Suetonius, a Roman imperial secretary writing in the early second century, composed The Twelve Caesars: brief lives of the rulers from Julius Caesar through Domitian. This chapter is Claudius, emperor from 41 to 54, after Rome had already become a one-man empire rather than a republic run by a senate and elected officials.

The family had kept him in a back room: a limp, a scholar, a man they treated as an embarrassment. When Caligula is killed, the Praetorian Guard — the emperor’s household troops — put Claudius on the throne because they need a Julio-Claudian body, not an argument. He conquers Britain. He lets freedmen, former slaves named Narcissus and Pallas, rival the magistrates who administer the city. His wife Messalina’s mock marriage to Silius ends in her death. Agrippina marries him so her son Nero stands ahead of Claudius’s boy Britannicus. Suetonius ridicules the body and still credits edicts, grants of citizenship, and a busy legal mind. In the old story, mushrooms clear the way for the son: a pedant on a throne, and a household that eats heirs.