one who for the time being could acquire an
ascendency over his well-intentioned but feeble disposition. Now, the
friends and confidents of Claudius had long been chosen from the ranks
of his freedmen. As under Louis XI. and Don Miguel, the barbers of these
monarchs were the real governors, so Claudius was but the minister
rather than the master of Narcissus his private secretary, of Polybius
his literary adviser, and of Pallas his accountant. A third person, with
whose name Scripture has made us familiar, was a freedman of Claudius.
This was Felix, the brother of Pallas, and that Procurator who, though
he had been the husband or the paramour of three queens, trembled before
the simple eloquence of a feeble and imprisoned Jew.[29] These men
became proverbial for their insolence and wealth; and once, when
Claudius was complaining of his own poverty, some one wittily replied,
"that he would have abundance if two of his freedmen would but admit him
into partnership with them."

[Footnote 29: Acts xix.]

But these men gained additional power from the countenance and intrigues
of the young and beautiful wife of Claudius, Valeria Messalina. In his
marriage, as in all else, Claudius had been pre-eminent in misfortune.
He lived in an age of which the most frightful sign of depravity was
that its women were, if possible, a shade worse than its men; and it was
the misery of Claudius, as it finally proved his ruin, to have been
united by marriage to the very worst among them all. Princesses like the
Berenice, and the Drusilla, and the Salome, and the Herodias of the
sacred historians were in this age a familiar spectacle; but none of
them were so wicked as two at least of Claudius's wives. He was
betrothed or married no less than five times. The lady first destined
for his bride had been repudiated because her parents had offended
Augustus; the next died on the very day intended for her nuptials. By
his first actual wife, Urgulania, whom he had married in early youth, he
had two children, Drusus and Claudia; Drusus was accidentally choked in
boyhood while trying to swallow a pear which had been thrown up into the
air. Very shortly after the birth of Claudia, discovering the
unfaithfulness of Urgulania, Claudius divorced her, and ordered the
child to be stripped naked and exposed to die. His second wife, Aelia
Petina, seems to have been an unsuitable person, and her also he
divorced. His third and fourth wives lived to earn a colo