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In brief, here was the hope of using against Tiberius at once the maternal pride and affection of Julia, the tenderness of Augustus, and the popularity of the name of Cæsar, which Caius carried. The people had never greatly loved the name of the Claudii, a haughty line of invincible aristocrats, always hard and overbearing with the poor, always opposed to the democratic party.
And she, daughter of the Cornelii and Claudii, whose ancestors had broken the might of Antiochus the Great and Mithridates should she not look in the face the heiress of the Lagidæ?
Upon the whole the Sabines maintained their footing in the mountains, as in the district bordering on Latium which has since been called by their name, and so too in the Volscian land, presumably because the Latin population did not extend thither or was there less dense; while on the other hand the well-peopled plains were better able to offer resistance to the invaders, although they were not in all cases able or desirous to prevent isolated bands from gaining a footing, such as the Tities and afterwards the Claudii in Rome.
Traces of this doctrine are found also in the Circulus Pisanus Claudii Berigardi, an author of French nationality who migrated to Italy and taught philosophy at Pisa: but especially the writings and the letters of Gabriel Naudé, as well as the Naudaeana, show that Averroism still lived on when this learned physician was in Italy.
Even in the first Punic war an instance occurred in which the consul himself made an open jest of consulting the auspices before battle a consul, it is true, belonging to the peculiar clan of the Claudii, which alike in good and evil was ahead of its age.
There lay the dead, heaps upon heaps, the patrician dress proclaiming the proud lineage of the fallen; Claudii, Fabii, Æmilii, Furii, Cornelii, Sempronii, and a dozen more great gentes were represented scions of the most magnificent oligarchy the world has ever seen. And this was their end! Cæsar passed his hand over his forehead and pressed his fingers upon his eyes.
Were it otherwise we should not have found the whole family of the Claudii moved by the desires and stirred by the passions which Titus Livius notes in many of them, and more especially in one holding the office of censor, who, when his colleague laid down his magistracy, as the law prescribed, at the end of eighteen months, would not resign, maintaining that he was entitled to hold the office for five years in accordance with the original law by which the censorship was regulated.
This single incident proves that in a period when Roman feeling as a rule recoiled from practising the arts of peace, members of this intellectual gens were already proficients in one of the proscribed Greek accomplishments, and taken into connection with the polished cultivation of the Claudii, and perhaps of other gentes, shows that in their private life the aristocratic party were not so bigoted as for political purposes they chose to represent themselves.
Terrified by dreams, and stung by desertion, the wretched tyrant fled to the Servilian Gardens, and from thence to the villa of one of his freedmen, near which he committed suicide, at the age of thirty-six, and in the fourteenth year of his inglorious reign, during which there are scarcely other events to chronicle than his own personal infamies. “In him perished the last scion of the stock of the Julii, refreshed in vain by grafts from the Octavii, the Claudii, and the Domitii.” Though the first of the emperors had married four wives, the second three, the third two, the fourth three, the fifth six, and the sixth three, yet Nero was the last of the Cæsars.
"Now might the great soul of Caesar have been full; and yet that which poured in as much or more was to behold that execrable race of the Claudii, having hunted and sucked his blood, with the thirst of tigers, to be rewarded with the Roman Empire, and remain in full possession of that famous patrimony: a spectacle to pollute the light of heaven!
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