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, the younger brother of Germanicus, was in his fiftieth year when, after the murder of Caligula, he was unexpectedly raised to the throne. Tacitus cannot conceal his amazement that one hitherto so contemptible in the eyes of every class in Rome should have been reserved for the dignity of emperor. "Some strange caprice of fortune," he thinks, "turns all human wisdom to a jest. There was scarcely a man in Rome who did not seem, by the voice of fame and the wishes of the people, designed for the sovereign power, rather than the very person whom Fate cherished in obscurity in order to make him, at a future period, master of the Roman world."

Yet Claudius, in intention, was not among the bad Cæsars. Had he met with honest friends, and had he not been misguided by his freedmen and his wives, Messalina and the younger Agrippina, his rule might have been happy for his subjects and creditable to himself. During a reign of fourteen years—41 to 54 ,—he made many good and useful regulations. He was