ther 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 succe