It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could have abandoned itself.  According to these writers, Messalina, at a loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love, who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the consul-designate.  According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius was at Ostia!  But is this credible, at least without admitting that Messalina had suddenly gone insane?  To what end and for what reason would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very heart of popular sentiment?  Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina certainly was, but mad she was not.  And even if we are willing to admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting farce had also gone mad?  It is difficult to suppose that they acted through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.

This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius by chance given us the key to its solution:  “Nam illud omnem fidem excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat, tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit” ("For that which would pass all belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted with the adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed the figures for the dowry").  If Claudius himself gave a dowry to the bride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius was to take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredible to Suetonius.  But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man could give away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius?  The deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as the middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded in imposing upon it their ideas and sentiments.  The passage in Suetonius proves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, and it is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it.  Nor is it improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of the contemporaries of Claudius.  We could therefore explain how, not really understanding what had happened, the historians of the following century should have believed that Messalina had married Silius while she was still the wife of Claudius.