The Emperor Claudius

3 units

The Julio-Claudian emperor Claudius (ruled 41-54 CE) is famous for his physical disabilities, his scholarly pursuits, his surprising elevation to power in middle age upon the murder of Caligula, his tragic promotion of his successor the teenaged Nero, his postmortem deification by the senate, and his modern reception in the fiction of Robert Graves (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) and television. In this course we will read two Latin texts that sum up Claudius’ life, character, and reign: Suetonius’ Life of Claudius (early 2nd c. CE) and Seneca’s vicious satire Apocolocyntosis (“Ascent of the Pumpkinhead into Heaven,” written just after Claudius’ death). Excerpts from the historian Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal will add to our picture of Claudius and the evolution of the role of emperor.