He often distributed largesses of corn and money among the people, and
					entertained them with a great variety of public magnificent spectacles, not only
					such as were usual, and in the accustomed places, but some of new invention, and
					others revived from ancient models, and exhibited in places where nothing of the
					kind had been ever before attempted. In the games which he presented at the
					dedication of Pompey's theatre, See AUGUSTUS, c. xxxi. It
						appears to have been often a prey to the flames, TIBERIUS, c. xli; CALIGULA,
						c. XX. which had been burnt down, and was rebuilt by him, he
					presided upon a tribunal erected for him in the orchestra; having first paid his
					devotions, in the temple above, and then coming down through the centre of the
					circle, while all the people kept their seats in profound silence. Contrary to the usual custom of rising and saluting the
						emperor with loud acclamations. He likewise exhibited the secular
					games, A. U. C. 800. giving out that Augustus had
					anticipated the regular period; though he himself says in his history, "That
					they had been omitted before the age of Augustus, who had calculated the years
					with great exactness, and again brought them to their regular period." The Secular Games had been celebrated by Augustus, A. U. C.
						736. See c. xxxi. of his life, and the Epode of Horace written on the
						occasion. The crier was therefore ridiculed, when he invited people
					in the usual form, "to games which no person had ever before seen, nor ever
					would again;" when many were still living who had already seen them; and some of
					the performers who had formerly acted in them, were now again brought upon the
					stage. He likewise frequently celebrated the Circensian games in the Vatican , In the circus
						which he had himself built. sometimes exhibiting a hunt of wild
					beasts, after every five courses. He embellished the Circus Maximus with marble
					barriers, and gilded goals, which before were of common stone Tophina; Tuffo, a porous stone of volcanic origin, which
						abounds in the neighbourhood of Rome , and, with the Travartino, is employed in all common
						buildings. and wood, and assigned proper places for the senators,
					who were used to sit promiscuously with the other spectators. Besides the
					chariot-races, he exhibited there the Trojan game, and wild beasts from
						 Africa , which were encountered by a
					troop of pretorian knights, with their tribunes, and even the prefect at the
					head of them; besides Thessalian horse, who drive fierce bulls round the circus,
					leap upon their backs when they have exhausted their fury, and drag them by the
					horns to the ground. He gave exhibitions of gladiators in several places, and of
					various kinds; one yearly on the anniversary of his accession in the pretorian
					camp, In compliment to the troops to whom he owed his
						elevation: see before, c. xi. but without any hunting, or the usual
					apparatus; another in the Septa as usual; and in the same place, another out of
					the common way,. and of a few days' continuance only, which he called Sportula;
					because when he was going to present it, he informed the people by proclamation,
					" that he invited them to a late supper, got up in haste, and without ceremony."
					Nor did he lend himself to any kind of public diversion with more freedom and
					hilarity; insomuch that he would hold out his left hand, and joined by the
					common people, count upon his fingers aloud the gold pieces presented to those
					who came off conquerors. He would earnestly invite the company to be merry;
					sometimes calling them his "masters," with a mixture of insipid, far-fetched
					jests. Thus when the people called for Palumbus, Palumbus
						was a gladiator: and Claudius condescended to pun upon his name, which
						signifies a wood-pigeon. he said, " He would give them one when he
					could catch it." The following was well-intended and well-timed; having, amidst
					great applause, spared a gladiator, on the intercession of his four sons, he
					sent a billet immediately round the theatre, to remind the people, " how much it
					behooved them to get children, since they had before them an example how useful
					they had been in procuring favour and security for a gladiator." He likewise
					represented in the Campus Martius , the
					assault and sacking of a town, and the surrender of the British kings, See before, c. xvii. Described in c. xx. and note. 
					presiding in his general's cloak. Immediately before he drew off the waters from
					the Fucine lake, he exhibited upon it a naval fight. But the combatants on board
					the fleets crying out, "Health attend you, noble emperor! We, who are about to
					peril our lives, salute you;" and he replying, "Health attend you too," they all
					refused to fight, as if by that response he had meant to excuse them. Upon this,
					he hesitated for a time, whether he should not destroy them all with fire and
					sword. At last, leaping from his seat, and running along the shore of the lake
					with tottering steps, the result of his foul excesses, he, partly by fair words,
					and partly by threats, persuaded them to engage. This spectacle represented an
					engagement between the fleets of Sicily 
					and Rhodes ; consisting each of twelve
					ships of war, of three banks of oars. The signal for the encounter was given by
					a silver Triton, raised by machinery from the middle of the lake. With regard to religious ceremonies, the administration of affairs both civil and
					military, and the condition of all orders of the people at home and abroad, some
					practices he corrected, others which had been laid aside he revived; and some
					regulations he introduced which were entirely new. In appointing new priests for
					the several colleges, he made no appointments without being sworn. When an
					earthquake happened in the city, he never failed to summon the people together
					by the praetor, and appoint holidays for sacred rites. And upon the sight of any
					ominous bird in the City or Capitol, he issued an order for a supplication, the
					words of which, by virtue of his office of high-priest, after an exhortation
					from the rostra, he recited in the presence of the people, who repeated them
					after him; all workmen and slaves being first ordered to withdraw. The courts of judicature, whose sittings had been formerly divided between the
					summer and winter months, he ordered, for the dispatch of business, to sit the
					whole year round. The jurisdiction in matters of trust, which used to be granted
					annually by special commission to certain magistrates, and in the city only, he
					made permanent, and extended to the provincial judges likewise. He altered a
					clause added by Tiberius to the Papia-Poppaean law, See
						before, AUGUSTUS, c xxxiv. which inferred that men of sixty years of
					age were incapable of begetting children. He ordered that, out of the ordinary
					course of proceeding, orphans might have guardians appointed them by the
					consuls; and that those who were banished from any province by the chief
					magistrate, should be debarred from coming into the City, or any part of
						 Italy . He inflicted on certain
					persons a new sort of banishment, by forbidding them to depart further than
					three miles from Rome . When any affair
					of importance came before the senate, he used to sit between the two consuls
					upon the seats of the tribunes. He reserved to himself the power of granting
					license to travel out of Italy , which
					before had belonged to the senate. He likewise granted the consular ornaments to his Ducenarian procurators. From
					those who declined the senatorian dignity, he took away the equestrian. Although
					he had in the beginning of his reign declared, that he would admit no man into
					the senate who was not the great-grandson of a Roman citizen, yet he gave the
					"broad hem" to the son of a freedman, on condition that he should be adopted by
					a Roman knight. Being afraid, however, of incurring censure by such an act, he
					informed the public, that his ancestor Appius Caecus, the censor, had elected
					the sons of freedmen into the senate; for he was ignorant, it seems, that in the
					times of Appius, and a long while afterwards, persons manumitted were not called
					freedmen, but only their sons who were free-born. Instead of the expense which
					the college of quaestors was obliged to incur in paving the high-ways, he
					ordered them to give the people an exhibition of gladiators; and relieving them
					of the provinces of Ostia and
					[Cisalpine] Gaul , he reinstated them in
					the charge of the treasury, which, since it was taken from them, had been
					managed by the praetors, or those who had formerly filled that office. He gave
					the triumphal ornaments to Silanus, who was betrothed to his daughter, though he
					was under age; and in other cases, he bestowed them on so many, and with so
					little reserve, that there is extant a letter unanimously addressed to him by
					all the legions, begging him "to grant his consular lieutenants the triumphal
					ornaments at the time of their appointment to commands, in order to prevent
					their seeking occasion to engage in unnecessary wars." He decreed to Aulus
					Plautius the honour of an ovation, To reward his able
						services as commander of the army in Britain . See before, c. xvii. going to meet him at
					his entering the city, and walking with him in the procession to the Capitol,
					and back, in which he took the left side, giving him the post of honour. He
					allowed Gabinius Secundus, upon his conquest of the Chauci, a German tribe, to
					assume the cognomen of Chaucius. German tribes between the
							 Elbe and the Weser , whose chief seat was at Bremen , and others about Ems or Luneburg . His military organization of the equestrian order was this. After having the
					command of a cohort, they were promoted to a wing of auxiliary horse, and
					subsequently received the commission of tribune of a legion. He raised a body of
					militia, who were called Supernumeraries, who, though they were a sort of
					soldiers, and kept in reserve, yet received pay. He procured an act of the
					senate to prohibit all soldiers from attending senators at their houses, in the
					way of respect and compliment. He confiscated the estates of all freedmen who
					presumed to take upon themselves the equestrian rank. Such of them as were
					ungrateful to their patrons, and were complained of by them, he reduced to their
					former condition of slavery; and declared to their advocates, that he would
					always give judgment against the freedmen, in any suit at law which the masters
					might happen to have with them. Some persons having exposed their sick slaves,
					in a languishing condition, on the island of Aesculapius, This island in the Tiber , opposite
						the Campus Martins, is said to have been formed by the corn sown by Tarquin
						the Proud on that consecrated field, and cut down and thrown by order of the
						consuls into the river. The water being low, it lodged in the bed of the
						stream, and gradual deposits of mud raising it above the level of the water,
						it was in course of time covered with buildings. Among these was the temple
						of AEsculapius, erected A. U. C. 462, to receive the serpent, the emblem of
						that deity which was brought to Rome in the time of a plague. There is a coin of Antoninus
						Pius recording this event, and Lumisdus has preserved copies of some curious
						votive inscriptions in acknowledgment of cures which were found in its
						ruins, Antiquities of Rome , p.
						379. It was common for the patient after having been exposed some nights in
						the temple, without being cured, to depart and put an end to his life.
						Suetonius here informs us that slaves so exposed, at last obtained their
						freedom. because of the tediousness of their cure; he declared all
					who were so exposed perfectly free, never more to return, if they should
					recover, to their former servitude; and that if any one chose to kill at once,
					rather than expose, a slave, he should be liable for murder. He published a
					proclamation, forbidding all travellers to pass through the towns of Italy any otherwise than on foot, or in a
					litter or chair. Which were carried on the shoulders of
						slaves. This prohibition had for its object either to save the wear and tear
						in the narrow streets, or to pay respect to the liberties of the
						town. He quartered a cohort of soldiers at Puteoli , and another at Ostia , to be in readiness against any
					accidents from fire. He prohibited foreigners from adopting Roman names,
					especially those which belonged to families. See the note
						in c. i. of this life of CLAUDIUS. Those who falsely pretended to the
					freedom of Rome , he heheaded on the
						 Esquiline . He gave up to the senate
					the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia , which Tiberius had transferred to
					his own administration. He deprived the Lycians of their liberties, as a
					punishment for their fatal dissensions; but restored to the Rhodians their
					freedom, upon their repenting of their former misdemeanors. He exonerated for
					ever the people of Ilium from the
					payment of taxes, as being the founders of the Roman race; reciting upon the
					occasion a letter in Greek, from the senate and people of Rome to king Seleucus, Seleucus Philopater, son of Antiochus the Great, who being conquered by the
						Romans, the succeeding kings of Syria acknowledged the supremacy of Rome . on which they promised him
					their friendship and alliance, provided that he would grant their kinsmen the
					Iliensians immunity from all burdens. He banished from Rome all the Jews, who
					were continually making disturbances at the instigation of one Chrestus. Suetonius has already, in TIBERIUS, C. xxxvi., mentioned the
						expulsion of the Jews from Rome ,
						and this passage confirms the conjecture, offered in the note, that the
						Christians were obscurely alluded to in the former notice. The antagonism
						between Christianity and Judaism appears to have given rise to the tumults
						which first led the authorities to interfere. Thus much we seem to learn
						from both passages: but the most enlightened men of that age were singularly
						ill-informed on the stupendous events which had recently occurred in
							 Judea , and we find Suetonius,
						although he lived at the commencement of the first century of the Christian
						aera, when the memory of these occurrences was still fresh, and it might be
						supposed, by that time, widely diffused, transplanting Christ from
							 Jerusalem to Rome , and placing him in the time of
						Claudius, although the crucifixion took place during the reign of Tiberius.
						St. Luke , Acts xviii. 2, mentions
						the expulsion of the Jews from Rome 
						by the emperor Claudius: Dio, however, says that he did not expel them, but
						only forbad their religious assemblies. It was very natural for Suetonius to
						write Chrestus instead of Christus, as the former was a name in use among
						the Greeks and Romans. Among others, Cicero mentions a person of that name
						in his Fam. Ep. ii. 8. He allowed the ambassadors of the Germans to sit at the public spectacles in the
					seats assigned to the senators, being induced to grant them favours by their
					frank and honourable conduct. For, having been seated in the rows of benches
					which were common to the people, on observing the Parthian and Armenian
					ambassadors sitting among the senators, they took upon themselves to cross over
					into the same seats, as being, they said, no way inferior to the others, in
					point either of merit or rank. The religious rites of the Druids, solemnized
					with such horrid cruelties, which had only been forbidden the citizens of
						 Rome during the reign of Augustus,
					he utterly abolished among the Gauls. Pliny tells us that Druidism had its
						origin in Gaul , and was trnsplanted
						into Britain , xxi. 1. Julius Caesar
						asserts just the contrary, Bell. Gall.
							vi.13.11 . The edict of Claudius was not carried into effect; at
						least, we find vestiges of Druidism in Gaul , during the reigns of Nero and Alexander
						Severus. On the other hand, he attempted to transfer the Eleusinian
					mysteries from Attica to Rome . The Eleusinian
						mysteries were never transferred from Athens to Rome ,
						notwithstanding this attempt of Claudius, and although Aurelius Victor says
						that Adrian effected it. He likewise ordered the temple of Venus
					Erycina in Sicily , which was old and in
					a ruinous condition, to be repaired at the expense of the Roman people. He
					concluded treaties with foreign princes in the forum, with the sacrifice of a
					sow and the form of words used by the heralds in former times. But in these and
					other things, and indeed the greater part of his administration, he was directed
					not so much by his own judgment, as by the influence of his wives and freedmen;
					for the most part acting in conformity to what their interests or fancies
					dictated.