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* The accounts of Claudius and Nero are from The Tragedy of the
Caesars, by S. Baring-Gould.
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For all that he did well at first.  He made himself popular with the mob, cracking poor homely jokes with them at which they laughed uproariously.  He paid strict attention to business:  made some excellent laws; wisely extended Roman citizenship among the subject peoples; undertook and pushed through useful public works.  Rome was without a decent harbor:  corn from Egypt had to be transshipped at sea and brought up the Tiber in lighters; which resulted in much inconvenience, and sometimes shortage of food in the city.  Claudius went down to Ostia and looked about him; and ordered a harbor dredged out and built there on a large scale.  The best engineers of the day said it was impossible to do, and would not pay if done.  But the old fool stuck to his views and made them get to work; and they found it, though difficult and costly, quite practicable; and when finished, it solved the food problem triumphantly.  This is by way of example.—­Poor old fool! it was said he never forgot a kindness, or remembered an injury.  He came soon, however, to be managed by various freedmen and rascals and wives; all to the end that aristocratic Rome should be well punished for its sins.  One day when he was presiding in the law courts, someone cried out that he was an old fool,—­which was very true.—­and threw a large book at him that cut his face badly,—­which was very unkind.  And yet, all said, through him and through several fine and statesmanlike measures he put through, the work of Augustus and Tiberius in the empire at large was in many ways pushed forward:  he did well by the provinces and the subject races, and carried on the grand homogenization of the world.

He reigned thirteen years; then came Nero.  If one accepts the traditional view of him, it is not without evidence.  His portraits suggest one ensouled by some horrible elemental; one with no human ego in him at all.  The accounts given of his moods and actions are quite credible in the light of the modern medical knowledge as to insanity; you would find men like Tacitus Nero in most asylums.  Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius was in the habit of taking science as a guide in their transcriptions; they did not, in dealing with Tiberius for example, suit their facts to the probabilities, but just set down the worst they had heard said.  What they record of him is unlikely, and does not fit in with his known actions.  But in drawing Nero, on the contrary, they made a picture that would surprise no alienist.  Besides, Tacitus was born some seventeen years after Tiberius died; but he was fourteen years old at the death of Nero, and so of an age to have seen for himself, and remembered.  Nero did kill his mother, who probably tried to influence him for good; and he did kill Seneca, who certainly did.  His reign is a monument to the rottenness of Rome;