Modern assessments of Claudius' principate vary widely. For some he was a strong ruler with a clear sense of direction, who had spent his long years of obscurity studying Roman
history and reaching his own conclusions about the correct blending of tradition and innovation, concealing behind his unprepossessing physical exterior and manners an incisive and
inventive intelligence; for them, his chief freedman secretaries, Pallas, Callistus, Narcissus, and the rest were the servants of the policies of a princeps who saw that the time was ripe
for a forward development. But other scholars see him as a weak-willed, absent-minded, erratic, and malleable man, suddenly and quite unexpectedly bundled on to the throne at the
age of fifty, totally devoid of any experience of the corridors of power and hence swiftly becoming the pliant tool of far more adroit and experienced manoeuverers within the
imperial household-in Dio's classic formulation, 'dominated by his slaves and his wives' (60-2); for them the increased centralization which marked his reign was the consequence not
of his deliberate decision, but of his own ineffectual weakness and the ambitions of his ministers.
It is impossible to be sure how much truth there is in these two contrasting pictures (and neither is likely to be completely false) since the overt facts can often be interpreted to suit
either. But there is probably more truth in the less favourable portrait, which was certainly that recognized by many contemporaries, criticized in Nero's accession speech to the
Senate, and caricatured by Seneca (below, pp. 663 f.) in his Apocolocyntosis. There can be no doubt that his freedmen achieved a far greater public prominence and influence than
those of his predecessors and successors (there is, incidentally, no sound basis for the view that Claudius 'created' or even first organized an imperial bureaucracy), or that his wives
exerted a potent influence; Messallina's public 'wedding' to the consul-designate Silius while her husband Claudius was out of Rome was so bizarre an affair that Tacitus felt
compelled to reassure his readers twice in a single paragraph {Annals 11. 27) that his account was history and not a farcical fairy-tale; and Augustus' private correspondence shows
that that shrewd and close observer, while recognizing some faint redeeming qualities in his young kinsman, had seen him as generally incoherent, absent-minded, easily influenced,
and far from circumspect in his choice of models (Suetonius, Claudius, 4).
Not that Claudius' reign was a failure: whatever view we take, his chief advisers were clever and able men who had risen high in the imperial household by their own talents and
energies. The invasion and conquest of southern Britain was a copy-book exercise, superbly well executed, commanded by generals of ability and dash; although the conquest made
little economic or strategic sense, it was a resounding and valuable political success. Something was done to repair the damage Gaius had done to the susceptibilities of the Jews; the
barbaric and potentially dangerous cult of Druidism was firmly repressed; citizenship was conceded widely, if not always "wisely, with the Emperor's personal advocacy of the
importance of this large-minded approach, though in a speech remarkable for its banality and irrelevance; public finances were buoyant; and Mauretania and Thrace were brought
from indirect to direct rule. But the judicial carnage among senators and equites was heavy (quite a number of them had been implicated in Scribonianus' abortive revolt in Dalmatia
a few months after Claudius' accession); and for all his good intentions, which need not be denied, it seems that only too often Claudius' left hand did not know what his right hand
was doing. Thus it was all very well for him to adjure senators not to behave like 'yes-men'; but Tacitus (Annals II. 23-5) makes it clear, for instance, that the possible admission of
some leading men from Gaul to the senatorial order had been discussed and already decided on in the Palace before Claudius brought it to the Senate, where the princeps's somewhat
incoherent speech was promptly followed by the automatic assent of his docile audience.
Nero
Claudius' death in October 54 was quite possibly due to poisoning by his second consort, his niece the younger Agrippina, whose son by her earlier marriage to Domitius
Ahenobarbus (consul A.D. 32) now came to the Principate one month short of his seventeenth birthday. Like Gaius before him, Nero (or his mother- some of the imperial females
were more ruthless than their kinsmen) lost no time in dispatching Britannicus (four years younger and Claudius' son by his earlier marriage to Messallina). For some time, however,
all seemed fair. Nero's old tutor Seneca, and Agrippina's sometime favourite Burrus, sole praetorian prefect since 51, got the better of the Empress Dowager in the struggle to
dominate the adolescent princeps, and presided over a period of stability and sound administration-although Thrasea Paetus, as already noted, stoutly deplored their neglect to exploit
the chance to recruit the Senate's influence and authority.
The first serious storm signal was hoisted when in 59 Nero grew impatient of his mother's insistent meddling and had her murdered. Three years later Burrus died, and was replaced
by a pair of praetorian prefects, one of them the infamous Tigellinus, who secured a maleficent influence over the Emperor he was in the end to abandon. At this point Seneca retired,
and soon Octavia, Claudius' daughter and Nero's wife, was ousted by the scheming Poppaea and later murdered. Nero was free to indulge his artistic and aesthetic pretensions,
surrounded by a claque of corrupt and greedy advisers and toadies, some base-born, like the Sicilian Tigellinus, many others Greek or Levantine freedmen. His extravagance and
their unscrupulous venality-not to mention the expense of warfare in Britain, where Boudicca's uprising was sparked off by Roman avarice and greed, and later in Asia Minor, where
an ill-thought-out and mismanaged forward move in Armenia ended in a thinly disguised surrender of actual Roman sovereignty and the collapse of Augustus' 'diplomatic solution'-
led to depreciation of the coinage and the quasi-judicial fleecing of rich victims.
The Great Fire of AD 64 gave Nero the opportunity to start building his grotesquely expensive 'Golden House' (below, pp. 784 fF.) on the ruins of much of the capital: rumours that
he had started the fire himself 'to clear the site' and had celebrated the occasion with poetry and song induced him to make the newly spreading Christian community of Rome, no