted to every possible means to bring grain to Rome, even in the winter season.
• To the merchants he held out the certainty of profit by assuming the expense of any loss that they might suffer from storms, and offered to those who would build merchant ships large bounties, adapted to the condition of each:  19   to a citizen exemption from the lex Papia Poppaea;49 to a Latin50 the rights of Roman citizenship; to women the privileges allowed the mothers of four children.51 And all these provisions are in force to‑day.
• The public works which he completed were great and essential rather than numerous; they were in particular the following: an aqueduct begun by Gaius; also the outlet of Lake Fucinus and the harbour at Ostia, although in the case of the last two he    p39knew that Augustus had refused the former to the Marsians in spite of their frequent requests, and that the latter had often been thought of by the Deified Julius, but given up because of its difficulty.
• He brought to the city on stone arches the cool and abundant founts of the   Claudian aqueduct, one of which is called Caeruleus and the other Curtius and Albudignus, and at the same time the spring of   the new Anio, distributing them into many beautifully ornamented pools.
•  He constructed the harbour at Ostia by building curving breakwaters on the right and left, while before the entrance he placed a mole in deep water. To give this mole a firmer foundation, he first sank the ship in which the great obelisk52 had been brought from Egypt, and then securing it by piles, built upon it a very lofty tower after the model of the Pharos at Alexandria, to be lighted at night and guide the course of ships.
• He very often distributed largess to the people. He also gave several splendid shows, not merely the usual ones in the customary places, but some of a new kind and some revived from ancient times, and in places where no one had ever given    p41them before.
• He opened the games at the dedication of Pompey's theatre, which he had restored when it was damaged by a fire, from a raised seat in the orchestra, after first offering sacrifice at the temples53 in the upper part of the auditorium and coming down through the tiers of seats while all sat in silence.
• He also celebrated secular games,54 alleging that they had been given too early by Augustus and not reserved for the regular time; although he himself writes in his own History that when they had been discontinued for a long time, Augustus restored them to their proper place after a very careful calculation of the intervals.
• Therefore the herald's proclamation was greeted with laughter, when he invited the people in the usual formula to games "which no one had ever seen or would ever see again"; for some were still living who had seen them before, and some actors who had appeared at the former performance appeared at that time as well.
• He often gave games in the Vatican Circus55 also, at times with a beast-baiting between every five races.

  • Vatican Circus
• But the Great Circus he adorned with barriers of marble and gilded goals,56 whereas before they had been of tufa and wood, and assigned special seats to the senators, who had been in the habit of viewing the games with the rest of the people.
• In addition to the chariot races he exhibited the game called Troy and also panthers, which were hunted down by a squadron of the praetorian cavalry under the lead of the tribunes and the prefect himself; likewise Thessalian horsemen,º who drive wild bulls all over the arena, leaping upon them    p43when they are tired out and throwing them to the ground by the horns.
• He gave many gladiatorial shows and in many places: one in yearly celebration of his accession, in the Praetorian Camp without wild beasts and fine equipment, and one in the •Saepta of the regular and usual kind; another in the same place not in the regular list, short and lasting but a few days, to which he was the first to apply the name of sportula,57 because before giving it for the first time he made proclamation that he invited the people "as it were to an extempore meal, hastily prepared."
•  Now there was no form of entertainment at which he was more familiar and free, even thrusting out his left hand,58 as the commons did, and counting aloud on his fingers the gold pieces which were paid to the victors; and ever and anon he would address the audience, and invite and urge them to merriment, calling them "masters" from time to time, and interspersing feeble and far-fetched jokes.
• when he had granted the wooden sword60 to an essedarius,61 for whose discharge four sons begged, and the act was received with loud and general applause, he at once circulated a note, pointing out to the people how greatly they ought to desire children, since they saw that they brought favour and protection even to a gladiator.
• He gave representations in the Campus Martius of the storming and sacking of a town in the manner of real warfare, as well as of the surrender of the kings of the Britons, and    p45presided clad in a general's cloak. Even when he was on the point of letting out the water from Lake Fucinus he gave a sham sea-fight first.
• But when the combatants cried out: "Hail, emperor, they who are about to die salute thee," he replied, "Or not,"62 and after that all of them refused to fight, maintaining that they had been pardoned.
• Upon this he hesitated for some time about destroying them all with fire and sword, but at last leaping from his throne and running along the edge of the lake with his ridiculous tottering gait,63 he induced them to fight, partly by threats and partly by promises.
• At this performance a Sicilian and a Rhodian fleet engaged, each numbering twelve triremes, and the signal was sounded on a horn by a silver Triton, which was raised from the middle of the lake by a mechanical device.
• Touching religious ceremonies and civil and military customs, as well as the condition of all classes at home and abroad, he corrected various abuses, revived some old customs or even established new ones.
• In admitting priests into the various colleges he never named anyone until he had first taken oath,64 and he scrupulously observed the custom of having the praetor call an assembly and proclaim a holiday, whenever there was an earthquake within the city; as well as that of offering up a supplication whenever a bird of ill-omen was seen on the Capitol.
• This last he himself conducted in his capacity of chief priest, first reciting the form of words to the people from the rostra, after all mechanics and slaves had been ordered to withdraw.
• The season for holding court, formerly divided into a winter and a summer term, he made    p47continuous.
• Jurisdiction in cases of trust, which it had been usual to assign each year and only to magistrates in the city, he delegated for all time and extended to the governors of the provinces. He annulled a clause added to the lex Papia Poppaea by Tiberius, implying that men of sixty could not beget children.
•  He made a law that guardians might be appointed for orphans by the consuls, contrary to the usual procedure, and that those who were banished from a province by its magistrates should also be debarred from the city and from Italy. He himself imposed upon some a new kind of punishment,66 by forbidding them to go more than •three miles outside of the city.
• He reserved to himself the granting of permission to travel, which had formerly been requested of the senate.
• When about to conduct business of special importance in the House, he took his seat between the two consuls or on the tribunes' bench.
• He gave the consular regalia even to the second grade of stewards.67 If any refused senatorial rank,68 he took from them that of knight also.
• Though he had declared at the beginning of his reign that he would choose no one as a senator who did not have a Roman citizen for a great-great‑grandfather, he gave the broad stripe even to a freedman's son, but only on condition that he should first be adopted by a Roman knight.
• Even then, fearful of criticism, he declared that the censor Appius Caecus, the ancient founder of his    p49family, had chosen the sons of freedmen into the senate; but he did not know that in the days of Appius and for some time afterwards the term libertini designated, not those who were themselves manumitted, but their freeborn sons.
• He obliged the college of quaestors to give a gladiatorial show in place of paving the roads; then depriving them of their official duties at Ostia and in Gaul, he restored to them the charge of the treasury of Saturn,69 which had in the meantime been administered by praetors, or by ex-praetors, as in our time.
• He gave the triumphal regalia to Silanus, his daughter's affianced husband, who was still a boy, and conferred them on older men so often and so readily, that a joint petition was circulated in the name of the legions,70 praying that those emblems be given the consular governors at the same time with their armies, to prevent their seeking all sorts of pretexts for war.
• To Aulus Plautius he also granted an ovation, going out to meet him when he entered the city, and walking on his left as he went to the Capitol and returned again. He allowed Gabinius Secundus to assume the surname of Cauchius because of his conquest of the Cauchi, a German nation.
• He rearranged the military career of the knights, assigning a division of cavalry after a cohort, and next the tribunate of a legion.
• He also instituted a series of military positions and a kind of fictitious service, which is called "supernumerary" and could be performed in absentia and in name only.
• He even had the Fathers pass a decree forbidding soldiers to enter the houses of senators to pay their respects.
• He confiscated    p51the property of those freedmen who passed as Roman knights, and reduced to slavery again such as were ungrateful and a cause of complaint to their patrons, declaring to their advocates that he would not entertain a suit against their own freedmen.
• When certain men were exposing their sick and worn out slaves on the Island of Aesculapius72 because of the trouble of treating them, Claudius decreed that all such slaves were free, and that if they recovered, they should not return to the control of their master; but if anyone preferred to kill such a slave rather than to abandon him, he was liable to the charge of murder.
• He provided by an edict that travellers should not pass through the towns of Italy except on foot, or in a chair or litter.
• He stationed a cohort at Puteoli and one at Ostia, to guard against the danger of fires.
• He forbade men of foreign birth to use the Roman names so far as those of the clans73 were concerned.
• Those who usurped the privileges of Roman citizenship he executed in the Esquiline field.
• He restored to the senate the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia, which Tiberius had taken into his own charge.
• He deprived the Lycians of their independence because of deadly intestine feuds, and restored theirs to the Rhodians, since they had given up their former faults.
• He allowed the people of Ilium perpetual exemption from tribute, on the ground that they were the founders of the Roman race, reading an ancient letter of the senate and people of    p53Rome written in Greek to king Seleucus, in which they promised him their friendship and alliance only on condition that he should keep their kinsfolk of Ilium free from every burden.
• Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,75 he expelled them from Rome.

  • Expulsion of Jews (Christian???) from Rome on account of "Chrestus" (Christ???)
• He allowed the envoys of the Germans to sit in the orchestra, led by their naïve self-confidence; for when they had been taken to the seats occupied by the common people and saw the Parthian and Armenian envoys sitting with the senate, they moved of their own accord to the same part of the theatre, protesting that their merits and rank were no whit inferior.
• He utterly abolished the cruel and inhuman religion of the Druids among the Gauls, which under Augustus had merely been prohibited to Roman citizens;
• on the other hand he even attempted to transfer the Eleusinian rites from Attica to Rome, and had the temple of Venus Erycina in Sicily, which had fallen to ruin through age, restored at the expense of the treasury of the Roman people.
• He struck his treaties with foreign princes in the Forum, sacrificing a pig76 and reciting the ancient formula of the fetial priests.
• But these and other acts, and in fact almost the whole conduct of his reign, were dictated not so much by his own judgment as that of his wives and freedmen, since he nearly always acted in accordance with their interests and desires.
• He was betrothed twice at an early age: to Aemilia Lepida, great-granddaughter of Augustus,    p55and to Livia Medullina, who also had the surname of Camilla and was descended from the ancient family of Camillus the dictator.
• He put away the former before their marriage, because her parents had offended Augustus; the latter was taken ill and died on the very day which had been set for the wedding.
•  He then married Plautia Urgulanilla, whose father had been honoured with a triumph, and later Aelia Paetina, daughter of an ex-consul. He divorced both these, Paetina for trivial offences, but Urgulanilla because of scandalous lewdness and the suspicion of murder.
• Then he married Valeria Messalina, daughter of his cousin Messala Barbatus. But when he learned that besides other shameful and wicked deeds she had actually married Gaius Silius, and that a formal contract had been signed in the presence of witnesses, he put her to death and declared before the assembled praetorian guard that inasmuch as his marriages did not turn out well, he would remain a widower, and if he did not keep his word, he would not refuse death at their hands.
• Yet he could not refrain from at once planning another match, even with Paetina, whom he had formerly discarded, and with Lollia Paulina, who had been the wife of Gaius Caesar.
• But his affections were ensnared by the wiles of Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus, aided by the right of exchanging kisses and the opportunities for endearments offered by their relationship; and at the next meeting of the senate he induced some of the members to propose that he be compelled to marry Agrippina, on the ground that it was for the interest of the State; also that others be allowed to contract similar marriages, which up to that time had been regarded as incestuous.
• And he    p57married her with hardly a single day's delay; but none were found to follow his example save a freedman and a chief centurion, whose marriage ceremony he himself attended with Agrippina.
• He had children by three of his wives: by Urgulanilla, Drusus<!-- Loeb has a comma here --> and Claudia; by Paetina, Antonia; by Messalina, Octavia and a son, at first called Germanicus and later Britannicus.
• He lost Drusus just before he came to manhood, for he was strangled by a pear which he had thrown into the air in play and caught in his open mouth.
• A few days before this he had betrothed him to the daughter of Sejanus, which makes me wonder all the more that some say that Drusus was treacherously slain by Sejanus.
• Claudia was the offspring of his freedman Boter, and although she was born within five months after the divorce78 and he had begun to rear her, yet he ordered her to be cast out naked at her mother's door and disowned.
• He gave Antonia in marriage to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and later to Faustus Sulla, both young men of high birth, and Octavia to his stepson Nero, after she had previously been betrothed to Silanus.
• Britannicus was born on the twenty-second day of his reign and in his second consulship.79 When he was still very small, Claudius would often take him in his arms and commend him to the assembled soldiers, and to the people at the games, holding him in his lap or in his outstretched hands, and he would wish him happy auspices, joined by the applauding throng.
• Of his sons-in‑law he adopted Nero; Pompeius and Silanus he not only declined to adopt, but even put to death.
• Of his freedmen he had special regard for the eunuch Posides, whom he even presented with the headless spear80 at his British triumph, along with those who had served as soldiers.
• He was equally fond of Felix, giving him the command of cohorts and of troops of horse, as well as of the province of Judaea; and he became the husband of three queens.

  • Felix..the same as mentioned in the Book of Acts
• Also of Harpocras, to whom he granted the privilege of riding through the city in a litter and of giving public entertainments.
• But most of all he was devoted to his secretary Narcissus and his treasurer Pallas, and he gladly allowed them to be honoured in addition by a decree of the senate, not only with immense gifts, but even with the insignia of quaestors and praetors. Besides this he permitted them to amass such wealth by plunder, that when he once complained of the low state of his funds, the witty answer was made that he would have enough and to spare, if he were taken into partnership by his two freedmen.
• Still higher was his regard for Polybius, his literary adviser, who often walked between the two consuls.
• Wholly under the control of these and of his wives, as I have said,83 he played the part, not of a prince, but of a servant lavishing honours, the command of armies, pardons or punishments, according to the interests of each of them, or even their wish or whim; and that too for the most part in ignorance and blindly.
• he put to death his father-in‑law Appius Silanus and the two Julias, daughters of    p61Drusus and Germanicus, on an unsupported charge and giving them no opportunity for defence; also Gnaeus Pompeius, the husband of his elder daughter, and Lucius Silanus who was betrothed to his younger one.
• Of these Pompey was stabbed in the embraces of a favourite youth, while Silanus was compelled to abdicate his praetorship four days before the Kalends of January and to take his own life at the beginning of the year, the very day of the marriage of Claudius and Agrippina.
• He inflicted the death penalty on thirty-five senators and more than three hundred Roman knights with such easy indifference, that when a centurion in reporting the death of an ex-consul said that his order had been carried out, he replied that he had given no order; but he nevertheless approved the act, since his freedmen declared that the soldiers had done their duty in hastening to avenge their emperor without instructions.
• But it is beyond all belief, that at the marriage which Messalina had contracted with her paramour Silius he signed the contract for the dowry with his own hand, being induced to do so on the ground that the marriage was a feigned one, designed to avert and turn upon another a danger which was inferred from certain portents to threaten the emperor himself.
• He possessed majesty and dignity of appearance, but only when he was standing still or sitting, and especially when he was lying down; for he was tall but not slender, with an attractive face, becoming white hair, and a full neck.
• But when he walked, his weak knees gave way under him and he had many disagreeable traits both in his lighter moments and when he was engaged in business; his laughter was unseemly and his anger still more disgusting,    p63for he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose; he stammered besides and his head was very shaky at all times, but especially when he made the least exertion.
• Though previously his health was bad, it was excellent while he was emperor except for attacks of heartburn, which he said all but drove him to suicide.
• He gave frequent and grand dinner parties, as a rule in spacious places, where six hundred guests were often entertained at one time.
• He even gave a banquet close to the outlet of the Fucine Lake and was well-nigh drowned, when the water was let out with a rush and deluged the place.
• He always invited his own children to dinner along with the sons and daughters of distinguished men, having them sit at the arms84 of the couches as they ate, after the old time custom.
• When a guest was suspected of having stolen a golden bowl the day before, he invited him again the next day, but set before him an earthenware cup. He is even said to have thought of an edict allowing the privilege of breaking wind quietly or noisily at table, having learned of a man who ran some risk by restraining himself through modesty.
• He was eager for food and drink at all times and in all places.
• Once when he was holding court in the forum of Augustus and had caught the savour of a meal which was preparing for the Salii86 in the temple of Mars hard by, he left the tribunal, went up where the priests were, and took his place at their table.
• He hardly ever left the dining-room until he was stuffed and soaked; then he went to sleep at once, lying on his back with his mouth open,    p65and a feather was put down his throat to relieve his stomach.
• He slept but little at a time, for he was usually awake before midnight; but he would sometimes drop off in the daytime while holding court and could hardly be roused when the advocates raised their voices for the purpose.
• He was immoderate in his passion for women, but wholly free from unnatural vice.
• He was greatly devoted to gaming, even publishing a book on the art, and he actually used to play while driving, having the board so fitted to his carriage as to prevent his game from being disturbed.
• That he was of a cruel and bloodthirsty disposition was shown in matters great and small.
• He always exacted examination by torture and the punishment of parricides87 at once and in his presence.
• When he was at Tibur and wished to see an execution in the ancient fashion,88 no executioner could be found after the criminals were bound to the stake. Whereupon he sent to fetch one from the city and continued to wait for him until nightfall.
• At any gladiatorial show, either his own or another's, he gave orders that even those who fell accidentally should be slain, in particular the net-fighters,89 so that he could watch their faces as they died.
•  When a pair of gladiators had fallen by mutually inflicted wounds, he at once had some little knives made from both their swords for his use.
• He took such pleasure in the combats with wild beasts and of those who fought at noonday,91 that he would go down to the arena at daybreak and after dismissing the people    p67for luncheon at midday, he would keep his seat and in addition to the appointed combatants, he would for trivial and hasty reasons match others, even of the carpenters, the assistants, and men of that class, if any automatic device, or pageant,92 or anything else of the kind, had not worked well.
• He even forced one of his pages93 to enter the arena just as he was, in his toga.
• But there was nothing for which he was so notorious as timidity and suspicion.
• Although in the early days of his reign, as we have said,94 he made a display of simplicity, he never ventured to go to a banquet without being surrounded by guards with lances and having his soldiers wait upon him in place of the servants; and he never visited a man who was ill without having the patient's room examined beforehand and his pillows and bed-clothing felt over and shaken out.
• Afterwards he even subjected those who came to pay their morning calls to search, sparing none the strictest examination. 2 Indeed, it was not until late, and then reluctantly, that he gave up having women and young boys and girls grossly mishandled, and the cases for pens and styles taken from every man's attendant or scribe.
• When Camillus began his revolution, he felt sure that Claudius could be intimidated without resorting to war; and in fact when he ordered the emperor in an insulting, threatening, and impudent letter to give up his throne and betake himself to a life of privacy and retirement, Claudius called together the leading men and asked their advice about complying.
• When, as I have mentioned before,95 a man with a dagger was caught near him as he was sacrificing, he    p69summoned the senate in haste by criers and loudly and tearfully bewailed his lot, saying that there was no safety for him anywhere; and for a long time he would not appear in public.
• He was so terror-stricken by unfounded reports of conspiracies that he had tried to abdicate.
• His ardent love for Messalina too was cooled, not so much by her unseemly and insulting conduct, as through fear of danger, since he believed that her paramour Silius aspired to the throne. On that occasion he made a shameful and cowardly flight to the camp,96 doing nothing all the way but ask whether his throne was secure.
• No suspicion was too trivial, nor the inspirer of it too insignificant, to drive him on to precaution and vengeance, once a slight uneasiness entered his mind.
• One of two parties to a suit, when he made his morning call, took Claudius aside, and said that he had dreamed that he was murdered by someone; then a little later pretending to recognize the assassin, he pointed out his opponent, as he was handing in his petition. The latter was immediately seized, as if caught red-handed, and hurried off to execution.
• It was in a similar way, they say, that Appius Silanus met his downfall. When Messalina and Narcissus had put their heads together to destroy him, they agreed on their parts and the latter rushed into his patron's bed-chamber before daybreak in pretended consternation, declaring that he had dreamed that Appius had made an attack on the emperor.
• Then Messalina, with assumed surprise, declared that she had had the same dream for several successive nights. A little later, as had been arranged, Appius, who had received orders the day before to come at that time, was reported to be forcing his way in, and as if were proof positive    p71of the truth of the dream, his immediate accusation and death were ordered.
• And Claudius did not hesitate to recount the whole affair to the senate next day and to thank the freedman97 for watching over his emperor's safety even in his sleep.
• He was conscious of his tendency to wrath and resentment and excused both in an edict; he also drew a distinction between them, promising that the former would be short and harmless and the latter not without cause.
• After sharply rebuking the people of Ostia, because they had sent no boats to meet him when he entered the Tiber, and in such bitter terms that he wrote that they had reduced him to the rank of a commoner, he suddenly forgave them and all but apologised.
• He repulsed with his own hand men who approached him in public at unseasonable times.
• He also banished98 a quaestor's clerk without a hearing, as well as a senator of praetorian rank, although they were blameless: the former for going too far in pleading a suit against him before he became emperor; the latter, because, when aedile, he had fined the tenants of Claudius's estates for violating the law forbidding the selling of cooked victuals, and had whipped his bailiff when he remonstrated. And with the same motive he took from the aediles the regulation of the cook-shops.99
• He did not even keep quiet about his own stupidity, but in certain brief speeches he declared that he had purposely feigned it under Gaius, because otherwise he could not have escaped alive and attained his present station. But he convinced no one, and    p73within a short time a book was published, the title of which was "The Elevation of Fools" and its thesis, that no one feigned folly.
• Among other things men have marvelled at his absent-mindedness and blindness, or to use the Greek terms, his μετεωρία and ἀβλεψία. When he had put Messalina to death, he asked shortly after taking his place at the table why the empress did not come.
• He caused many of those whom he had condemned to death to be summoned the very next day to consult with him or game with him, and sent a messenger to upbraid them for sleepy-heads when they delayed to appear.
• When he was planning his unlawful marriage with Agrippina, in every speech that he made he constantly called her his daughter and nursling, born and brought up in his arms. Just before his adoption of Nero, as if it were not bad enough to adopt a stepson when he had a grown-up son of his own, he publicly declared more than once that no one had ever been taken into the Claudian family by adoption.
• In short, he often showed such heedlessness in word and act that one would suppose that he did not know or care to whom, with whom, when, or where he was speaking. When a debate was going on about the butchers and vintners, he cried out in the house: "Now, pray, who can live without a snack," and then went on to describe the abundance of the old taverns to whom he himself used to go for wine in earlier days.
• He gave us one of his reasons for supporting a candidate for the quaestorship, that the man's father had once given him cold water when he was ill and needed it.
• When the people of Ostia made a public petition to him, he flew into a rage on the very tribunal and bawled out that he had no reason for obliging them; that he was surely free if anyone was.
• In fact every day, and almost every hour and minute, he would make such remarks as these; "What! do you take me for a Telegenius?"100 "Scold me, but hands off!" and many others of the same kind which would be unbecoming even in private citizens, not to mention a prince who lacked neither eloquence nor culture, but on the contrary constantly devoted himself to liberal pursuits.
• He began to write a history in his youth with the encouragement of Titus Livius101 and the direct help of Sulpicius Flavius.
• But when he gave his first reading to a large audience, he had difficulty in finishing, since he more than once threw cold water on his own performance.
• For at the beginning of the reading the breaking down of several benches by a fat man raised a laugh, and even after the disturbance was quieted, Claudius could not keep from recalling the incident and renewing his guffaws.
• Even while he was emperor he wrote a good deal and gave constant recitals through a professional reader.
• He began his history with the death of the dictator Caesar, but passed to a later period and took a fresh start at the end of the civil war, realising that he was not allowed to give a frank or true account of the earlier times, since he was often taken to task both by his mother and his grandmother.
• p77He left two books of the earlier history, but forty-one of the later.
• He also composed an autobiography in eight books, lacking rather in good taste than in style, as well as a "Defence of Cicero against the Writings of Asinius Gallus," a work of no little learning.
• Besides this he invented three new letters and added them to the alphabet, maintaining that they were greatly needed;104 he published a book on their theory when he was still in private life, and when he became emperor had no difficulty in bringing about their general use. These characters may still be seen in numerous books, in the daily gazette,105 and in inscriptions on public buildings.
• He gave no less attention to Greek studies, taking every occasion to declare his regard for that language and its superiority.
• To a foreigner who held forth both in Greek and in Latin he said: "Since you are ready with both our tongues"; and in commending Achaia to the senators he declared that it was a province dear to him through the association of kindred studies; while he often replied to Greek envoys in the senate in a set speech.

• Indeed he quoted many Homeric lines from the tribunal, and whenever he had punished an enemy or a conspirator, he commonly gave the tribune of the guard107 this verse when he asked for the usual watchword:  

     

  "Ward off stoutly the man whosoever is first to assail you."108
• Because of these works there was    p79added to the old Museum at Alexandria a new one called after his name, and it was provided that in the one his Etruscan History should be read each year from beginning to end, and in the other his Carthaginian, by various readers in turn, in the manner of public recitations.
• At last he even wrote historical works in Greek, twenty books of Etruscan History and eight of Carthaginian.
• Towards the end of his life he had shown some plain signs of repentance for his marriage with Agrippina and his adoption of Nero; for when his freedmen expressed their approval of a trial in which he had the day before condemned a woman for adultery, he declared that it had been his destiny also to have wives who were all unchaste, but not unpunished; and shortly afterwards meeting Britannicus, he hugged him close and urged him to grow up and receive from his father an account of all that he had done, adding in Greek, "He who dealt the wound will heal it."
• When he expressed his intention of giving Britannicus the gown of manhood, since his stature justified it though he was still young and immature, he added: "That the Roman people may at last have a genuine Caesar."110
• Not long afterwards he also made his will and sealed it with the seals of all the magistrates. But before he could go any farther, he was cut short by Agrippina, who was being accused besides of many other crimes both by her own conscience and by informers.
• That Claudius was poisoned is the general belief, but when it was done and by whom is disputed.
• Some say that it was his taster, the eunuch Halotus, as he was banqueting on the Citadel111 with the priests;    p81others that at a family dinner Agrippina served the drug to him with her own hand in mushrooms, a dish of which he was extravagantly fond.
• Reports also differ as to what followed.
•  Many say that as soon as he swallowed the poison he became speechless, and after suffering excruciating pain all night, died just before dawn.
• Some say that he first fell into a stupor, then vomited up the whole contents of his overloaded stomach, and was given a second dose, perhaps in a gruel, under pretence that he must be refreshed with food after his exhaustion, or administered in a syringe, as if he were suffering from a surfeit and required relief by that form of evacuation as well.
• His death was kept quiet until all the arrangements were made about the succession.
• Accordingly vows were offered for his safety, as if he were still ill, and the farce was kept up by bringing in comic actors, under pretence that he had asked to be entertained in that way.
• He died on the third day before the Ides of October in the consulship of Asinius Marcellus and Acilius Aviola, in the sixty-fourth year of his age and the fourteenth of his reign.
• He was buried with regal pomp and enrolled among the gods, an honour neglected and finally annulled by Nero, but later restored to him by Vespasian.
• The principal omens of his death were the following: the rise of a long-haired star, commonly called a comet; the striking of his father Drusus's tomb by lightning; and the fact that many magistrates of all ranks had died that same year.
• There are besides some indications that he himself was not unaware of his approaching end, and that he made no secret    p83of it;º for when he was appointing the consuls, he made no appointment beyond the month when he died, and on his last appearance in the senate, after earnestly exhorting his children to harmony, he begged the members to watch over the tender years of both; and in his last sitting on the tribunal he declared more than once that he had reached the end of a mortal career, although all who heard him prayed that the omen might be averted.112

243 more annotations...

• Suetonius,   The Lives of the Caesars
• The Life of Julius Caesar
• In the course of his sixteenth year1 he lost his father.
• In the next consulate, having previously been nominated priest of Jupiter,2 he broke his engagement with Cossutia, a lady of only equestrian rank, but very wealthy, who had been betrothed to him before he assumed the gown of manhood, and married Cornelia, daughter of that Cinna who was four times consul,
• by whom he afterwards had a daughter Julia; and the dictator Sulla could by no means force him to put away his wife.
• Therefore besides being punished by the loss of his priesthood,a his wife's dowry, and his family inheritances, Caesar was held to be one of the opposite party. He was accordingly forced to go into hiding, and though suffering from a severe attack of quartan ague, to change from one covert to another almost every night, and save himself from Sulla's detectives by bribes.
• But at last, through the good offices of the Vestal virgins and of his near kinsmen, Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta, he obtained forgiveness.
•  Everyone knows that when Sulla had long    p5held out against the most devoted and eminent men of his party who interceded for Caesar, and they obstinately persisted, he at last gave way and cried, either by divine inspiration or a shrewd forecast: "Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius."
• He served his first campaign in Asia on the personal staff of Marcus Thermus, governor of the province.
• Being sent by Thermus to Bithynia, to fetch a fleet, he dawdled so long at the court of Nicomedes that he was suspected of improper relations with the king; and he lent colour to this scandal by going back to Bithynia a few days after his return, with the alleged purpose of collecting a debt for a freedman, one of his dependents.
• During the rest of the campaign he enjoyed a better reputation, and at the storming of Mytilene Thermus awarded him the civic crown.3
• He served too under Servilius Isauricus in Cilicia, but only for a short time;
• for learning of the death of Sulla, and at the same time hoping to profit by a counter revolution which Marcus Lepidus was setting on foot, he hurriedly returned to Rome.
• But he did not make common cause with Lepidus, although he was offered highly favourable terms, through lack of confidence both in that leader's capacity and in the outlook, which he found less promising than he had expected.
• Then, after the civil disturbance had been quieted, he brought a charge of extortion against Cornelius Dolabella, an ex-consul who had been    p7honoured with a triumph.
• On the acquittal of Dolabella Caesar determined to withdraw to Rhodes, to escape from the ill-will which he had incurred, and at the same time to rest and have leisure to study under Apollonius Molo, the most eminent teacher of oratory of that time.
• While crossing to Rhodes, after the winter season had already begun, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacussa and remained in their custody for nearly forty days in a state of intense vexation, attended only by a single physician and two body-servants;
• for he had sent off his travelling companions and the rest of his attendants at the outset, to raise money for his ransom.
• Once he was set on shore on payment of fifty talents, he did not delay then and there to launch a fleet and pursue the departing pirates, and the moment they were in his power to inflict on them the punishment which he had often threatened when joking with them.
• He then proceeded to Rhodes, but as Mithridates was devastating the neighbouring regions, he crossed over into Asia, to avoid the appearance of inaction when the allies of the Roman people were in danger. There he levied a band of auxiliaries and drove the king's prefect from the province, thus holding the wavering and irresolute states to their allegiance.
• While serving as military tribune, the first office which was conferred on him by vote of the people after his return to Rome, he ardently supported the leaders in the attempt to re-establish the authority of the tribunes of the commons, the extent of which Sulla had curtailed.
• Furthermore, through a bill proposed by one Plotius, he effected the recall of his wife's brother Lucius Cinna, as well    p9as of the others who had taken part with Lepidus in his revolution and after the consul's death had fled to Sertorius; and he personally spoke in favour of the measure.
• When quaestor, he pronounced the customary orations from the rostra in praise of his aunt Julia and his wife Cornelia, who had both died.
• And in the eulogy of his aunt he spoke in the following terms of her paternal and maternal ancestry and that of his own father: "The family of my aunt Julia is descended by her mother from the kings, and on her father's side is akin to the immortal Gods; for the Marcii Reges (her mother's family name) go back to Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, the family of which ours is a branch, to Venus. Our stock therefore has at once the sanctity of kings, whose power is supreme among mortal men, and the claim to reverence which attaches to the Gods, who hold sway over kings themselves."
• But he afterward divorced her, suspecting her of adultery with Publius Clodius; and in fact the report that Clodius had gained access to her in woman's garb during a public religious ceremony5 was so persistent, that the senate decreed that the pollution of the sacred rites be judicially investigated.
• In place of Cornelia he took to wife Pompeia, daughter of Quintus Pompeius and granddaughter of Lucius Sulla.
• When he was there, while making the circuit of the assize-towns, to hold court under commission from the praetor, he came to Gades, and noticing a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he heaved a sigh, and as if out of patience with his own    p11incapacity in having as yet done nothing noteworthy at a time of life when Alexander had already brought the world to his feet, he straightway asked for his discharge, to grasp the first opportunity for greater enterprises at Rome.
• As quaestor it fell to his lot to serve in Further Spain.
• Furthermore, when he was dismayed by a dream the following night (for he thought that he had offered violence to his mother) the soothsayers inspired him with high hopes by their interpretation, which was: that he was destined to rule the world, since the mother whom he had seen in his power was none other than the earth, which is regarded as the common parent of all mankind.
• Departing therefore before his term was over, he went to the Latin colonies which were in a state of unrest and meditating a demand for citizenship;6 and he might have spurred them on to some rash act, had not the consuls, in anticipation of that very danger, detained there for a time the legions which had been enrolled for service in Cilicia.
• For all that he presently made a more daring attempt at Rome; for a few days before he entered upon his aedileship he was suspected of having made a conspiracy with Marcus Crassus, an ex-consul, and likewise with Publius Sulla and Lucius Autronius, who, after their election to the consulship, had been found guilty of corrupt practices.
• The design was to set upon the senate at the opening of the year and put to the sword as many as they thought good; then Crassus was to usurp the dictatorship, naming Caesar as his master of horse, and when they had organized the state according to their pleasure, the consulship was to be restored to Sulla and Autronius.
• This plot is mentioned by Tanusius Geminus in his    p13History, by Marcus Bibulus in his edicts, and by Gaius Curio the elder in his speeches.
• Cicero too seems to hint at it in a letter to Axius, where he says that Caesar in his consulship established the despotism which he had had in mind when he was aedile.
• Tanusius adds that Crassus, either conscience-stricken or moved by fear, did not appear on the day appointed for the massacre, and that therefore Caesar did not give the signal which it had been arranged that he should give;
• Not only Curio, but Marcus Actorius Naso as well declare<!-- sic --> that Caesar made another plot with Gnaeus Piso, a young man to whom the province of Spain had been assigned unasked and out of the regular order, because he was suspected of political intrigues at Rome; that they agreed to rise in revolt at the same time, Piso abroad and Caesar at Rome, aided by the Ambrani and the peoples beyond the Po; but that Piso's death brought both their designs to naught.
• and Curio says that the arrangement was that Caesar should let his toga fall from his shoulder.
• When aedile, Caesar decorated7 not only the Comitium and the Forum with its adjacent basilicas, but the Capitol as well, building temporary colonnades for the display of a part of his material.
• He exhibited combats with wild beasts and stage-plays too, both with his colleague and independently.
• The result was that Caesar alone took all the credit even for what they spent in common, and his colleague Marcus Bibulus openly said that his was the fate of Pollux: "For," said he, "just as the temple erected in the Forum to the twin brethren, bears only the name of Castor, so the joint liberality of Caesar and myself is credited to Caesar alone."
•  Caesar gave a gladiatorial show besides, but with somewhat fewer pairs of combatants than he had purposed; for the huge band which he assembled from all quarters so terrified his opponents, that a bill was passed limiting the number of gladiators which anyone was to be allowed to keep in the city.
• Having won the goodwill of the masses, Caesar made an attempt through some of the tribunes to have the charge of Egypt given him by a decree of the commons, seizing the opportunity to ask for so irregular an appointment because the citizens of Alexandria had deposed their king, who had been named by the senate an ally and friend of the Roman people, and their action was generally condemned.
• He failed however because of the opposition of the aristocratic party; wishing therefore to impair their prestige in every way he could, he restored the trophies commemorating the victories of Gaius Marius over Jugurtha and over the Cimbri and Teutoni, which Sulla had long since demolished.
• Furthermore in conducting prosecutions for murder,8 he included in the number of murderers even those who had received moneys from the public treasury during the proscriptions for bringing in the heads of Roman citizens, although they were expressly exempted by the Cornelian laws.
• He also bribed a man to bring a charge of high treason against Gaius Rabirius, who some years before had rendered conspicuous service to the senate in repressing the seditious designs of the tribune Lucius Saturninus;
• and when he had been selected by lot to sentence the accused,9 he did so with such eagerness, that when Rabirius appealed to    p17the people, nothing was so much in his favour as the bitter hostility of his judge.
• After giving up hope of the special commission,10 he announced his candidacy for the office of pontifex maximus, resorting to the most lavish bribery.
• Thinking on the enormous debt which he had thus contracted, he is said to have declared to his mother on the morning of his election, as she kissed him when he was starting for the polls, that he would never return except as pontifex.
• And in fact he so decisively defeated two very strong competitors (for they were greatly his superiors in age and rank), that he polled more votes in their tribes than were cast for both of them in all the tribes.
• When the conspiracy of Catiline was detected, and all the rest of the senate favoured inflicting the extreme penalty on those implicated in the plot, Caesar, who was now praetor elect, alone proposed that their goods be confiscated and that they be imprisoned each in a separate town.
• Nay, more, he inspired such fear in those who favoured severer measures, by picturing the hatred which the Roman commons would feel for them for all future time, that Decimus Silanus, consul elect, was not ashamed to give a milder interpretation to his proposal (since it would have been humiliating to change it) alleging that it had been understood in a harsher sense than he intended.
•  Caesar would have prevailed too, for a number had already gone over to him, including Cicero, the consul's brother, had not the address of Marcus Cato kept the wavering senate in line.
• Yet not even then did he cease to delay the proceedings, but only when an armed    p19troop of Roman knights that stood on guard about the place threatened him with death as he persisted in his headstrong opposition. They even drew their swords and made such passes at him that his friends who sat next him forsook him, while a few had much ado to shield him in their embrace or with their robes. Then, in evident fear, he not only yielded the point, but for the rest of the year kept aloof from the House.
• On the first day of his praetorship he called upon Quintus Catulus to render an account owing to the people touching the restoration of the Capitol, proposing a bill for turning over the commission to another.11 But he withdrew the measure, since he could not cope with the united opposition of the aristocrats, seeing that they had at once dropped their attendance on the newly elected consuls12 and hastily gathered in throngs, resolved on an obstinate resistance.
• Nevertheless, when Caecilius Metellus, tribune of the commons, brought forward some bills of a highly seditious nature in spite of the veto of his colleagues, Caesar abetted him and espoused his cause in the stubbornest fashion, until at last both were suspended from the exercise of their public functions by a decree of the senate.
• Yet in spite of this Caesar had the audacity to continue in office and to hold court; but when he learned that some were ready to stop him by force of arms, he dismissed his lictors, laid aside his robe of office, and slipped off privily to his house, intending to remain in retirement because of the state of the times.
•  Indeed, when the populace on the following day flocked to him quite of their own accord, and with riotous    p21demonstrations offered him their aid in recovering his position, he held them in check.
• Since this action of his was wholly unexpected, the senate, which had been hurriedly convoked to take action about that very gathering, publicly thanked him through its leading men; then summoning him to the House and lauding him in the strongest terms, they rescinded their former decree and restored him to his rank.
• He again fell into danger by being named among the accomplices of Catiline, both before the commissioner13 Novius Niger by an informer called Lucius Vettius and in the senate by Quintus Curius, who had been voted a sum of money from the public funds as the first to disclose the plans of the conspirators.
• Curius alleged that his information came directly from Catiline, while Vettius actually offered to produce a letter to Catiline in Caesar's handwriting. 2 But Caesar, thinking that such an indignity could in no wise be endured, showed by appealing to Cicero's testimony that he had of his own accord reported to the consul certain details of the plot, and thus prevented Curius from getting the reward.
• As for Vettius, after his bond was declared forfeit and his goods seized, he was roughly handled by the populace assembled before the rostra, and all but torn to pieces.
• Caesar then put him in prison, and Novius the commissioner went there too, for allowing an official of superior rank to be arraigned before his tribunal.
• Being allotted the province of Farther Spain after his praetorship, Caesar got rid of his creditors, who tried to detain him, by means of sureties and contrary both to precedent and law was    p23on his way before the provinces were provided for;14 possibly through fear of a private impeachment or perhaps to respond more promptly to the entreaties of our allies for help.
• After restoring order in his province, he made off with equal haste, and without waiting for the arrival of his successor, to sue at the same time for a triumph and the consulship.
• But inasmuch as the day for the elections had already been announced and no account be taken of Caesar's candidacy unless he entered the city as a private citizen, and since his intrigues to gain exemption from the laws met with general protest, he was forced to forgo the triumph, to avoid losing the consulship.
• Of the two other candidates for this office, Lucius Lucceius and Marcus Bibulus, Caesar joined forces with the former, making a bargain with him that since Lucceius had less influence but more funds, he should in their common name promise largess to the electors from his own pocket.
• When this became known, the aristocracy authorized Bibulus to promise the same amount, being seized with fear that Caesar would stick at nothing when he became chief magistrate, if he had a colleague who was heart and soul with him.
• Many of them contributed to the fund, and even Cato did not deny that bribery under such circumstances was for the good of the commonwealth.
• So Caesar was chosen consul with Bibulus. With the same motives the aristocracy took care that provinces of the smallest importance should be assigned to the newly elected consuls; that is, mere woods and pastures.
• Thereupon Caesar, especially incensed by this slight, by every possible attention courted the    p25goodwill of Gnaeus Pompeius, who was at odds with the senate because of its tardiness in ratifying his acts after his victory over king Mithridates.
• He also patched up a peace between Pompeius and Marcus Crassus, who had been enemies since their consulship, which had been one of constant wrangling. Then he made a compact with both of them, that no step should be taken in public affairs which did not suit any one of the three.
• Caesar's very first enactment after becoming consul was, that the proceedings both of the senate and of the people should day by day be compiled and published. He also revived a by-gone custom, that during the months when he did not have the fasces an orderly should walk before him, while the lictors followed him.
• He brought forward an agrarian law too, and when his colleague announced adverse omens,16 he resorted to arms and drove him from the Forum; and when next day Bibulus made complaint in the senate and no one could be found who ventured to make a motion, or even to express an opinion about so high-handed a proceeding (although decrees had often been passed touching less serious breaches of the peace), Caesar's conduct drove him to such a pitch of desperation, that from that time until the end of his term he did not leave his house, but merely issued proclamations announcing adverse omens.
• From that time on Caesar managed all the affairs of state alone and after his own pleasure; so that sundry witty fellows, pretending by way of jest to sign and seal testamentary documents,17 wrote "Done in the consulship of Julius and Caesar," instead of "Bibulus and Caesar," writing down    p27the same man twice, by name and by surname.

• Presently too the following verses were on everyone's lips:—  

     

  "In Caesar's year, not Bibulus', an act took place of late;   For naught do I remember done in Bibulus' consulate."
• The plain called Stellas,b which had been devoted to public uses by the men of by-gone days, and the Campanian territory, which had been reserved to pay revenues for the aid of the government, he divided without casting lots18 among twenty thousand citizens who had three or more children each.
• When the publicans asked for relief, he freed them from a third part of their obligation, and openly warned them in contracting for taxes in the future not to bid too recklessly.
• He freely granted everything else that anyone took it into his head to ask, either without opposition or by intimidating anyone who tried to object.
• Marcus Cato, who tried to delay proceedings,19 was dragged from the House by a lictor at Caesar's command and taken off to prison.
• When Lucius Lucullus was somewhat too outspoken in his opposition, he filled him with such fear of malicious prosecution,20 that Lucullus actually fell on his knees before him.
• Because Cicero, while pleading in court, deplored the times, Caesar transferred the orator's enemy Publius Clodius that very same day from the patricians to the plebeians, a thing for which Clodius had for a long time been vainly striving; and that too at the ninth hour.
• Finally taking action against all the opposition in a body, he bribed an informer to declare that he had been    p29egged on by certain men to murder Pompey, and to come out upon the rostra and name the guilty parties according to a prearranged plot. But when the informer had named one or two to no purpose and not without suspicion of double-dealing, Caesar, hopeless of the success of his over-hasty attempt, is supposed to have had him taken off by poison.
• At about the same time he took to wife Calpurnia, daughter of Lucius Piso, who was to succeed him in the consulship, and affianced his own daughter Julia to Gnaeus Pompeius, breaking a previous engagement with Servilius Caepio, although the latter had shortly before rendered him conspicuous service in his contest with Bibulus.
• And after this new alliance he began to call upon Pompey first to give his opinion in the senate, although it had been his habit to begin with Crassus, and it was the rule for the consul in calling for opinions to continue throughout the year the order which he had established on the Kalends of January.
• Backed therefore by his father-in‑law and son-in‑law, out of all the numerous provinces he made the Gauls his choice, as the most likely to enrich him and furnish suitable material for triumphs.
• At first, it is true, by the bill of Vatinius he received only Cisalpine Gaul with the addition of Illyricum; but presently he was assigned Gallia Comata as well by the senate, since the members feared that even if they should refuse it, the people would give him this also.
• Transported with joy at this success, he could not keep from boasting a few days later before a crowded house, that having gained his heart's desire to the grief and lamentation of his opponents, he would therefore from that time mount    p31on their heads;22 and when someone insultingly remarked that that would be no easy matter for any woman, he replied in the same vein that Semiramis too had been queen in Syria and the Amazons in days of old had held sway over a great part of Asia.
• When at the close of his consulship the praetors Gaius Memmius and Lucius Domitius moved an inquiry into his conduct during the previous year, Caesar laid the matter before the senate; and when they failed to take it up, and three days had been wasted in fruitless wrangling, went off to his province.
• Whereupon his quaestor was at once arraigned on several counts, as a preliminary to his own impeachment. Presently he himself too was prosecuted by Lucius Antistius, tribune of the commons, and it was only by appealing to the whole college that he contrived not to be brought to trial, on the ground that he was absent on public service.
• Then to secure himself for the future, he took great pains always to put the magistrates for the year under personal obligation, and not to aid any candidates or suffer any to be elected, save such as guaranteed to defend him in his absence. And he did not hesitate in some cases to exact an oath to keep this pledge or even a written contract.
• When however Lucius Domitius, candidate for the consulship, openly threatened to effect as consul what he had been unable to do as praetor, and to take his armies from him, Caesar compelled Pompeius and Crassus to come to Luca, a city in his province, where he prevailed on them to stand for a second consulship, to defeat Domitius;
• and he also    p33succeeded through their influence in having his term as governor of Gaul made five years longer.
• Encouraged by this, he added to the legions which he had received from the state others at his own cost, one actually composed of men of Transalpine Gaul and bearing a Gallic name too (for it was called Alauda),23 which he trained in the Roman tactics and equipped with Roman arms;
• and later on he gave every man of it citizenship.
• After that he did not let slip any pretext for war, however unjust and dangerous it might be, picking quarrels as well with allied, as with hostile and barbarous nations; so that once the senate decreed that a commission be sent to inquire into the condition of the Gallic provinces, and some even recommended that Caesar be handed over to the enemy.
• But as his enterprises prospered, thanksgivings were appointed in his honour oftener and for longer periods than for anyone before his time.
• During the nine years of his command this is in substance what he did.
• All that part of Gaul which is bounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Cévennes, and by the Rhine and Rhone rivers, a circuit of some 3,20024 miles, with the exception of some allied states which had rendered him good service, he reduced to the form of a province;
• and imposed upon it a yearly tribute of 40,000,000 sesterces.
•  He was the first Roman to build a bridge and attack the Germans beyond the Rhine; and he inflicted heavy losses upon them.
• He invaded the Britons too, a people unknown before,    p35vanquished them, and exacted moneys and hostages.
• Amid all these successes he met with adverse fortune but three times in all: in Britain, where his fleet narrowly escaped destruction in a violent storm; in Gaul, when one of his legions was routed at Gergovia; and on the borders of Germany, when his lieutenants Titurius and Aurunculeius were ambushed and slain.
• Within this same space of time he lost first his mother, then his daughter, and soon afterwards his grandchild.
• Meanwhile, as the community was aghast at the murder of Publius Clodius, the senate had voted that only one consul should be chosen, and expressly named Gnaeus Pompeius.
• When the tribunes planned to make him Pompey's colleague, Caesar urged them rather to propose to the people that he be permitted to stand for a second consulship without coming to Rome, when the term of his governorship drew near its end, to prevent his being forced for the sake of the office to leave his province prematurely and without finishing the war.
•  On the granting of this, aiming still higher and flushed with hope, he neglected nothing in the way of lavish expenditure or of favours to anyone, either in his public capacity or privately.
• He began a forum with the proceeds of his spoils, the ground for which cost more than a hundred million sesterces.
• He announced a combat of gladiators and a feast for the people in memory of his daughter, a thing quite without precedent.
• To raise the expectation of these events to the highest possible pitch, he had the material for the banquet prepared in part by his own household, although he had let contracts to the    p37markets as well.
• He gave orders that whenever famous gladiators fought without winning the favour of the people,26 they should be rescued by force and kept for him.
• He had the novices trained, not in a gladiatorial school by professionals, but in private houses by Roman knights and even by senators who were skilled in arms, earnestly beseeching them, as is shown by his own letters, to give the recruits individual attention and personally direct their exercises.
• He doubled the pay of the legions for all time.
• Whenever grain was plentiful, he distributed it to them without stint or measure, and now and then gave each man a slave from among the captives.
• Moreover, to retain his relationship and friendship with Pompey, Caesar offered him his sister's granddaughter Octavia in marriage, although she was already the wife of Gaius Marcellus, and asked for the hand of Pompey's daughter, who was promised to Faustus Sulla.
• When he had put all Pompey's friends under obligation, as well as the greater part of the senate, through loans made without interest or at a low rate, he lavished gifts on men of all other classes, both those whom he invited to accept his bounty and those who applied to him unasked, including even freedmen and slaves who were special favourites of their masters or patrons.
• In short, he was the sole and ever ready help of all who were in legal difficulties or in debt and of young spendthrifts, excepting only those whose burden of guilt or poverty was so heavy, or who were so given up to riotous living, that even he could not save them; and to these he declared in the plainest terms that what they needed was a civil war.
• He took no less pains to win the devotion of princes and provinces all over the world, offering prisoners to some by the thousand as a gift, and sending auxiliary troops to the aid of others whenever they wished, and as often as they wished, without the sanction of the senate or people, besides adorning the principal cities of Asia and Greece with magnificent public works, as well as those of Italy and the provinces of Gaul and Spain.
• At last, when all were thunder-struck at his actions and wondered what their purpose could be, the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, after first making proclamation that he purposed to bring before the senate a matter of the highest public moment, proposed that a successor to Caesar be appointed before the end of his term, on the ground that the war was ended, peace was established, and the victorious army ought to be disbanded;
• also that no account be taken of Caesar at the elections, unless he were present, since Pompey's subsequent action27 had not annulled the decree of the people.
• And it was true that when Pompey proposed a bill touching the privileges of officials, in the clause whereby he debarred absentees from candidacy for office he forgot to make a special exception in Caesar's case, and did not correct the oversight until the law had been inscribed on a tablet of bronze and deposited in the treasury.
• Not content with depriving Caesar of his provinces and his privilege, Marcellus also moved that the colonists whom Caesar had settled in Novum Comum by the bill of Vatinius should lose their citizenship, on the ground that it had been given from political motives and was not authorized by the law.
• Greatly troubled by these measures, and thinking, as they say he was often heard to remark, that now that he was the leading man of the state, it was harder to push him down from the first place to the second than it would be from the second to the lowest, Caesar stoutly resisted Marcellus, partly through vetoes of the tribunes and partly through the other consul, Servius Sulpicius.
• When next year Gaius Marcellus, who had succeeded his cousin Marcus as consul, tried the same thing, Caesar by a heavy bribe secured the support of the other consul, Aemilius Paulus, and of Gaius Curio, the most reckless of the tribunes.
•  But seeing that everything was being pushed most persistently, and that even the consuls elect were among the opposition, he sent a written appeal to the senate, not to take from him the privilege which the people had granted, or else to compel the others in command of armies to resign also; feeling sure, it was thought, that he could more readily muster his veterans as soon as he wished, than Pompey his newly levied troops.
• He further proposed a compromise to his opponents, that after giving up eight legions and Transalpine Gaul, he be allowed to keep two legions and Cisalpine Gaul, or at least one legion and Illyricum, until he was elected consul.
• But when the senate declined to interfere, and his opponents declared that they would accept no compromise in a matter affecting the public welfare, he crossed to Hither Gaul, and after holding all the assizes, halted at Ravenna, intending to resort to war if the senate took any drastic action against the tribunes of the commons who interposed vetoes in his behalf.
• Now this was his excuse    p43for the civil war, but it is believed that he had other motives.
• Gnaeus Pompeius used to declare that since Caesar's own means were not sufficient to complete the works which he had planned, nor to do all that he had led the people to expect on his return, he desired a state of general unrest and turmoil.
• Others say that he dreaded the necessity of rendering an account for what he had done in his first consulship contrary to the auspices and the laws, and regardless of vetoes; for Marcus Cato often declared, and took oath too, that he would impeach Caesar the moment he had disbanded his army.
• It was openly said too that if he was out of office on his return, he would be obliged, like Milo, to make his defence in a court hedged about by armed men.
• The latter opinion is the more credible one in view of the assertion of Asinius Pollio, that when Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus saw his enemies slain or in flight, he said, word for word: "They would have it so. Even I, Gaius Caesar, after so many great deeds, should have been found guilty, if I had not turned to my army for help."
• Some think that habit had given him a love of power, and that weighing the strength of his adversaries against his own, he grasped the opportunity of usurping the despotism which had been his heart's desire from early youth.

• Cicero too was seemingly of this opinion, when he wrote in the third book of his De Officiis29 that Caesar ever had upon his lips these lines of Euripides,30 of which Cicero himself adds a version:  

     

  "If wrong may e'er be right, for a throne's sake   Were wrong most right:— be God in all else feared."31
• Accordingly, when word came that the veto of the tribunes had been set aside and they themselves had left the city, he at once sent on a few cohorts with all secrecy, and then, to disarm suspicion, concealed his purpose by appearing at a public show inspecting the plans of a gladiatorial school which he intended building, and joining as usual in a banquet with a large company.
• It was not until after sunset that he set out very privily with a small company, taking the mules from a bakeshop hard by and harnessing them to a carriage; and when his lights went out and he lost his way, he was astray for some time, but at last found a guide at dawn and got back to the road on foot by narrow by-paths.
• Then, overtaking his cohorts at the river Rubicon, which was the boundary of his province, he paused for a while, and realising what a step he was taking, he turned to those about him and said: "Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword."
• On a sudden there appeared hard by a being of wondrous stature and beauty, who sat and played upon a reed; and when not only the shepherds flocked to hear him, but many of the soldiers left their posts, and among them some of the trumpeters, the apparition snatched a trumpet from one of them, rushed to the river, and sounding the war-note with mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank.
• As he stood in doubt, this sign was given him.
• Then Caesar cried: "Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast," said he.
• Accordingly, crossing with his army, and welcoming the tribunes of the commons, who had    p47come to him after being driven from Rome, he harangued the soldiers with tears, and rending his robe from his breast besought their faithful service. It is even thought that he promised every man a knight's estate, but that came of a misunderstanding: for since he often pointed to the finger of his left hand as he addressed them and urged them on, declaring that to satisfy all those who helped him to defend his honour he would gladly tear this very ring from his hand, those on the edge of the assembly, who could see him better than they could hear his words, assumed that he said what his gesture seemed to mean; and so the report went about that he had promised them the right of the ring and four hundred thousand sesterces32 as well.
• He overran Umbria, Picenum, and Etruria, took prisoner Lucius Domitius, who had been irregularly33 named his successor, and was holding Corfinium with a garrison, let him go free, and then proceeded along the Adriatic to Brundisium, where Pompey and the consuls had taken refuge, intending to cross the sea as soon as might be.
• The sum total of his movements after that is, in their order, as follows:
• After trying by every kind of hindrance to prevent their sailing, he marched off to Rome, and after calling the senate together to discuss public business, went to attack Pompey's strongest forces, which were in Spain under command of three of his lieutenants — Marcus Petreius, Lucius Afranius, and Marcus Varro — saying to his friends before he left "I go to meet an army without a leader, and I shall return to meet a leader without an army."
• And in fact, though his advance was delayed by the siege of Massilia, which had shut    p49its gates against him, and by extreme scarcity of supplies, he nevertheless quickly gained a complete victory.
• Returning thence to Rome, he crossed into Macedonia, and after blockading Pompey for almost four months behind mighty ramparts, finally routed him in the battle at Pharsalus, followed him in his flight to Alexandria,
• and when he learned that his rival had been slain, made war on King Ptolemy, whom he perceived to be plotting against his own safety as well; a war in truth of great difficulty, convenient neither in time nor place, but carried on during the winter season, within the walls of a well-provisioned and crafty foeman, while Caesar himself was without supplies of any kind and ill-prepared.
• Victor in spite of all, he turned over the rule of Egypt to Cleopatra and her younger brother, fearing that if he made a province of it, it might one day under a headstrong governor be a source of revolution.
•  From Alexandria he crossed to Syria, and from there went to Pontus, spurred on by the news that Pharnaces, son of Mithridates the Great, had taken advantage of the situation to make war, and was already flushed with numerous successes;
• but Caesar vanquished him in a single battle within five days after his arrival and four hours after getting sight of him, often remarking on Pompey's good luck in gaining his principal fame as a general by victories over such feeble foemen.
• Then he overcame Scipio and Juba, who were patching up the remnants of their party in Africa, and the sons of Pompey in Spain.
• In all the civil wars he suffered not a single disaster except through his lieutenants, of    p51whom Gaius Curio perished in Africa, Gaius Antonius fell into the hands of the enemy in Illyricum, Publius Dolabella lost a fleet also off Illyricum, and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus an army in Pontus.
• Personally he always fought with the utmost success, and the issue was never even in doubt save twice: once at Dyrrachium, where he was put to flight, and said of Pompey, who failed to follow up his success, that he did not know how to use a victory; again in Spain, in the final struggle, when, believing the battle lost, he actually thought of suicide.
• Having ended the wars, he celebrated five triumphs, four in a single month, but at intervals of a few days, after vanquishing Scipio; and another on defeating Pompey's sons.
• The first and most splendid was the Gallic triumph, the next the Alexandrian, then the Pontic, after that the African, and finally the Spanish, each differing from the rest in its equipment and display of spoils.
• As he rode through the •Velabrum on the day of his Gallic triumph, the axle of his chariot broke, and he was all but thrown out; and he mounted the Capitol by torchlight, with forty elephants bearing lamps on his right and his left.
• In his Pontic triumph he displayed among the show-pieces of the procession an inscription of but three words, "I came, I saw, I conquered," not indicating the events of the war, as the others did, but the speed with which it was finished.
• To each and every foot-soldier of his veteran legions he gave twenty-four thousand sesterces by way of booty, over and above the two thousand apiece which he had paid them at the beginning of the civil strife.
• He also assigned them lands, but    p53not side by side, to avoid dispossessing any of the former owners.
• To every man of the people, besides ten pecks of grain and the same number of pounds of oil,c he distributed the three hundred sesterces which he had promised at first, and one hundred apiece to boot because of the delay.
•  He also remitted a year's rent in Rome to tenants who paid two thousand sesterces or less, and in Italy up to five hundred sesterces.
• He added a banquet and a dole of meat, and after his Spanish victory two dinners;34 for deeming that the former of these had not been served with a liberality creditable to his generosity, he gave another five days later on a most lavish scale.
• He gave entertainments of divers kinds: a combat of gladiators and also stage-plays in every ward all over the city, performed too by actors of all languages, as well as races in the circus, athletic contests, and a sham sea-fight.
• In the gladiatorial contest in the Forum Furius Leptinus, a man of praetorian stock, and Quintus Calpenus, a former senator and pleader at the bar, fought to a finish.
• A Pyrrhic dance was performed by the sons of the princes of Asia and Bithynia.
• During the plays Decimus Laberius, a Roman knight, acted a farce of his own composition, and having been presented with five hundred thousand sesterces and a gold ring,35 passed from the stage through the orchestra and took his place in the fourteen rows.
• For the races the circus was lengthened at either end and a broad canal37 was dug all about it; then young men of the highest rank drove four-horse and two-horse chariots and rode pairs of horses, vaulting from one to the other.
• The game called Troy was performed by two troops, of    p55younger and of older boys.
• Combats with wild beasts were presented on five successive days, and last of all there was a battle between two opposing armies, in which five hundred foot-soldiers, twenty elephants, and thirty horsemen engaged on each side.
• To make room for this, the goals were taken down and in their place two camps were pitched over against each other.
• The athletic competitions lasted for three days in a temporary stadium built for the purpose in the region of the Campus Martius.
•  For the naval battle a pool was dug in the lesser Codeta and there was a contest of ships of two, three, and four banks of oars, belonging to the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, manned by a large force of fighting men.
• Such a throng flocked to all these shows from every quarter, that many strangers had to lodge in tents pitched in streets or along the roads, and the press was often such that many were crushed to death, including two senators.
• Then turning his attention to the reorganisation of the state, he reformed the calendar, which the negligence of the pontiffs had long since so disordered, through their privilege of adding months or days at pleasure, that the harvest festivals did not come in summer nor those of the vintage in the autumn;
• and he adjusted the year to the sun's course by making it consist of three hundred and sixty-five days, abolishing the intercalary month,38 and adding one day every fourth year.
•  Furthermore, that the correct reckoning of seasons might begin with the next Kalends of January, he inserted two other months between those of November and December; hence the year in which these arrangements were made was one of fifteen months,    p57including the intercalary month, which belonged to that year according to the former custom.
• He filled the vacancies in the senate, enrolled additional patricians, and increased the number of praetors, aediles, and quaestors, as well as of the minor officials; he reinstated those who had been degraded by official action of the censors or found guilty of bribery by verdict of the jurors.
• He shared the elections with the people on this basis: that except in the case of the consulship, half of the magistrates should be appointed by the people's choice, while the rest should be those whom he had personally nominated.
• And these he announced in brief notes like the following, circulated in each tribe: "Caesar the Dictator to this or that tribe. I commend to you so and so, to hold their positions by your votes."
• He admitted to office even the sons of those who had been proscribed.
• He limited the right of serving as jurors to two classes, the equestrian and senatorial orders, disqualifying the third class, the tribunes of the treasury.39
• He made the enumeration of the people40 neither in the usual manner nor place, but from street to street aided by the owners of blocks of houses, and reduced the number of those who received grain at public expense from three hundred and twenty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand.
• And to prevent the calling of additional meetings at any future time for purposes of enrolment, he provided that the places of such as died should be filled each year by the praetors from those who were not on the list.
• Moreover, to keep up the population of the city, depleted as it was by the assignment of    p59eighty thousand citizens to colonies across the sea, he made a law that no citizen older than twenty or younger than forty, who was not detained by service in the army, should be absent from Italy for more than three successive years;
• and that those who made a business of grazing should have among their herdsmen at least one-third who were men of free birth.
• that no senator's son should go abroad except as the companion of a magistrate or on his staff;
• He conferred citizenship on all who practised medicine at Rome, and on all teachers of the liberal arts, to make them more desirous of living in the city and to induce others to resort to it.
• As to debts, he disappointed those who looked for their cancellation, which was often agitated, but finally decreed that the debtors should satisfy their creditors according to a valuation of their possessions at the price what they had paid for them before the civil war, deducting from the principal whatever interest had been paid in cash or pledged through bankers; an arrangement which wiped out about a fourth part of their indebtedness.
• He dissolved all guilds, except those of ancient foundation.
• He increased the penalties for crimes; and inasmuch as the rich involved themselves in guilt with less hesitation because they merely suffered exile, without any loss of property, he punished murderers of freemen41 by the confiscation of all their goods, as Cicero writes, and others by the loss of one-half.
• He administered justice with the utmost conscientiousness and strictness.
• Those convicted of extortion he even dismissed from the senatorial order.
• He annulled the marriage of an ex-praetor, who had married a woman the very day after her    p61divorce, although there was no suspicion of adultery.
• He denied the use of litters and the wearing of scarlet robes or pearls to all except those of a designated position and age, and on set days.
• He imposed duties on foreign wares.
•  In particular he enforced the laws against extravagance, setting watchmen in various parts of the market, to seize and bring to him dainties which were exposed for sale in violation of the law; and sometimes he sent his lictors and soldiers to take from a dining-room any articles which had escaped the vigilance of his watchmen, even after they had been served.
• In particular, for the adornment and convenience of the city, also for the protection and extension of the Empire, he formed more projects and more extensive ones every day: first of all, to rear a temple of Mars, greater than any in existence, filling up and levelling the pool in which he had exhibited the sea-fight,
• and to build a theatre of vast size, sloping down from the Tarpeian rock;
• to reduce the civil code to fixed limits, and of the vast and prolix mass of statutes to include only the best and most essential in a limited number of volumes;
• to open to the public the greatest possible libraries of Greek and Latin books, assigning to Marcus Varro the charge of procuring and classifying them;
• to drain the Pomptine marshes;
• to let out the water from Lake Fucinus;
• to make a highway from the Adriatic across the summit of the Apennines as far as the Tiber;
• to cut a canal through the Isthmus;
• to check the Dacians, who had poured into Pontus and Thrace;
• then to make war on the Parthians by way of Lesser Armenia, but not to risk a battle with them until he had first tested their mettle.
• But before I speak of that, it will not be amiss to describe briefly his personal appearance, his dress, his mode of life, and his character, as well as his conduct in civil and military life.
• All these enterprises and plans were cut short by his death.
• He is said to have been tall of stature with a fair complexion, shapely limbs, a somewhat full face, and keen black eyes;
• sound of health, except that towards the end he was subject to sudden fainting fits and to nightmare as well.
• He was twice attacked by the falling sickness42 during his campaigns.
• He was somewhat overnice in the care of his person, being not only carefully trimmed and shaved, but even having superfluous hair plucked out, as some have charged; while his baldness was a disfigurement would troubled him greatly, since he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors.
• Because of it he used to comb forward his scanty locks from the crown of his head, and of all the honours voted him by the senate and people there was none which he received or made use of more gladly than the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath at all times.
• They say, too, that he was remarkable in his dress; that he wore a senator's tunic43 with fringed sleeves reaching to the wrist, and always had a girdle44 over it, though rather a loose one; and this, they say, was the occasion of Sulla's mot, when he often warned the nobles to keep an eye on the ill-girt boy.
• Many have written that he was very fond of elegance and luxury;
• He lived at first in the •Subura in a modest house, but after he became pontifex maximus, in the official residence on the •Sacred Way.
• that having laid the foundations of a country-house on his estate at Nemi and finished it at great cost, he tore it all down because it did not suit him in every particular, although at the time he was still poor and heavily in debt;
• and that he carried tesselated<!-- sic --> and mosaic floorsd about with him on his campaigns.
• They say that he was led to invade Britain by the hope of getting pearls, and that in comparing their size he sometimes weighed them with his own hand;
• that he was always a most enthusiastic collector of gems, carvings, statues, and pictures by early artists;
• also of slaves of exceptional figure and training at enormous prices, of which he himself was so ashamed that he forbade their entry in his accounts.
• It is further reported that in the provinces he gave banquets constantly in two dining-halls, in one of which his officers or Greek companions, in the other Roman civilians and the more distinguished of the provincials reclined at table.
• He was so punctilious and strict in the management of his household, in small matters as well as in those of greater importance, that he put his baker in irons for serving him with one kind of bread and his guests with another;
• and he inflicted capital punishment on a favourite freedman for adultery with the wife of a Roman knight, although no complaint was made against him.

• There was no stain on his reputation for    p67chastity except his intimacy with King Nicomedes, but that was a deep and lasting reproach, which laid him open to insults from every quarter. I say nothing of the notorious lines of Licinius Calvus:  

     

  "Whate'er Bithynia had, and Caesar's paramour."
• I pass over, too, the invectives of Dolabella and the elder Curio, in which Dolabella calls him "the queen's rival, the inner partner of the royal couch," and Curio, "the brothel of Nicomedes and the stew of Bithynia."
• I take no account of the edicts of Bibulus, in which he posted his colleague as "the queen of Bithynia," saying that "of yore he was enamoured of a king, but now of a king's estate."
• At this same time, so Marcus Brutus declares, one Octavius, a man whose disordered mind made him somewhat free with his tongue, after saluting Pompey as "king" in a crowded assembly, greeted Caesar as "queen."
• But Gaius Memmius makes the direct charge that he acted as cup-bearer to Nicomedes with the rest of his wantons at a large dinner-party, and that among the guests were some merchants from Rome, whose names Memmius gives.
• Cicero, indeed, is not content with having written in sundry letters that Caesar was led by the king's attendants to the royal apartments, that he lay on a golden couch arrayed in purple, and that the virginity of this son of Venus was lost in Bithynia;
• but when Caesar was once addressing the senate in defence of Nysa, daughter of Nicomedes, and was enumerating his obligations to the king, Cicero cried: "No more of that, pray, for it is well known what he gave you, and what you gave him in turn."

•  Finally, in his Gallic triumph his soldiers, among the bantering    p69songs which are usually sung by those who followed the chariot, shouted these lines, which became a by-word:  

     

  "All the Gauls did Caesar vanquish, Nicomedes vanquished him;   Lo! now Caesar rides in triumph, victor over all the Gauls,   Nicomedes does not triumph, who subdued the conqueror."
• That he was unbridled and extravagant in his intrigues is the general opinion, and that he seduced many illustrious women, among them Postumia, wife of Servius Sulpicius, Lollia, wife of Aulus Gabinius, Tertulla, wife of Marcus Crassus, and even Gnaeus Pompey's wife Mucia.
• At all events there is no doubt that Pompey was taken to task by the elder and the younger Curio, as well as by many others, because through a desire for power he had afterwards married the daughter of a man on whose account he divorced a wife who had borne him three children, and whom he had often referred to with a groan as an Aegisthus.
• But beyond all others Caesar loved Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus, for whom in his first consulship he bought a pearl costing six million sesterces.
• During the civil war, too, besides other presents, he knocked down some fine estates to her in a public auction at a nominal price, and when some expressed their surprise at the low figure, Cicero wittily remarked: "It's a better bargain than you think, for there is a third off."45 And in fact it was thought that Servilia was prostituting her own daughter Tertia to Caesar.

• That he did not refrain from intrigues in the provinces is shown in particular by this couplet, which was also shouted by the soldiers in his Gallic triumph:  

     

  "Men of Rome, keep close to your consorts, here's a bald adulterer.   Gold in Gaul you spent in dalliance, which you borrowed here in Rome."
• He had love affairs with queens too, including Eunoe the Moor, wife of Bogudes, on whom, as well as on her husband, he bestowed many splendid presents, as Naso writes;
• but above all with Cleopatra, with whom he often feasted until daybreak, and he would have gone through Egypt with her in her state-barge almost to Aethiopia, had not his soldiers refused to follow him.
• Finally he called her to Rome and did not let her leave until he had ladened her with high honours and rich gifts, and he allowed her to give his name to the child which she bore.
•  In fact, according to certain Greek writers, this child was very like Caesar in looks and carriage.
• Mark Antony declared to the senate that Caesar had really acknowledged the boy, and that Gaius Matius, Gaius Oppius, and other friends of Caesar knew this.
• Of these Gaius Oppius, as if admitting that the situation required apology and defence, published a book, to prove that the child whom Cleopatra fathered on Caesar was not his.
• Helvius Cinna, tribune of the commons, admitted to several that he had a bill drawn up in due form, which Caesar had ordered him to propose to the people in his absence, making it lawful for Caesar to marry what wives he wished, and as many as he wished, "for the purpose of begetting    p73children."
• But to remove all doubt that he had an evil reputation both for shameless vice and for adultery, I have only to add that the elder Curio in one of his speeches calls him "every woman's man and every man's woman."
• That he drank very little wine not even his enemies denied.
• There is a saying of Marcus Cato that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the state when sober.
• Even in the matter of food Gaius Oppius tells us that he was so indifferent, that once when his host served stale oil instead of fresh, and the other guests would have none of it, Caesar partook even more plentifully than usual, not to seem to charge his host with carelessness or lack of manners.
• for as certain man have declared in their memoirs, when he was proconsul in Spain,48 he not only begged money from the allies, to help pay his debts, but also attacked and sacked some towns of the Lusitanians although they did not refuse his terms and opened their gates to him on his arrival.
• Neither when in command of armies nor as a magistrate at Rome did he show a scrupulous integrity;
• In Gaul he pillaged shrines and temples of the gods filled with offerings, and oftener sacked towns for the sake of plunder than for any fault.
• In consequence he had more gold than he knew what to do with, and offered it for sale throughout Italy and the provinces at the rate of three thousand sesterces the pound.
• In his first consulship he stole three thousand pounds of gold from the Capitol, replacing it with the same weight of gilded bronze.
• He made alliances and thrones a matter of barter, for he extorted from Ptolemy alone in his own name    p75and that of Pompey nearly six thousand talents, while later on he met the heavy expenses of the civil wars and of his triumphs and entertainments by the most bare-faced pillage and sacrilege.
• After his accusation of Dolabella, he was without question numbered with the leading advocates. At all events when Cicero reviews the orators in his Brutus,50 he says that he does not see to whom Caesar ought to yield the palm, declaring that his style is elegant as well as transparent, even grand and in a sense noble.f
• In eloquence and in the art of war he either equalled or surpassed the fame of their most eminent representatives.
• Again in a letter to Cornelius Nepos he writes thus of Caesar: 2 "Come now, what orator would you rank above him of those who have devoted themselves to nothing else? Who has cleverer or more frequent epigrams? Who is either more picturesque or more choice in diction?"
• He appears, at least in his youth, to have imitated the manner of Caesar Strabo, from whose speech entitled "For the Sardinians" he actually transferred some passages word for word to a trial address51 of his own.
• He is said to have delivered himself in a high-pitched voice with impassioned action and gestures, which were not without grace.
• He left several speeches, including some which are attributed to him on insufficient evidence.
• Augustus had good reason to think that the speech "For Quintus Metellus" was rather taken down by shorthand writers who could not keep pace with his delivery, than published by Caesar himself; for in some copies I find that even the title is not "For Metellus," but, "Which he wrote for Metellus," although the discourse purports to be from Caesar's lips, defending Metellus and himself    p77against the charges of their common detractors.
• Augustus also questions the authenticity of the address "To His Soldiers in Spain," although there are two sections of it, one purporting to have been spoken at the first battle, the other at the second, when Asinius Pollio writes that because of the sudden onslaught of the enemy he actually did not have time to make an harangue.
• for the author of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars is unknown; some think it was Oppius, others Hirtius, who also supplied the final book of the Gallic War, which Caesar left unwritten.
• He left memoirs too of his deeds in the Gallic war and in the civil strife with Pompey;
• With regard to Caesar's memoirs Cicero, also in the Brutus52 speaks in the following terms: 2 "He wrote memoirs which deserve the highest praise; they are naked in their simplicity, straightforward yet graceful, stripped of all rhetorical adornment, as of a garment; but while his purpose was to supply material to others, on which those who wished to write history might draw, he haply gratified silly folk, who will try to use the curling-irons on his narrative, but he has kept men of any sense from touching the subject."
• Of these same memoirs Hirtius uses this emphatic language:53 "They are so highly rated in the judgment of all men, that he seems to have deprived writers of an opportunity, rather than given them one; yet our admiration for this feat is greater than that of others; for they know how well and faultlessly he wrote, while we know besides how easily and rapidly he finished his task."
•  Asinius Pollio thinks that they were put together somewhat carelessly and without strict regard for truth; since in many cases Caesar was too    p79ready to believe the accounts which others gave of their actions, and gave a perverted account of his own, either designedly or perhaps from forgetfulness; and he thinks that he intended to rewrite and revise them.
• He left besides a work in two volumes "On Analogy," the same number of "Speeches criticising Cato," in addition to a poem, entitled "The Journey."
• He wrote the first of these works while crossing the Alps and returning to his army from Hither Gaul, where he had held the assizes; the second about the time of the battle of Munda, and the third in the course of a twenty-four days' journey from Rome to Farther Spain.
• Some letters of his to the senate are also preserved, and he seems to have been the first to reduce such documents to pages and the form of a note-book,54 whereas previously consuls and generals sent their reports written right across the sheet.
• There are also letters of his to Cicero, as well as to his intimates on private affairs, and in the latter, if he had anything confidential to say, he wrote it in cipher, that is, by so changing the order of the letters of the alphabet, that not a word could be made out. If anyone wishes to decipher these, and get at their meaning, he must substitute the fourth letter of the alphabet, namely D, for A, and so with the others.
• We also have mention of certain writings of his boyhood and early youth, such as the "Praises of Hercules," a tragedy "Oedipus," and a "Collection of Apophthegms"; but Augustus forbade the publication of all these minor works in a very brief and frank letter sent to Pompeius Macer, whom he had selected to set his libraries in order.
• On the march he headed his army, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, bareheaded both in the heat of the sun and in rain.
• He was highly skilled in arms and horsemanship, and of incredible powers of endurance.
• He covered great distances with incredible speed, making a hundred miles a day in a hired carriage and with little baggage, swimming the rivers which barred his path or crossing them on inflated skins, and very often arriving before the messengers sent to announce his coming.
• In the conduct of his campaigns it is a question whether he was more cautious or more daring, for he never led his army where ambuscades were possible without carefully reconnoitring the country, and he did not cross to Britain without making personal inquiries55 about the harbours, the course, and the approach to the island.
• But on the other hand, when news came that his camp in Germany was beleaguered, he made his way to his men through the enemies' pickets, disguised as a Gaul.
• He crossed from Brundisium to Dyrrachium in winter time, running the blockade of the enemy's fleets; and when the troops which he had ordered to follow him delayed to do so, and he had sent to fetch them many times in vain, at last in secret and alone he boarded a small boat at night with his head muffled up; and he did not reveal who he was, or suffer the helmsman to give way to the gale blowing in their teeth, until he was all but overwhelmed by the waves.
• Though the victim escaped as he was offering sacrifice, he did not put off his expedition against Scipio and Juba. Even    p83when he had a fall as he disembarked, he gave the omen a favourable turn by crying: "I hold thee fast, Africa."
• No regard for religion ever turned him from any undertaking, or even delayed him.
• Furthermore, to make the prophecies ridiculous which declared that the stock of the Scipios was fated to be fortunate and invincible in that province, he kept with him in camp a contemptible fellow belonging to the Cornelian family, to whom the nickname Salvito56 had been given as a reproach for his manner of life.
• He joined battle, not only after planning his movements in advance but on a sudden opportunity, often immediately at the end of a march, and sometimes in the foulest weather, when one would least expect him to make a move.
• It was not until his later years that he became slower to engage, through a conviction that the oftener he had been victor, the less he ought to tempt fate, and that he could not possibly gain as much by success as he might lose by defeat.
• When the issue was doubtful, he used to send away the horses, and his own among the first, to impose upon the troops the greater necessity of standing their ground by taking away that aid to flight.
• He never put his enemy to flight without also driving him from his camp, thus giving him no respite in his panic.
• This horse was foaled on his own place, and since the soothsayers had declared that it foretold the rule of the world for its master, he reared it with the greatest care, and was the first to mount it, for it would endure no other rider. Afterwards, too, he dedicated a statue of it before the temple of Venus Genetrix.
• He rode a remarkable horse, too, with feet that were almost human; for its hoofs were cloven in such a way as to look like toes.
• When his army gave way, he often rallied it single-handed, planting himself in the way of the fleeing men, laying hold of them one by one, and even catching them by the throat and forcing them to face the enemy;
• that, too, when they were in such a panic that an eagle-bearer made a pass at him with the point57 as he tried to stop him, while another left the standard in Caesar's hand when he would hold him back.
• His presence of mind was no less renowned, and the instances of it will appear even more striking.
• After the battle of Pharsalus, when he had sent on his troops and was crossing the strait of the Hellespont in a small passenger boat, he met Lucius Cassius, of the hostile party, with ten armoured ships,58 and made no attempt to escape, but went to meet Cassius and actually urged him to surrender; and Cassius sued for mercy and was taken on board.
• At Alexandria, while assaulting a bridge, he was forced by a sudden sally of the enemy to take to a small skiff; when many others threw themselves into the same boat, he plunged into the sea, and after swimming for •two hundred paces, got away to the nearest ship, holding up his left hand all the way, so as not to wet some papers which he was carrying, and dragging his cloak after him with his teeth, to keep the enemy from getting it as a trophy.
• He valued his soldiers neither for their personal character nor for their fortune, but solely for their prowess, and he treated them with equal strictness and indulgence; for he did not curb them everywhere and at all times, but only in the presence    p87of the enemy.
• Then he required the strictest discipline, not announcing the time of a march or a battle, but keeping them ready and alert to be led on a sudden at any moment wheresoever he might wish.
• And warning them every now and then that they must keep close watch on him, he would steal away suddenly by day or night and make a longer march than usual, to tire out those who were tardy in following.
• He often called them out even when there was no occasion for it, especially on rainy days and holidays.
• When they were in a panic through reports about the enemy's numbers, he used to rouse their courage not by denying or discounting the rumours, but by falsely exaggerating the true danger. For instance, when the anticipation of Juba's coming filled them with terror, he called the soldiers together and said: "Let me tell you that within the next few days the king will be here with ten legions, thirty thousand horsemen, a hundred thousand light-armed troops, and three hundred elephants. Therefore some of you may as well cease to ask further questions or make surmises and may rather believe me, since I know all about it. Otherwise, I shall surely have them shipped on some worn out craft and carried off to whatever lands the wind may blow them."
• He did not take notice of all their offences or punish them by rule, but he kept a sharp look out for deserters and mutineers, and chastised them most severely, shutting his eyes to other faults.
• Sometimes, too, after a great victory he relieved of all duties and gave them full licence to revel, being in the habit of boasting that his soldiers could fight well even when reeking of perfumes.
•  In the assembly he addressed them not as "soldiers," but by the more flattering term "comrades," and he kept them in fine trim, furnishing them with arms inlaid with silver and gold, both for show and to make them hold the faster to them in battle, through fear of the greatness of the loss.
• Such was his love for them that when he heard of the disaster to Titurius, he let his hair and beard grow long, and would not cut them until he had taken vengeance.
• When he began the civil war, every centurion of each legion proposed to supply a horseman from his own savings, and the soldiers one and all offered their service without pay and without rations, the richer assuming the care of the poorer.
• In this way he made them most devoted to his interests as well as most valiant.
• Throughout the long struggle not one deserted and many of them, on being taken prisoner, refused to accept their lives, when offered them on the condition of consenting to serve against Caesar.
• They bore hunger and other hardships, both when in a state of siege and when besieging others, with such fortitude, that when Pompey saw in the works at Dyrrachium a kind of bread made of herbs, on which they were living, he said that he was fighting wild beasts;
• and he gave orders that it be put out of sight quickly and shown to none of his men, for fear that the endurance and resolution of the foe would break their spirit.
• How valiantly they fought is shown by the fact that when they suffered their sole defeat before Dyrrachium, they insisted on being punished, and their commander felt called upon rather to console them than to chastise them.
• In the other battles they    p91overcame with ease countless forces of the enemy, though decidedly fewer in number themselves.
• Indeed one cohort of the sixth legion, when set to defend a redoubt, kept four legions of Pompey at bay for several hours, though almost all were wounded by the enemy's showers of arrows, of which a hundred and thirty thousand were picked up within the ramparts.
•  And no wonder, when one thinks of the deeds of individual soldiers, either of Cassius Scaeva the centurion, or of Gaius Acilius of the rank and file, not to mention others.
• Scaeva, with one eye gone, his thigh and shoulder wounded, and his shield bored through in a hundred and twenty places, continued to guard the gate of a fortress put in his charge.
• Acilius in the sea-fight at Massilia grasped the stern of one of the enemy's ships, and when his right hand was lopped off, rivalling the famous exploit of the Greek hero Cynegirus, boarded the ship and drove the enemy before him with the boss of his shield.
• They did not mutiny once during the ten years of the Gallic war; in the civil wars they did so now and then, but quickly resumed their duty, not so much owing to any indulgence of their general as to his authority. For he never gave way to them when they were insubordinate, but always boldly faced them, discharging the entire ninth legion in disgrace before Placentia, though Pompey was still in the field, reinstating them unwillingly and only after many abject entreaties, and insisting on punishing the ringleaders.
• Again at Rome, when the men of the Tenth clamoured for their discharge and rewards with terrible threats and no little peril to the city, though the war in Africa was then raging, he did    p93not hesitate to appear before them, against the advice of his friends, and to disband them.
• But with a single word, calling them "citizens," instead of "soldiers," he easily brought them round and bent them to his will; for they at once replied that they were his "soldiers" and insisted on following him to Africa, although he refused their service.
• Even then he punished the most insubordinate by the loss of a third part of the booty and of the land intended for them.
• He defended Masintha, a youth of high birth, against king Hiempsal with such spirit, that in the dispute he caught the king's son Juba by the beard.
• Even when a young man he showed no lack of devotion and fidelity to his dependents.
• On Masintha's being declared tributary to the king, he at once rescued him from those who would carry him off and kept him hidden for some time in his own house; and when presently he left for Spain after his praetorship, he carried the young man off in his own litter, unnoticed amid the crowd that came to see him off and the lictors with their faces.
• His friends he treated with invariable kindness and consideration.
• When Gaius Oppius was his companion on a journey through a wild, woody country and was suddenly taken ill, Caesar gave up to him the only shelter59 there was, while he himself slept on the ground out-of‑doors.
• Moreover, when he came to power, he advanced some of his friends to the highest positions, even though they were of the humblest origin, and when taken to task for it, flatly declared that if he had been helped in defending his honour by brigands and cut-throats, he would have requited even such men in the same way.
• Although Gaius Memmius had made highly caustic speeches against him, to which he had replied with equal bitterness, he went so far as to support Memmius afterwards in his suit for the consulship.
• On the other hand he never formed such bitter enmities that he was not glad to lay them aside when opportunity offered.
• When Gaius Calvus, after some scurrilous epigrams, took steps through his friends towards a reconciliation, Caesar wrote to him first and of his own free will.
• Valerius Catullus, as Caesar himself did not hesitate to say, inflicted a lasting stain on his name by the verses about Mamurra;60 yet when he apologised, Caesar invited the poet to dinner that very same day, and continued his usual friendly relations with Catullus's father.
• Even in avenging wrongs he was by nature most merciful, and when he got hold of the pirates who had captured him, he had them crucified, since he had sworn beforehand that he would do so, but ordered that their throats be cut first.
• He could never make up his mind to harm Cornelius Phagites, although when he was sick and in hiding,61 the man had waylaid him night after night, and even a bribe had barely saved him from being handed over to Sulla.
• The slave Philemon, his amanuensis, who had promised Caesar's enemies that he would poison him, he merely punished by death, without torture.
• When summoned as a witness against Publius Clodius, the paramour of his wife Pompeia, charged on the same count with sacrilege, Caesar declared that he had no evidence, although both his mother Aurelia and his sister Julia had given the same jurors a faithful account of the whole affair;
• and on being asked why it was then that he had put away his    p97wife, he replied: "Because I maintain that the members of my family should be free from suspicion, as well as from accusation."
• He certainly showed admirable self-restraint and mercy, both in his conduct of the civil war and in the hour of victory.
• While Pompey announced that he would treat as enemies those who did not take up arms for the government, Caesar gave out that those who were neutral and of neither party would be numbered with his friends.
• He freely allowed all those whom he had made centurions on Pompey's recommendation to go over to his rival.
•  When conditions of surrender were under discussion at Ilerda, and friendly intercourse between the two parties was constant, Afranius and Petreius, with a sudden change of purpose, put to death all of Caesar's soldiers whom they found in their camp; but Caesar could not bring himself to retaliate in kind.
• At the battle of Pharsalus he cried out, "Spare your fellow citizens," and afterwards allowed each of his men to save any one man he pleased of the opposite party.
• And it will be found that no Pompeian lost his life except in battle, save only Afranius and Faustus, and the young Lucius Caesar;
• and it is believed that not even these men were slain by his wish, even though the two former had taken up arms again after being pardoned, while Caesar had not only cruelly put to death the dictator's slaves and freedmen with fire and sword, but had even butchered the wild beasts which he had procured for the entertainment of the people.
• At last, in his later years, he went so far as to allow all those whom he had not yet pardoned to return to Italy, and to hold magistracies and the command of armies:
• p99and he actually set up the statues of Lucius Sulla and Pompey, which had been broken to pieces by the populace.
• After this, if any dangerous plots were formed against him, or slanders uttered, he preferred to quash rather than to punish them. 5 Accordingly, he took no further notice of the conspiracies which were detected, and of meetings by night, than to make known by proclamation that he was aware of them; and he thought it enough to give public warning to those who spoke ill of him, not to persist in their conduct, bearing with good nature the attacks on his reputation made by the scurrilous volume of Aulus Caecina and the abusive lampoons of Pitholaus.
• Yet after all, his other actions and word so turn the scale, that it is thought that he abused his power and was justly slain.
• For not only did he accept excessive honours, such as an uninterrupted consulship, the dictatorship for life, and the censorship of public morals, as well as the forename Imperator, the surname of Father of his Country, a statue among those of the kings, and a raised couch in the orchestra;
• but he also allowed honours to be bestowed on him which were too great for mortal man: a golden throne in the House and on the judgment seat; a chariot and litter63 in the procession at the circus; temples, altars, and statues beside those of the gods; a special priest, an additional college of the Luperci, and the calling of one of the months by his name.
• In fact, there were no honours which he did not receive or confer at pleasure.
• He held his third and fourth consulships in name only, content with the power of the dictatorship    p101conferred on him at the same time as the consulships.
• Moreover, in both years he substituted two consuls for himself for the last three months, in the meantime holding no elections except for tribunes and plebeian aediles, and appointing praefects instead of the praetors, to manage the affairs of the city during his absence.
• When one of the consuls suddenly died the day before the Kalends of January, he gave the vacant office for a few hours to a man who asked for it. 3 With the same disregard of law and precedent he named magistrates for several years to come, bestowed the emblems of consular rank on ten ex-praetors, and admitted to the House men who had been given citizenship, and in some cases half-civilised Gauls.
• He assigned the charge of the mint and of the public revenues to his own slaves, and gave the oversight and command of the three legions which he had left at Alexandria to a favourite of his called Rufio, son of one of his freedmen.

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• No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A. B. C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law.
• So far did he go in his presumption, that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said: "They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart."64
• When the Senate approached him in a body with many highly honorary decrees, he received them    p103before the temple of Venus Genetrix without rising.
• But it was the following action in particular that roused deadly hatred against him.
• Some think that when he attempted to get up, he was held back by Cornelius Balbus; others, that he made no such move at all, but on the contrary frowned angrily on Gaius Trebatius when he suggested that he should rise.
• And this action of his seemed the more intolerable, because when he himself in one of his triumphal processions rode past the benches of the tribunes, he was so incensed because a member of the college, Pontius Aquila, did not rise, that he cried: "Come then, Aquila, take back the republic from me,65 you tribune"; and for several days he would not make a promise to any one without adding, "That is, if Pontius Aquila will allow me."
• To an insult which so plainly showed his contempt for the Senate he added an act of even greater insolence; for at the Latin Festival, as he was returning to the city, amid the extravagant and unprecedented demonstrations of the populace, someone in the press placed on his statue a laurel wreath with a white fillet tied to it;
• and when Epidius Marullus and Caesetius Flavius, tribunes of the commons, gave orders that the ribbon be removed from the wreath and the man taken off to prison, Caesar sharply rebuked and deposed them, either offended that the hint at regal power had been received with so little favour, or, as he asserted, that he had been robbed of the glory of refusing it.
•  But from that time on he could not rid himself of the odium of having aspired to the title of monarch, although he replied to the commons, when they hailed him as king, "I am Caesar and no king,"
• and at the •Lupercalia, when    p105the consul Antony several times attempted to place a crown upon his head as he spoke from the rostra, he put it aside and at last sent it to the Capitol, to be offered to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
• Nay, more, the report had spread in various quarters that he intended to move to Ilium or Alexandria, taking with him the resources of the state, draining Italy by levies, and leaving the charge of the city to his friends;
• also that at the next meeting of the Senate Lucius Cotta would announce as the decision of Fifteen,68 that inasmuch as it was written in the books of fate that the Parthians could be conquered only by a king, Caesar should be given that title.
• It was this that led the conspirators to hasten in carrying out their designs, in order to avoid giving their assent to this proposal.
• Therefore the plots which had previously been formed separately, often by groups of two or three, were united in a general conspiracy, since even the populace no longer were pleased with present conditions, but both secretly and openly rebelled at his tyranny and cried out for defenders of their liberty.
• On the admission of foreigners to the Senate, a placard was posted: "God bless the Commonwealth!69 let no one consent to point out the House to a newly made senator."

• The following verses too were sung everywhere:—  

     

  "Caesar led the Gauls in triumph, led them to the senate house;   Then the Gauls put off their breeches, and put on the laticlave."70
• When Quintus Maximus, whom he had appointed consul in his place for three months, was entering    p107the theatre, and his lictor called attention to his arrival in the usual manner, a general shout was raised: "He's no consul!"
• At the first election after the deposing of Caesetius and Marullus, the tribunes, several votes were found for their appointment as consuls.

• Some wrote on the base of Lucius Brutus' statue: "Oh, that you were still alive"; and on that of Caesar himself:  

     

  "First of all was Brutus consul, since he drove the kings from Rome;   Since this man drove out the consuls, he at last is made our king."
• More than sixty joined the conspiracy against him, led by Gaius Cassius and Marcus and Decimus Brutus.
• At first they hesitated whether to form two divisions at the elections in the Campus Martius, so that while some hurled him from the bridge71 as he summoned the tribes to vote, the rest might wait below and slay him; or to set upon him in the Sacred Way or at the entrance to the theatre.
• When, however, a meeting of the Senate was called for the Ides of March in the Hall of Pompey, they readily gave that time and place the preference.
• Now Caesar's approaching murder was foretold to him by unmistakable signs.
• A few months before, when the settlers assigned to the colony at Capua by the Julian Law were demolishing some tombs of great antiquity, to build country houses, and plied their work with the greater vigour because as they rummaged about they found a quantity of vases of ancient workmanship, there was discovered in a tomb, which was said to be that of Capys, the founder of Capua, a bronze tablet,    p109inscribed with Greek words and characters to this purport: "Whenever the bones of Capys shall be moved, it will come to pass that a son of Ilium shall be slain at the hands of his kindred, and presently avenged at heavy cost to Italy."
• And let no one think this tale a myth or a lie, for it is vouched for by Cornelius Balbus, an intimate friend of Caesar.
• Shortly before his death, as he was told, the herds of horses which he had dedicated to the river Rubicon when he crossed it, and had let loose without a keeper, stubbornly refused to graze and wept copiously.
• Again, when he was offering sacrifice, the soothsayer Spurinna warned him to beware of danger, which would come not later than the Ides of March;
• and on the day before the Ides of that month a little bird called the king-bird flew into the Hall of Pompeyg with a sprig of laurel, pursued by others of various kinds from the grove hard by, which tore it to pieces in the hall.
• In fact the very night before his murder he dreamt now that he was flying above the clouds, and now that he was clasping the hand of Jupiter;
• and his wife Calpurnia thought that the pediment72 of their house fell, and that her husband was stabbed in her arms; and on a sudden the door of the room flew open of its own accord.
• Both for these reasons and because of poor health he hesitated for a long time whether to stay at home and put off what he had planned to do in the senate; but at last, urged by Decimus Brutus not to disappoint the full meeting which had for some time been waiting for him, he went forth almost at the end of the fifth hour;
• and when a note revealing the plot was handed him by someone on the way, he    p111put it with others which he held in his left hand, intending to read them presently.
• Then, after several victims had been slain, and he could not get favourable omens, he entered the House in defiance of portents, laughing at Spurinna and calling him a false prophet, because the Ides of March were come without bringing him harm; though Spurinna replied that they had of a truth come, but they had not gone.
• As he took his seat, the conspirators gathered about him as if to pay their respects, and straightway Tillius Cimber, who had assumed the lead, came nearer as though to ask something; and when Caesar with a gesture put him off to another time, Cimber caught his toga by both shoulders;
• then as Caesar cried, "Why, this is violence!" one of the Cascas stabbed him from one side just below the throat.
•  Caesar caught Casca's arm and ran it through with his stylus,74 but as he tried to leap to his feet, he was stopped by another wound.
• When he saw that he was beset on every side by drawn daggers, he muffled his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to his feet with his left hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his body also covered.
• And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, "You too, my child?"
• All the conspirators made off, and he lay there lifeless for some time, and finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down.
• And of so many wounds none turned out to be mortal, in the opinion of the    p113physician Antistius, except the second one in the breast.
• The conspirators had intended after slaying him to drag his body to the Tiber, confiscate his property, and revoke his decrees; but they forebore<!-- sic --> through fear of Marcus Antonius the consul, and Lepidus, the master of horse.
• Then at the request of his father-in‑law, Lucius Piso, the will was unsealed and read in Antony's house, which Caesar had made on the preceding Ides of September at his place near Lavicum, and put in the care of the chief of the Vestals.
• Quintus Tubero states that from his first consulship until the beginning of the civil war it was his wont to write down Gnaeus Pompeius as his heir, and to read this to the assembled soldiers.
• In his last will, however, he named three heirs, his sisters' grandsons, Gaius Octavius, to three-fourths of his estate, and Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius to share the remainder.
• He named several of his assassins among the guardians of his son, in case one should be born to him, and Decimus Brutus even among his heirs in the second degree.
• At the end of the will, too, he adopted Gaius Octavius into his family and gave him his name.
• To the people he left his gardens near the Tiber for their common use and three hundred sesterces to each man.
• When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix;
• within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.
• Since it was clear    p115that the day would not be long enough for those who offered gifts, they were directed to bring them to the Campus by whatsoever streets of the city they wished, regardless of any order of precedence.

• At the funeral games, to rouse pity and indignation at his death, these words from the "Contest for the Arms" of Pacuvius were sung:—  

     

  "Saved I these men that they might murder me?"
• Instead of a eulogy the consul Antonius caused a herald to recite the decree of the Senate in which it had voted Caesar all divine and human honours at once, and likewise the oath with which they had all pledged themselves to watch over his personal safety; to which he added a very few words of his own.
• and words of like purport from the "Electra" of Atilius.
• The bier on the rostra was carried down into the Forum by magistrates and ex-magistrates; and while some were urging that it be burned in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and others in the Hall of Pompey, on a sudden two beings76 with swords by their sides and brandishing a pair of darts set fire to it with blazing torches, and at once the throng of bystanders heaped upon it dry branches, the judgment seats with the benches, and whatever else could serve as an offering.
• Then the musicians and actors tore off their robes, which they had taken from the equipment of his triumphs and put on for the occasion, rent them to bits and threw them into the flames, and the veterans of the legions the arms with which they had adorned themselves for the funeral; many of the women too, offered up the jewels which they wore and the amulets and robes of their children.
•  At the height of the public grief a throng of foreigners went about lamenting each after the fashion of his country, above all the Jews,77 who even flocked to the place for several successive nights.

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• Immediately after the funeral the commons ran to the houses of Brutus and Cassius with firebrands, and after being repelled with difficulty, they slew Helvius Cinna when they met him, through a mistake in the name, supposing that he was Cornelius Cinna, who had the day before made a bitter indictment of Caesar and for whom they were looking;
• Afterwards they set up in the Forum a solid column of Numidian marble •almost twenty feet high, and inscribed upon it, "To the Father of his Country."
• and they set his head upon a spear and paraded it about the streets.
• At the foot of this they continued for a long time to sacrifice, make vows, and settle some of their disputes by an oath in the name of Caesar.
• Caesar left in the minds of some of his friends the suspicion that he did not wish to live longer and had taken no precautions, because of his failing health; and that therefore he neglected the warnings which came to him from portents and from the reports of his friends.
• Some think that it was because he had full trust in the last decree of the senators and their oath that he dismissed even the armed bodyguard of Spanish soldiers that formerly attended him.
• Others, on the contrary, believe that he elected to expose himself once for all to the plots that threatened him on every hand, rather than to be always anxious and on his guard.
• Some, too, say that he was wont to declare that it was not so much to his own interest    p119as to that of his country that he remain alive; he had long since had his fill of power and glory; but if aught befell him, the commonwealth would have no peace, but would be plunged in strife under much worse conditions.
• About one thing almost all are fully agreed, that he all but desired such a death as he met; for once when he read in Xenophon78 how Cyrus in his last illness gave directions for his funeral, he expressed his horror of such a lingering kind of end and his wish for one which was swift and sudden.
• And the day before his murder, in a conversation which arose at a dinner at the house of Marcus Lepidus, as to what manner of death was most to be desired, he had given his preference to one which was sudden and unexpected.
• He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age,
• and was numbered among the gods, not only by a formal decree, but also in the conviction of the common people.
• For at the first of the games which his heir Augustus gave in honour of his apotheosis, a comet shone for seven successive days, rising about the eleventh hour,79 and was believed to be the soul of Caesar, who had been taken to heaven;
• and this is why a star is set upon the crown of his head in his statue.
• It was voted that the hall in which he was slain be walled up, that the Ides of March be called the Day of Parricide, and that a meeting of the senate should never be called on that day.
• Hardly any of his assassins survived him for more than three years, or died a natural death.
• They were all condemned, and they perished in various ways — some by shipwreck, some in battle; some took their own lives with the self-same dagger with which they had impiously slain Caesar.
• The Editor's Notes:
• 85/84 B.C., according to the chronology of Suetonius, which makes the year of Caesar's birth 100 B.C. The arguments in favour of 102 are however very strong.
• By Marius and Cinna, consuls in 86
• A chaplet of oak leaves, given for saving the life of a fellow-citizen, the Victoria Cross of antiquity.
• The festival of Bona Dea, from which all men were excluded.
• The towns beyond the river Po, such as Verona, Comum, and Cremona, wished to obtain the rights of citizenship, which had been given to many of the Italian towns at the close of the Social War (89‑88 B.C.).
• Forum ornare was the technical term for the display there by the aediles of the material to be used in their public shows
• As iudex quaestionis, an office held by Caesar between the aedileship and the praetorship.
• As iudex perduellionis, or duumvir perduellionis, one of a commission of two men appointed to try cases of high treason.
• Of these one was selected by lot (sorte ductus) to conduct the trial, if one were necessary, and pass sentence. An appeal was allowed and the duumvir then brought the case before the comitia centuriata (in the regal period before the comitia curiata). See   Liv. 1.26.5 ff.;   Cic. Rab. 4.
• When the consuls went to the Capitol to offer sacrifice at the commencement of their term of office (on January 1), their friends escorted them to the temple and back to their homes. Caesar took advantage of the absence of the aristocrats for his attack on Catulus.
• That is, without waiting for the decrees of the senate which formally confirmed the appointments of the new governors, and provided them with funds and equipment.
• If silvae callesque should stand in the text, it is used in a different sense from calles in   Tac. Ann. 4.27. It seems to designate provinces where the duties of the governor would be confined to guarding the mountain-pastures and keeping the woods free from brigands. The senate would not run the risk of letting Caesar secure a province involving the command of an army. Cf. note on xxiv.1.
• Business could be interrupted or postponed at Rome by the announcement of an augur or a magistrate that he had seen a flash of lightning or some other adverse sign; sometimes an opponent merely announced that he would "watch the skies" for such omens.
• A Celtic word meaning a crested lark,   (Plin. N. H. 11.37)   which was the device on the helmets of the legion.
• Roman measure; •about 3106 English miles, taking the Roman foot (296 mm) as 0·97 English.
• When the senate passed a decree that Caesar should disband his army before a given date, the tribunes Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius exercised their privilege and vetoed it   (Caesar, B. C. 1.2.6‑7); not only did the senate disregard the veto, but the tribunes were obliged to see safety in flight   (id. 1.5.1‑2).
• Knights (as well as senators) had the privilege of wearing a gold ring, and must possess an estate of 400,000 sesterces.
• The prandium was the first substantial meal of the day, taken about noon; the translation "dinner" is used advisedly.
• In token of his restoration to the rank of knight, which he forfeited by appearing on the stage; see   chap. xxxiii.
• The first fourteen rows above the orchestra, reserved for the knights by the law of L. Roscius Otho, tribune of the commons, 67 B.C.
• Euripus, the strait between Euboea and Boeotia, was used also as a common noun, meaning "a ditch" or "canal."
• The year had previously consisted of 355 days, and the deficiency of about eleven days was made up by inserting an intercalary month of twenty-two or twenty-three days after February.
• The derivation of parricida is uncertain, but it cannot come from pater and caedo. In early times it meant wilful murder of a freeman; XII. Tab. ap. Fest. s.v., si qui hominem liberum dolo sciens morti duit, paricidas esto; later, it was associated by popular etymology with pater and caedo, and used also in the modern sense of the word.
• Epilepsy, called morbus comitialis, because an attack was regarded as sufficient cause for the postponement of elections, or other public business. Sometimes a seizure was feigned for political reasons.
• Latus clavus, the broad purple stripe, is also applied to a tunic with the broad stripe. All senators had the right to    (p63)wear this; the peculiarity in Caesar's case consisted in the long fringed sleeves.
• While a girdle was commonly worn with the ordinary tunic, it was not usual to wear one with the latus clavus;   Quint. XI.3.138. The looseness of the girdle was an additional peculiarity.
• The words liberorum quaerendorum causa are a legal formula indicating that the purpose of marriage is to beget legal heirs.
• Caesar was in reality propraetor, but proconsul (pro consule) is sometimes used of the governor of a province, regardless of his rank.
• That is, Caesar reduced his reports to book form. If the book was a roll, the writing was arranged in columns, parallel with the edges (or long sides) of the roll. If it was a codex, several sheets were folded and fastened together and the writing was arranged on each page in one or two columns. His predecessors merely took a sheet, or sheets, and wrote from side to side and from top to bottom, without columns or margins.
• The standard of the legion was a silver eagle with outstretched wings, mounted on a pole which had a sharp point at the other end, so that it could be set firmly in the ground.
• Rostratae naves, ships of war provided with brazen beaks (rostra) or rams.
• Probably some woodcutter's hut; deversorium means 'inn, lodging.'
• For carrying his statue among those of the gods.
• That is, "make me restore the republic."
• The white fillet was emblematic of royalty.
• The college of fifteen priests (quindecimviri sacris faciundis) in charge of the Sybilline<!-- sic --> books.
• The pons suffragiorum, a temporary bridge of planks over which the voters passed one by one, to cast their ballots;   Cic. Ad Att. i.14;   Ovid, Fasti, v.634.
• Possibly "from behind," though it is hard to see how a wound paulo infra iugulum could have been dealt from that position. Aversum has better mss. authority than adversum, is a priori more probable, and is supported by Plutarch's version; but it may mean "turned away."
• A pointed instrument of bone or metal, for writing on waxen tablets.
• To inherit a share of his estate in the event of the death of the heirs in the first degree or their refusal to accept the inheritance; it was often a mere compliment.
• Caesar was beloved by the Jews, not only because he had overthrown Pompey, who had violated their Holy of Holies, but because of many acts of kindness besides.
•    the loss of his priesthood:   the flamen dialis had to be married, could not divorce, and if his wife died had to resign: thus by putting away his wife, Caesar was automatically bombing himself out of the priesthood. See the article   Flamen   in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities for these and many other details.
•    The plain called Stellas:   Usually referred to as "the district of Stellae", a relatively remote area of eastern Campania on the borders of Samnite territory, over which one of the Samnite wars was fought, as recorded by Livy   (IX.44). The area can hardly be characterized as a plain.
• the Roman pound, however, was about 325 grams, much less than the English pound (just under 457 grams). At any rate, Caesar's distribution was around 90 liters of grain and 3 liters of oil: enough of one to cook the other in, and a basic ration for one person for 3 months.
•    ten pecks of grain and ten pounds of oil:   At roughly 8.75 liters, the modius is a close equivalent to the English peck (9.09 litres);
•  A translation error in the Loeb edition, made more striking by the fact that "tessellated floors" (the usual spelling, by the way) are mosaic floors.
• 
• 
• tessellata pavimenta:

• sectilia pavimenta: 

   floors made of crustae (sliced veneers of precious marbles) cut in specific shapes to form what our translator should have called   opus sectile.
• floors made of tesserae (small cubes, most often black and white, sometimes colored) arranged in patterns — i.e., <!--  <A HREF=" E/Gazetteer/Periods/Roman/Topics/Architecture/Elements/decorative/pavements/mosaic/home.html  "TARGET="offsite" onMouseOver="return Ebox(INARRAY,1,WIDTH,175)" onMouseOut="nd();"> --> mosaics<!--</A>-->;

•  an Aegisthus:   an appalling thing to say of someone, and one wonders whether Pompey had any inside information. In the kinky and bloodthirsty legends of the Greeks, Aegisthus was the son of Thyestes sleeping with his own daughter: so that his mother was his half-sister, and his father was his grandfather. Abandoned as a baby, he was adopted by his uncle Atreus who had killed Thyestes' children and fed them to him as stew. Understandably, Aegisthus, the original angry young man, winds up killing his uncle then cuckolding his uncle's son Agamemnon as soon as the latter goes off to war. 

   Caesar did indeed cuckold a lot of people, including Pompey, who in tagging him as Aegisthus, was giving himself out as Agamemnon doing his warrior's duty overseas while this shiftless lecher was stealing his wife: but Pompey was also getting back at Caesar in a classic and very hostile piece of psychoanalysis.   
• Caesar's style, elegant as well as transparent:   or at least, such is the general meaning of the passage, which is peculiarly difficult to translate.
•    the Hall of Pompey:   more usually referred to today as the Curia of Pompey. For details and sources, see the article   Curia Pompei   in Platner and Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome.
•    "You too, my child?":   It is quite possible to speculate that Caesar was being literal, and that Brutus was his son.