Was Claudius The Greatest Innovator Of The Early Principate?

When speaking about Augustus, modern scholars love to stress how he sought to show continuity with, and restoration of, Republican systems. It mattered above all else to Augustus, we like to say, that he presided over res publica restituta. This has generally been extended to Tiberius, the 'old-fashioned Republican' who cared most about the Senate and, only later, perhaps, about his pisciculi. Of Gaius, little is said except that he was mad and bad. The Principate, the argument goes, only became innovative when the shy historian Claudius was thrust onto the throne, 'elevated against the wishes of the Senate' and in power purely as 'Imperator Receptus' by the Praetorians, and he overthrew the programme of continuity and calm which the first principes had overseen, replacing it with a monarchic system governed centrally and administered by a secretive royal court of liberti, uninterested in the 'Augustan idea of the essential primacy of Italy' and planning a world empire utterly unlike the old res publica. I shall try to show that this is a little extreme - Claudius made innovations as ruler, but he was not the only princeps so to do, nor was his conception of his position or of the nature of the Roman state fundamentally different from that of his predecessors. Claudius' principate, I intend to suggest, was much more like the other Julio-Claudians than it was different, and we shall see through an examination of his relationships with the Senate and with freedmen, and through his engagement with conquest and with the perennial question of the Roman citizenship.

It seems to me that if any group within the res publica were to notice and react angrily to a princeps unsettling the famous balanced constitution of the Augustan settlement, it would surely be the Senate, and so it is there first that we turn in search of Claudian innovation. On the other hand, we might pause and question whether the Senate really were what that formulation demands them to have been: a powerful, tetchy body prepared to rebel and overthrow the princeps at any moment. In reality, I suggest, they were a group mainly consisting of fairly recently elevated novi homines, very few of whom had any memory of the old ways, and who owed not only their career prospects and places in the senate to the princeps' largesse, but also their lives to his clementia. I do not in the end believe that the Senate could have provided a serious form of resistance to Claudius, even if he did what I also do not think he did, which is transfer huge elements of the governance of the state away from the senators and into the hands of his trusted freedmen. Claudius was imposed as princeps by the Praetorian Guard, it is true, and those who wish to see his power as residing in their camp and at the expense of the Senate can turn to the extraordinarily large donative of 15,000 sesterces and to the coin referred to above, with Imp Recept and the camp of the Guard on it.This is a reasonable story - because it is all true. The problem lies with the inference that this meant he was opposed to and opposed by the Senate, who supposedly felt that they had the right to select the Princeps. That inference allows scholars to see in our absence of named praefecti frumenti dandi between Claudius and Nerva an abolition followed by restoration of this office. The role may have been abolished, but on the other hand, 'it may be pure chance that the inscri ptions do not survive', and we should not allow our theories about how Claudius ruled to push us into wishful thinking not justified by our sources.

The argument over the selection by the Senate of a princeps, moreover, seems to ignore the efforts both Augustus and Tiberius put into the succession, which would surely have been pointless had the Senate had the real power to select a new monarch. Claudius was the right member of the right family at the right moment, and he backed his luck up with expenditure to reward loyalty and the threat of - and use of - violence. This was no innovation - indeed it not only was, but was also seen at the time as, the key compromise of pax Augusta. Claudius minted coins with that motif on them to demonstrate that the executions of his enemies that inaugurated his principate in blood were the necessary price of restoring, after the insanity of Caligula, the true foundations of pax - a princeps in power, securing concord both internal and external, and senators left free to carry on their own internal squabbles and political machinations within the framework of security provided by the ruler. That, I propose, was what the Senate most wanted, not the chance to select one of their own number to lead them: indeed, as is often said of Augustus, but is equally true of the stammering recluse Claudius, the Senate must have preferred someone whom in terms of lineage and "breeding" they could look down on to serve as princeps - 'a fool made king' - rather than select a leading man from one of the patrician families, who truly felt themselves superior, and thus give them actual superiority to back it up. In his relationship with the Senate, then, Claudius was not so much an innovator, as a monarch acting in a similar way to his predecessors, dominating and manipulating as well as supporting the position of, the Senate in the new res publica.

The second half of the general view that Claudius disregarded and disrespected the Senate is normally that he governed through new and informal systems, instead of using the distinguished aristocrats who had previously administered the state - or, as Momigliano put it, 'he centralized the administration in the hands of a group of freedmen belonging to his own household'. This is not without merit, for one cannot read the Tacitean account of the reign of Claudius without remarking on how often the liberti are mentioned and how significant they appear to be, such as when Narcissus orders the execution of Messalina and is supposed to have told the guards standind over her, 'ita imperatorem iubere'. At least this is someone who is capable of being perceived as acting on behalf of the ruler's interests without the princeps actually knowing what he was doing - a powerful figure must lie behind Tacitus' rhetoric. It is reasonable to say that there was a gradual trend towards centralising the mechanisms of the executive and judicial branches of the government (if such terms are appropriate at all) within the domus Caesaris, and even that, within that trend, the reign of Claudius marks a significant moment. The princeps formalised his control over the finances of the state by the transfer of such matters from the aerarium to the fiscus, but this should not be read as a collapse of some dyarchy between senate and princeps that had existed under the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula, in which the princeps had very specific and limited functions within the res publica, but as a feature of how, over several reigns, 'the principate was gradually and imperfectly turned into an institution'.

I would suggest, moreover, that Claudius did continue to make significant use of the senate, and to place considerable value on it as a useful component institution of the world he needed to govern. We should note that 'he made constant use of senatus consulta and employed the Comitia only on occasion', rebalancing the forms of state communication in favour of senatorial rather than populist traditions after the aberration of Caligula's changes, which had left the senators '?? ?? ?? ??? ????? ????? ?????????'. We should not ingore, moreover, that Claudius '?? ?? ??????? ??? ???????? ??????', which must have been a considerable relief to the élite. Two technical changes, also, I suggest, were to the benefit of the senatorial élite: 'provincias Achaiam et Macedoniam senatui reddidit', thus providing more places for proconsuls and propraetors to administer after their term of office was done, and created 'militiae genus supra numerum', enabling young laticlavi to fulfil the requirements of entering the Senate without actual, arduous military service. Claudius, it is true, used the liberti whom he trusted as crucial advisors and administrators, and it is also true that this was a general trend of the Julio-Claudian era as the Principate's forms and institutions solidified and codified themselves. It is not the case, I do not think, that this can be shown to be because the princeps hated or mistrusted the Senate, but merely because he sought effective administrative forms, which sometimes involved senators and sometimes freedmen. Nor can we say that they hated him, or at least, if they did, they would not dare do so openly: Momigliano must be wrong, I suggest, to think that the offer of the title pater senatus was sarcastic. The world empire that Claudius needed to keep control of was the ruler's first priority, not the antiquated rights of the aristocrats, who had themselves largely forgotten their old pre-eminence. World empire, as well as senators and Italian aristocrats of all stripes, needed to be co-opted into the project of Roman domination, and citizenship was one significant way to achieve this aim.

I do not intend to dwell long on the question of citizenship, on which I have a fairly simple thesis. Offers of citizenship and Latin status were an element in an ongoing process of Romanisation and co-option into the Roman project and moreover they had been such throughout Rome's history. Claudius did not create the concept of extending the citizenship, nor did he offer it willy-nilly, as it happens; for that, the world would have to wait for Caracalla. 'There is no evidence that citizenship was granted to people who were unfitted to hold it', and it seems redolent of a desire to see foolishness or clumsiness in Claudius to suggest that his offers were beyond the pale in a way that those of Augustus, or Caesar, or those necessitated by the Social War, were not. The opportunity to enter the Senate represented for provincial élites a highly desirable opportunity to gain status, and for the Roman state a chance to include them even more in the process of Romanisation and harmonisation which would pacify the provinces of the Empire and secure their loyalty to the centre. Claudius 'was mainly interested in the West', and his offers of citizenship were concentrated in the areas in the West of the Empire that required solidifying and securing. It happens that these were beyond the old boundaries of Italy, but the boundaries of the world had become increasingly malleable to the Imperial will - we note a further expansion of the pomoerium by Claudius, for example. Rome could not run the world while also remaining obsessed with an Italy that was no longer a significant source of anxiety for its rulers, and Claudius would have been foolish to fixate on the rigidity of identity that was the source of the 'opposition to recruiting the senate outside Italy' at the expense of gaining or sustaining the support of all-important provincial leaders. I do not think it is helpful for us to consider this a dramatic innovation, set in opposition to Augustus' devotion to the cause of Italian identity. Each princeps faced his own challenges in securing his position at the summit of the Roman state and I think it would be reckless for us to assume divergent ideological formulations as the source of policies that essentially differed merely in order to fit with the needs of the moment. Claudius did not so much innovate in respect to the citizenship, then, as fit his policies to obtain his objectives, which must have been above all to hold onto power by establishing himself as the sole convincing guarantor of pax Augusta for his own time.

We have tried to propose Claudius as an effective and clear-sighted administrator rather than a fanatical innovator throwing off the mores and predilections of his predecessors in favour of a dramatically new monarchic form of government, but it is fair to say that at first glance his invasions and expansions of the Empire do seem to point to another side to the fourth princeps. I think that the invasion of Britain had a two-fold cause, firstly that 'the reign of Cunobelinus marked a hardening of British resistance to the domination of Rome` as expressed in the various treaties that had been signed since the time of Caesar's invasions, an increasingly significant set of acts of defiance that endangered pax Augusta, and also that the invasion marked an opportunity to show that Rome's control did not end at the edge of the European landmass but could be extended wherever Rome pleased, under the direction of the one indispensable man in the res publica, the princeps. It was not an insignificant feat for Claudius that he '???? ?? ??? ??????? ???????, ??? ?????????? ?? ??? ??????????', and the invasion of Britain was worthwhile if it demonstrated a princeps potens rerum and able to dominate not merely the territories already pacified by his illustrious predecessors, but those wild and distant lands across the sea. This image of Claudius pacifying the far corners of the globe is foregrounded dramatically by the deployment of elephants in the invasion of Britain - from one corner of the Empire to the other, only the princeps could achieve such feats of subjugation and domination of nations and species, and in this way he reminded his subjects of his significance to them.

It has been clear to scholars for some time that Claudius does not deserve as much castigation as he has received, and I think we can go somewhat further than Dio was prepared to in recognising his achievement: he did not merely '??? ????? ??? ??????? ????????', but he achieved control over and then stabilised and controlled the res publica very effectively. He used apposite forms of administration for the task that faced him, using senators and other members of the élite where useful and freedmen as required, without undue concern for dynamics of status and class; he conquered to prove his value and power, not rashly or beyond reasonable limits for Roman power, and he secured for the Principate an even greater control over financial, political and social mechanisms than his predecessors had gained. Claudius impressively used all the tools at his disposal to achieve his ends, with a holistic view of his power and responsibility: so, for example, those who helped solve the grain crisis by providing large ships gained some freedoms from the restrictions of the lex Pappia Poppaea on marriage. None of this, though, was essentially innovative, really: it was a development of what had gone before but in fundamental continuity - for Claudius as for those who had ruled before him, the central task of the Principate was to hold on to power and to pass it on successfully - to survive and to rule as monarch over a Rome that was still unsteadily being acclimatised to such a system.

Bibliography Dio, Roman History Suetonius, Divus Claudius Tacitus, Annals Roman Imperial Coinage

Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship Momigliano, Claudius Levick, Claudius Osgood, Claudius Caesar Rickman, The Corn Supply