The day
following, Claudius related the whole affair to the senate, and
acknowledged his great obligation to his freedmen for watching over him
even in his sleep.

XXXVIII. Sensible of his being subject to passion and resentment, he
excused himself in both instances by a proclamation, assuring the public
that "the former should be short and harmless, and the latter never
without good cause." After severely reprimanding the people of Ostia for
not sending some boats to meet him upon his entering the mouth of the
Tiber, in terms which might expose them to the public resentment, he
wrote to Rome that he had been treated as a private person; yet
immediately afterwards he pardoned them, and that in a way which had the
appearance of making them (327) satisfaction, or begging pardon for some
injury he had done them. Some people who addressed him unseasonably in
public, he pushed away with his own hand. He likewise banished a person
who had been secretary to a quaestor, and even a senator who had filled
the office of praetor, without a hearing, and although they were
innocent; the former only because he had treated him with rudeness while
he was in a private station, and the other, because in his aedileship he
had fined some tenants of his, for selling cooked victuals contrary to
law, and ordered his steward, who interfered, to be whipped. On this
account, likewise, he took from the aediles the jurisdiction they had
over cooks'-shops. He did not scruple to speak of his own absurdities,
and declared in some short speeches which he published, that he had only
feigned imbecility in the reign of Caius, because otherwise it would have
been impossible for him to have escaped and arrived at the station he had
then attained. He could not, however, gain credit for this assertion;
for a short time afterwards, a book was published under the title of
Moron anastasis, "The Resurrection of Fools," the design of which was to
show "that nobody ever counterfeited folly."

XXXIX. Amongst other things, people admired in him his indifference and
unconcern; or, to express it in Greek, his meteoria and ablepsia.
Placing himself at table a little after Messalina's death, he enquired,
"Why the empress did not come?" Many of those whom he had condemned to
death, he ordered the day after to be invited to his table, and to game
with him, and sent to reprimand them as sluggish fellows for not making
greater haste. When he was meditating his i