There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar.  Weakened both in mind and body by the continuous maladies of an orphaned infancy, kept under the cruel tyranny of a barbarous slave, the unhappy youth had lived in despised obscurity among the members of a family who were utterly ashamed of him.  His mother Antonia called him a monstrosity, which Nature had begun but never finished; and it became a proverbial expression with her, as is said to have been the case with the mother of the great Wellington, to say of a dull person, “that he was a greater fool than her son Claudius.”  His grandmother Livia rarely deigned to address him except in the briefest and bitterest terms.  His sister Livilla execrated the mere notion of his ever becoming emperor.  Augustus, his grandfather by adoption, took pains to keep him as much out of sight as possible, as a wool-gathering[26] and discreditable member of the family, denied him all public honours, and left him a most paltry legacy.  Tiberius, when looking out for a successor, deliberately passed him over as a man of deficient intellect.  Caius kept him as a butt for his own slaps and blows, and for the low buffoonery of his meanest jesters.  If the unhappy Claudius came late for dinner, he would find every place occupied, and peer about disconsolately amid insulting smiles.  If, as was his usual custom, he dropped asleep, after a meal, he was pelted with olives and date-stones, or rough stockings were drawn over his hands that he might be seen rubbing his face with them when he was suddenly awaked.

[Footnote 26:  He calls him [Greek meteoros] which implies awkwardness and constant absence of mind.]

This was the unhappy being who was now summoned to support the falling weight of empire.  While rummaging the palace for plunder, a common soldier had spied a pair of feet protruding from under the curtains which shaded the sides of an upper corridor.  Seizing these feet, and inquiring who owned them, he dragged out an uncouth, panic-stricken mortal, who immediately prostrated himself at his knees and begged hard for mercy.  It was Claudius, who scared out of his wits by the tragedy which he had just beheld, had thus tried to conceal himself until the storm was passed.  “Why, this is Germanicus!” [27] exclaimed the soldier, “let’s make him emperor.”  Half joking and half in earnest, they hoisted him on their shoulders—­for terror had deprived him of the use of his legs—­and hurried him off to the camp of the Praetorians.  Miserable and anxious he reached the camp, an object of compassion to the crowd of passers-by, who believed that he was being hurried off to execution.  But the soldiers, who well knew their own interests, accepted him with acclamations, the more so as, by a fatal precedent, he promised them a largess of more than 80_l_. apiece.  The supple Agrippa (the Herod of Acts xii.), seeing how the wind lay, offered to plead his cause with the Senate, and succeeded partly by arguments, partly by intimidation, and partly by holding out the not unreasonable hopes of a great improvement on the previous reign.