CHAPTER VI.
THE REIGN OF CLAUDIUS, AND THE BANISHMENT OF SENECA.
While the senators were deliberating, the soldiers were acting.

They felt a true, though degraded, instinct that to restore the ancient forms of democratic freedom would be alike impossible and useless, and with them the only question lay between the rival claimants for the vacant power.

Strange to say that, among these claimants, no one seems ever to have thought of mentioning the prince who became the actual successor.
There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar.

Weakened both in mind and body by the continuous maladies of an orphaned infancy, kept under the cruel tyranny of a barbarous slave, the unhappy youth had lived in despised obscurity among the members of a family who were utterly ashamed of him.

His mother Antonia called him a monstrosity, which Nature had begun but never finished; and it became a proverbial expression with her, as is said to have been the case with the mother 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.