Daily Blog 2 Week 8

Konnor Drewen

3/22/011

Were the Julio-Claudians really as bad as they seem?

            Some of the emperors were as bad as they seem and made a bad name for the Juilo-Claudians. There was Nero who was one of the most insane emperors. He ordered the death of his mother, threw Christians into lion’s dens, and burned down the city of Roma. He played a fiddle while the city burned to the ground. Another one that had a bad reputation was Caligula.  The Roman historian Suetonius (who wrote of Caligula) often gives exaggerated view on Roman History, so it is hard to trust all of his accounts. Nevertheless, no one really gives a good picture of Caligula, who became deathly ill in the early part of his reign and never recovered his sanity. Philo, a Jewish man who was sent with an embassy to Rome, mentions how wrongly Caligula treated him and other Jews, ignoring and toying with his guests from Judea. He also tossed unfortunate people men, women, children, and slaves of cliffs sometimes just for the fun of the act. Claudius really was not all that of a bad or evil emperor. He made river systems and religious reforms, but he was not appreciated by future people. Nero called his actions stupid and that he was too senile to have meant the laws that he had passed. This continued to be the opinion of Claudius until Nero no longer spoke of him. So yes some of the Julio-Claudians were bad people, but that is in our opinion. The people of that time may have been fine with it. The Julio-Claudians were not all bad though. They just got a bad reputation.