The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It seems surprising that Caligula survived as emperor for as long as he did – it was partly because he surrounded himself with a specially picked bodyguard of German troops. One day at the arena he took a brief stroll to a hallway under the grandstand, and one of the officers of the royal guard cut him down, then stabbed him – appropriately – in his genitals. Other guards went to the palace, killed Caligula’s wife and dashed out the brains of his baby daughter against the wall.

Behind a curtain the palace guards found Caligula’s uncle Claudius in a state of abject terror. Claudius, who was lame and stammered, had survived this long (he was fifty) because he was generally regarded as a harmless idiot. The guards liked him and proclaimed him emperor. And in fact Claudius proved to be an excellent emperor, ruling for the next thirteen years – until his murder – as soberly and fairly as Augustus.

Through the two novels by Robert Graves, Claudius has become one of the best-known of the twelve Caesars. Graves represents him as a kindly and decent man, somewhat the dupe of his servants and his wives, but shrewd and well-intentioned. Most of this is true; but to balance the picture we have to take into account Suetonius’s less partial portrait. Suetonius mentions that his ‘cruel and sanguinary’ disposition was much in evidence – that he made a point of watching criminals being put to the torture, and witnessing ‘ancient style’ executions in which a man was flogged to death; clearly, he inherited some of the sadistic disposition that characterised other members of his family, including his uncle Tiberius. Like Tiberius and Caligula, he seems to have been something of a sex maniac, ‘setting no bounds to his libidinous intercourse with women’. When annoyed by the failure of mechanical devices at the arena, he was likely to order the carpenter responsible to go and fight the lions. Suetonius lists some of the executions ordered by Claudius: Appius Silanus, father of his son-in-law, Cneius Pompey, husband of his eldest daughter, two nieces, thirty-five senators and three hundred knights. Graves represents Claudius as the dupe of his nymphomaniac wife Messalina and of various scheming freedmen; but since Suetonius mentions that his two nieces were executed ‘without any positive proof of their crimes… or so much as allowing them to make a defence’, it is difficult to regard Claudius entirely as an innocent dupe. When, eventually, Claudius found out about Messalina’s sexual misdemeanours – including a contest with a famous prostitute to see who could satisfy most men in a single night – he ordered her execution, then that of more than three hundred men and women who had been involved with her in sexual orgies. Claudius then decided to marry his niece Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus and Caligula’s sister, and had the law against incest changed especially for this purpose. Agrippina was another schemer, like the empress Livia, and persuaded Claudius to adopt her son by a previous marriage, Nero, as his heir. When she suspected that Claudius was about to change his mind, she fed him poisoned mushrooms, and the brief but, on the whole, prosperous reign of Claudius came to an end.

So although Claudius was undoubtedly one of the ‘better’ Caesars, it is hard not to feel that by any objective standard he was something of a monster. The humiliations and difficulties of his early life, and the problems of preserving his neck under Tiberius and Caligula, seem to have acted as a discipline that preserved an element of moderation in his character. But the position of absolute power brought out his worst qualities, just as with Marius and Sulla, Tiberius and Caligula.

One act of Claudius’s reign should be noted in passing, since it had far-reaching consequences. In 43 A.D. he invaded Britain, which had – since the time of Julius Caesar – been friendly to Rome but was not a Roman province. Claudius conquered, and Britain became Romanised. And he paid various British chiefs large sums of money to aid the process. But seven years after Claudius’s death, in 61 A.D., Roman stupidity and Roman brutality produced effects that had become grimly familiar over the past three centuries, since Rome extended its boundaries beyond Italy. The Roman occupiers were callous and tactless, behaving as if everything in Britain was theirs for the taking. The British were regarded as barbarians and treated with patronising contempt.

One of the subject kings, Prasutagus, ruled a tribe called the Iceni in what is now East Anglia. He regarded himself as friendly to Rome and had, in fact, borrowed heavily from Roman moneylenders. When he felt his end approaching, in 59 A.D., he decided that it might benefit his wife and two daughters if he left half his fortune to the new Roman emperor, Nero. But after his death, the procurator of Britain – a treasury official named Catus Decianus – took a different view; it was his understanding of Roman law that all Prasutagus’s estate belonged to Rome. In 61 A.D. he presented himself at the palace of Prasutagus’s queen Boudica (sometimes spelt Boadicea) and made some completely impossible demand. (He regarded these Britons in much the same way that later imperialists – including the Britons themselves – would regard savage tribes in Africa). When Boudica protested he ordered his soldiers to strip and flog her. The men seized the opportunity to grab her daughters and commit multiple rape. Then they proceeded to seize what they could for the Roman treasury (and their own pockets – Roman officials were expected to be corrupt).

But the Roman had underestimated Boudica. She began to plan a rebellion. A few months later, in June, she heard that a Roman army had invaded the island of Anglesey in Wales, and massacred the Druids – priests of the suppressed British religion – and their followers. This was the signal for revolt. Boudica and her troops marched against the Roman fortress town of Camulodunum – Colchester, which had a population of about twenty thousand. Colchester sent to London for reinforcements; but the incompetent Catus Decianus sent only two hundred men. The Britons attacked savagely; after two days they burst into the town, and the survivors all retreated into the half-completed temple of Claudius (who had been voted a god). The Iceni heaped brushwood round the walls and set fire to it. All the defenders – including women and children – died in the flames.

A relief force of five thousand legionaries marched from Lincoln; Boudica ambushed them and cut most of them down – only some cavalry escaped. She marched on the new Roman town of Londinium (London). The Romans fled, and half the population fled with them. Then the Britons arrived – 120,000 of them – and treated London with the same brutal thoroughness as Colchester. The cruelties are described by the historian Dio Cassius: ‘… they hung up naked the most noble and distinguished women and they cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths in order to make the victims appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through their bodies.’ These atrocities probably had a ritual element – not unlike the Mau Mau in modern times. The men were treated with similar ferocity. The Britons were taking revenge for more than a decade of swaggering Roman brutality. London was burnt to the ground.

Boudica now found herself confronting the same problem that had destroyed Spartacus in the previous century – how to discipline an unruly mob of looters. The governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, had an army only a tenth as large as that of Boudica; but her troops were now overconfident and careless. Instead of waiting for the Romans to attack, they made the mistake of hurling themselves on the packed ranks of shields. When attack after attack broke like the sea against these highly-trained veterans, the Britons became discouraged and began to weaken; then a Roman advance scattered them. The Britons fled towards the carts in which their families were waiting; the Romans followed and began a massacre. Even the horses in the shafts were killed. Everything was set on fire. Boudica escaped from the battlefield, but committed suicide by poison, together with her daughters. Paulinus then sent for more legions from Gaul and Germany and settled down to dispensing revenge. The Roman historians, understandably, offer no details, but we are told that Paulinus punished tribes who had remained neutral as well as rebels. He seems to have seized stores and standing crops, creating a famine just as winter was coming on. And there can be no doubt that Paulinus crucified and tortured on a massive scale – so much so that even the emperor Nero was shocked; he replaced Paulinus with another governor and ordered that there should be a new principle of reconciliation. It is not clear what became of Catus Decianus, the man who caused the whole thing by ordering the flogging and rapes; no doubt he continued to rise in the Roman civil service.