With the voice of a sea creature, throaty and raucous, he was virtually unintelligible, Seneca claimed; Pliny the Elder counted him among the hundred most scholarly authors of the day. Disgraced by ‘a horrible habit under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth and running at the nose, a stammer, and a persistent nervous tic’, Claudius devoted the wastelands of his youth, when Rome ignored him, to an activity which took no account of his physical shortcomings and which Dio praises as suitable training for the principate: writing history. (He also devoted his time to taverns and tarts.) A scion of the imperial house, his tutors were appropriately eminent: Livy and Sulpicius Flavus. He possessed from birth an exceptional memory, from exceptional circumstances the time and leisure for solitary study. The result was twenty volumes on the history of Etruria, homeland of his first wife Plautia Urgulanilla (granddaughter of a confidante of Livia); an account of the old enemy Carthage written in eight volumes; and forty-three volumes in Latin devoted to the recent history of Rome, with tactful omissions concerning the civil war, the Proscriptions and the roots of Augustus’ settlement.
