Claudius (10 BC – 54 AD)
A stuttering, limping, and often dribbling aristocrat (we think he may have suffered from cerebral palsy), in the poisonous, image-obsessed environment of the imperial court, Claudius was forced to wear his flaws on his sleeve. He’d been a prominent public figure during the reign of his nephew, Caligula. But prominence didn’t equate to respect, and Claudius often found himself the butt of jokes. Arriving late for banquets, he would be made to circle the room several times before being offered a seat. He would also routinely fall asleep after gorging himself and food and wine, only for people to throw olive stones at him and put slippers on his hands (so that waking up he would rub his face with them).
When it came to gluttony, nothing much changed after the Praetorian Guard declared Claudius their emperor in 41 AD after Caligula’s execution. He would never leave a banquet without being unable to move through the amount of food and wine he’d consumed and would carry on his alcoholic/narcoleptic tendencies of passing out post-feasting. After gorging himself half to death he would fall asleep on his back with his mouth wide open, and could only be induced to drink after a white feather had been waved down his throat and he’d been made to vomit.
Like Mark Antony, Claudius also gives us an example of an ancient figure harnessing the anesthetizing effects of alcohol. In 48 AD, Claudius’s wife Messalina publically married her senatorial lover Gaius Silius while the emperor was away on business. News of what had happened quickly spread and Claudius rushed back to the capital to nip this coup d’état in the bud. Silius was put immediately to death but Messalina was merely imprisoned. She implored her guards to let he see her (ex-) husband but, taking power into their own hands, Claudius’s advisors had Messalina summarily executed. The emperor’s only response: to ask for his wine goblet to be refilled.
Although Claudius suffered from poor health as a young and middle-aged man, it markedly improved when he became emperor. We are told, however, that he suffered from a persistent stomach complaint—one so bad it even drove him to consider suicide—which some suggest came from regular heavy drinking. Claudius died in 54 AD, at the age of 54. But it wasn’t the drink that got him in the end but the food: poisoned mushrooms specifically, surreptitiously administered by his wife, Agrippina, and her spoiled bratty son, Nero.