CLAUDIUS, AppiusCaecu¾, a Roman patrician and author of the 4th century b.c. In 312 b.c. he was elected censor without having passed through the office of consul. His censorship was remarkable for the actual or attempted achievement of several great constitutional changes. He filled vacancies in the senate with men of low birth; and when his list was rejected, and C. Plautius, his colleague, resigned, he continued, in defiance of custom, to hold the office alone. He also retained it for five years, despite the Aemilian law, which limited the duration of its tenure to a year and a half. He transferred the charge of the public worship of Hercules in the Forum Boarium from the hands of the Politian gens to that of public slaves. He distributed the libertini among all the tribes; and he further invaded the exclusive rights of the patricians by directing his secretary Cneius Flavius (whom, though a freedman, he made a senator) to publish the legis actiones and the list of dies fasti (or days on which legal business could be transacted). And lastly, he gained enduring fame by the construction of a road and an aqueduct, which—a thing unheard of before—he called by his own name. In the year after his resignation of the censorship (307) he was elected consul. In 298 he was made interrex; and in 296, as consul, he led the army in Samnium, and the armies of the two consuls gained a victory over the Etruscans and Samnites; but he never triumphed, nor does his military career appear to have been at all distinguished. Next year he was praetor, and he was once dictator. To the Ogulnian law admitting the plebeians to the offices of augur and pontifex he was strongly opposed; and his advocacy of the cause of the democracy seems to have ended with his censorship. His ambition and ...his pride of race were, however, accompanied by a passionate love of Rome.
He was already blind and tottering with age when Cineas, the minister of Pyrrhus visited him, but so vigorously did he oppose every concession that all the eloquence of Cineas was in vain, and the Romans forgot past misfortunes'in the inspiration of his patriotism. The story of his blindness, however, may be merely a method of accounting for his cognomen.
Appius Claudius Caecus is also remarkable as the first of the Roman writers, both in verse and prose, of whom we know anything. He wrote a poem which is mentioned by Cicero, but of which the remaining fragments are of the smallest, and a legal work entitled De Usurpationibus. Itis very likely also that he was concerned in the drawing up of the Legis Actiones published by Flavius. His Sententioe, which include the famous dictum “Every one is the architect of his own fortunes,” were read by Panaetius, but are now lost.
CLAUDIUS, AppiusCrassus, was, according to Livy, a patrician notorious for his pride and cruelty and his bitter hatred of the plebeians. Twice they refused to fight under him, and, fleeing before their enemies, brought upon him defeat and disgrace. He retaliated by decimating the army. At length they effected his banishment, but he quickly returned, and again became consul. In the same year (451 b. c.) he was made one of the decemviri who had been appointed to draw up a code of written laws, and so carefully did he act during his first year of office that he was the only one of the ten who was re-elected. With Claudius at their head, the new decemviri appear to have resolved on retaining permanent authority, but an outburst of popular feeling suddenly crushed their power. Enamoured of the beautiful daughter of the plebeian centurion Virginius, Claudius attempted to seize her by an abuse of justice. One of his clients, Marcus Claudius, swore that she was the child of a slave belonging to him, and that she had been stolen by the childless wife of the centurion. Virginius was summoned from the army, but a private message was sent at the same time instructing the general to detain him. The first messenger was more speedy than the second, and on the day of trial Virginius was present to expose the conspiracy. Still judgment was given according to the evidence of Marcus, and Claudius commanded Virginia to be given up to him. There was but one way of escape, and in despair, her father seized a knife from a neighbouring stall and plunged it in her side. The popular passion was deeply stirred. Virginius, with Icilius, the betrothed lover of his daughter, and Nαmitorius, her uncle, hurried to arouse the army; Horatius and Valerius put themselves at the head of the people. The decemviri were overthrown; and Appius Claudius died in prison, either by his own hand or by that of the executioner. Mommsen rejects the view given as above by Livy, and is inclined to hold that Claudius, as decemvir, was the pretended champion of the plebs, and that the revolution which ruined him was a return of the people to the rule of the patricians, who are represented by Horatius and Valerius. See appendix to vol. i. of his History of Rome.
CLAUDIUS, or Tiberius ClaudiusDrusus Nero Germanicus (10 b.c. —54 a,d.), the first Roman emperor of the name, born at Lugdunum (Lyons), in 10 b.c., was the son of Drusus and Antonia, and grandson of Livia, the wife of Augustus. Paralyzed and lame, and unable to speak with distinctness, he was an object of scorn even to his mother; and the natural diffidence and timidity of his character were increased by neglect and insult, till he was regarded as little better than an imbecile. His time was spent chiefly in the society of servants, and devoted to the industrious pursuit of literature; and until his accession he took no real part in public affairs, though Caligula honoured him with the dignity of consul. His first wife was Plautia Urgulanilla, whom he divorced because he suspected her of designs against his life; his second, Aelia Petina, was also divorced; and his third was the infamous Valeria Messalina. In 41 a,d., on the murder of Caligula, Claudius was seized by the praetorians, and declared emperor. As soon as he gained resolution to assume the authority of his office, he proclaimed an amnesty for all except Chaerea, the assassin of his predecessor, and one or two others. The account, however, of his painstaking government, his laborious personal administration of justice, his conquest of Britain, his extension of Ûiq jus honorum to the Gauls, his construction of the Claudian aqueduct and the harbour of Ostia, are matters of history (see Roman History). The cruelties of his reign appear to have been due to the facility of character which placed him completely under the influence of his favourite freedmen, of whom the most conspicuous were Narcissus, Pallas, and Polybius, and of his wife, the vicious and shameless Messalina, whom he fondly loved and honoured. At length, according to the account of Tacitus, Messalina went through the ceremony of marriage with one of her lovers, and urged by her former confederate Narcissus, the emperor allowed her to be seized, aud Narcissus put her to death. Suetonius throws a somewhat different light on the story, making it rather more probable, for he tells us that there was a rumour that the emperor desired and assisted in the marriage, because he had been warned by a soothsayer that the husband of Messalina was about to fall into misfortune. The next and fourth wife of Claudius was his niece Agrippina, a woman as criminal as any of her predecessors. She prevailed upon him to set aside his own son Britannicus in favour of Nero, her son by a former marriage; and in 54 a.d., that she might place the act beyond recall, she put the emperor to death by means of poison.
Encouraged by Livy, as Suetonius asserts, and assisted by the freedmen who attended him, Claudius produced a history of Rome, commencing with the battle of Actium (31 b.c.), in 41 books, a defence of Cicero against Asinius Pollio, memoirs of his own life, and, in Greek, a history of Carthage and a history of Etruria; but none of his writings have come down to us. He introduced three new letters into the Latin alphabet—the digamma, the ψ, and another not now known; but they appear to have been dropped at his death.
The principal authority for the life and times of Claudius is the Annals of Tacitus, in whose high-coloured pictures there is much that gives rise to a suspicion of exaggeration. Suetonius and Dion Cassius are even less trustworthy.
CLAUDIUS, Marcus Aurelius, Gothicus, the second of the Roman emperors of the name of Claudius, was born in Hlyria or Dardania in the first half of the 3d century. On account of his military ability he was placed in command of an army by Decius; and Valerian appointed him general on the Illyrian frontier, and ruler of the provinces of the lower Danube. During the reign of Gallienus, he was called to Italy in order to crush Aureolus; and, on the death of the emperor (268 a.d.) he was chosen as his successor, in accordance, it was said, with his express desire. He enjoyed great popularity, and, as far as we can now judge, he appears to have been a man of considerable ability and strength of character. The account of his reign belongs to the history of Rome.
CLAUDIUS, Matthias (1743-1815), a German poet, otherwise known by the nom de plume of Asmus, was born in 1743 at Rheinfeld, near Lubeck, and studied at Jena. With the exception of a short time in 1776 and 1777, when he held the office of superior commissioner or Ober-landcommissar at Darmstadt, he spent his life in the little town of Wandsbeck, near Hamburg, for which he had conceived so strong an attachment that he would not accept any appointment which required him to settle elsewhere. Here he earned his first literary reputation by the publication, from 1770 to 1775, of a weekly periodical called the Wandsbecker Bote or Wandsbeck Messenger, in which he gave to the world a large number of prose essays and poems of various kinds. They were written in very pure and simple German, and appealed to the popular taste; in many there was a vein of extravagant humour or even burlesque, while others were full of quiet meditation and solemn sentiment. In his later days, perhaps through the influence of Klopstock, with whom he had formed an intimate acquaint· ance, Claudius became strongly pietistic, and the graver side of his nature was alone permitted to display itself. Instead of firing the German heart with a Bheinweinlied, or shaking the German sides with a Wenn Jemand eine Reise thut, he translated the works of Saint Martin and Fénelon. At the same time, he thought it no harm to publish a complete collection of his writings, under the whimsical title of Asmus omnia sua secum portans, oder Sämmtlaehe Werke des Wandsbecker Bothen, 8 vols. 1774-1812. His biography has been written by Herbst (Gotha, 1857); and Kahle has given us Claudius und Hebel (Berlin, 1864).
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