Talk:Claudius
From Academic Kids
He is the only scholar to ever wear the purple.
Hmm...what about Marcus Aurelius? Adam Bishop 22:24, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)
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There is some excellent material on Claudius at:
http://www.romans-in-britain.org.uk/bio_claudius.htm
Points I would like to add to the topic include a mention of his possible mental deficiency, his reforms of the judiciary, pensions for soldiers and that his death is believed to be murder. However, I would like some additional sources to validate this information before I put it in.
I am also wondering if the material on various coups and the quote of his judgement of the Alexandians would be suitable to include or if it is just too much detail.
- To compare with the "competition", [1] (http://www.roman-emperors.org/claudius.htm) (without most of the point-by-point notes) has about the level of detail (and quality!) that we would like WP's article to have. Note that it cites a couple Claudius bios, which are "safer" than direct uses of the sources. Stan 12:01, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
a backwards 'C' to replace BS ?
- He also proposed a reform of the Roman alphabet by introducing three new letters: ... and a backwards 'C' to replace BS.
Can someone confirm this so called "BS", please ? Thanks. -- PFHLai 02:40, 2005 Jan 21 (UTC)
- It's genuine. Latin has a sequence BS (e.g. in urbs "city") that Claudius invented a letter (this one was called antisigma) for. It was written BS because it appeared where a morpheme ending in B (e.g., urb-, ob-) was added to a morpheme beginning with S (e.g. -s → urbs; -structus → obstructus). It was presumably pronounced /ps/, and creating a letter for the sound /ps/ would be in imitation of Greek Ψ. —Muke Tever 04:55, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
April 1?
Found some of his lost autobiography on April Fools day with no sources referenced? --Dante Alighieri | Talk 19:54, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)
- This is just stupid. I even remember some of those passages from I, Claudius.Kuralyov 00:47, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Farting
Is there a reliable source regarding this apparent pro-farting law that Claudius passed? It seems rather ridiculous that the Romans would have explicitly outlawed farting in the first place, but I suppose that wouldn't be strictly speaking necessary for Claudius to issue a proclamation in favor of it. This claim appears to be blatantly apocryphal, and even if true of very questionable relevance (we don't have any mention in the article regarding tax laws passed, for example). siafu 05:35, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- The sole source is Suet. Claud. 32 (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Claudius*.html#32.5), in the Loeb translation: "He is even said to have thought of an edict allowing the privilege of breaking wind quietly or noisily at table, having learned of a man who ran some risk by restraining himself through modesty." Not a "law", but an "edict" — which can mean anything; not "he promulgated" but "he is said to have thought of" (Dicitur etiam meditatus). The error is the same as the frequently repeated nonsense about Caligula's horse being consul: no, it was just something Suetonius says his subject was thinking of. I'm correcting the article, now that we've all had our fun. Bill 06:27, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
