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Currently reading “Seutonias The Lives of the Caesars” and will post random insights on Roman Emperors here as I come across them. Currently reading about Emperor Claudius who ruled from 42-54 AD
Imagine being a European in the 1500s and seeing a rubber ball bounce for the first time.
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they encountered something that seemed almost impossible. Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica had been making rubber balls for centuries, using latex collected from rubber trees. They used them in their famous ceremonial ballgames.
Europeans had balls made from materials such as leather, cloth and inflated animal bladders, but nothing behaved quite like this.
In 1528, Hernán Cortés brought a group of Indigenous ballplayers to the court of Emperor Charles V, where they demonstrated their game.
For spectators who had never encountered elastic rubber, watching a solid-looking ball hit the ground and spring back into the air must have been extraordinary.
The Spanish chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera marvelled at the material, describing how the balls seemed to leap in a way European balls simply couldn't.
Long before Europeans understood how rubber worked, the peoples of Mesoamerica had already been manufacturing and playing with it for thousands of years.
Rubber didn't create European ball sports, which already existed, but the material would eventually help transform sporting equipment and the kinds of balls people could manufacture. Today, rubber or synthetic rubber is found in the construction of many of the world's most familiar sports balls, from footballs and basketballs to tennis balls and golf balls
Claudius wrote a massive history of Rome starting with the assassination of Julius Caesar, skipping over subsequent events as writing about them truthfully would have upset his mother and grandmother, and then continuing with the period after the civil war.
The first time he went to read his history in a crowded hall, a bench broke under the weight of a fat man. Everyone laughed, no one more so than Claudius who was unable to continue reading as he couldn’t stop laughing every time he tried to read.
Claudius’ history of Rome was 41 volumes. He also wrote an 8 volume autobiography, a 20 volume of history of the Etruscan civilisation, a multi-volume history of Carthage, a treatise defending his introduction of three new letters into the Latin alphabet (the sonus medius, antisigma, and the digamma for 'V'), as well as a book on the art of dice playing. None of his works survive, due to lack of interest in scholars in the work of someone seen as a bumbljng leader and the works were just too long to make many copies of.
Claudius nominated a man for political office because his father had once given him a drink of cold water when he was sick.
Like some wealthy Romans, Claudius would gorge himself on food and drinks, then someone would tickle the back of his throat with a feather, in order to induce vomiting, and then return to eat more.
On the night he died, it’s believed he was poisoned by mushrooms. But there were conflicting stories.
As he was feeling unwell, his physician, Xenophon, convinced him he needed to vomit and used the feather trick and thus he got the poison out of the system. He was then convinced he had to eat to get better, and then was given gruel with more poison.
There is also a rumour he was given poison with an enema that was used to relive constipation.
Tacitus alleged that Xenophon had coated the feather in his throat with a fast-acting poison.
It’s hard to believe he would have eaten a second time after getting sick given how paranoid he was but there were signs he accepted he was going to die.
His wife Agrippina, mother of the next Emperor Nero, is the leading suspect.
The day after Claudius had his wife Messalina executed, he demanded to know where his wife was when he sat down for dinner.
Claudius often claimed that he pretended to be stupid in the time of Caligula in order to survive, otherwise he wouldn’t have lived long enough to become emperor.
Suetonius said nobody was persuaded by this and mention a book released soon after that said nobody pretends to be an idiot.
After Claudius found out his wife had secretly married another man, while he was away, he believed it was an attempt to seize the empire for her new lower, Silius. He fled in terror to the praetorians camp shouting over and over “Am I still emperor?”
Claudius was enthusiastic about supervising torture sessions and would call for an executioner immediately once someone was condemned.
Claudius had two of his son in laws killed. One, Gnaeus Pompeius, was stabbed while in bed with a young boy “for whom he had a particular passion”.
The other, Lucius Silanus, was given permission to kill himself rather than be executed.
The other son in law who survived was Nero who once he became Emperor then killed all three of Claudius’ grown-up children.