A certain Adminius, who seems to have been a son of Cunobelinus, being expelled by his father, fled to the Roman camp in Germany with a small band of followers, and their humble supplications to the Emperor Caligula (37–41) caused that insane egotist to vaunt himself as the conqueror of Britain. A pompous epistle conveyed to the Senate the news of this great triumph, and the bearers thereof were especially charged to enter the city in a state-chariot and to deliver their important communication only in the Temple of Mars and to a crowded assembly. But the buffoonery of the nephew was to be followed by the serious labour of the uncle. The conquest of Britain was now nigh at hand. CHAPTER IV. THE ROMAN CONQUEST OF BRITAIN. In the year 41 after Christ’s birth the short madness of Caligula’s dominion over the world was ended by his assassination in one of the long corridors of the Palatine. His uncle Claudius, the despised weakling of the imperial family, dragged forth trembling from his hiding-place behind a curtain, and to his intense surprise acclaimed as Augustus by the mutinous Prætorians: this was the man for whom by a strange destiny was reserved the glory of adding Britain to the Roman Empire. Yet Claudius, for all his odd ways, his shambling gait, his shaking head, his stammering speech, was by no means the mere fool whom his relatives, ashamed of his physical deficiencies, had affected to consider him. He wrote in countless books the story of his imperial ancestors and his own; he knew the old Etruscan tongue, a knowledge, alas! now lost to the world, and translated treatises written therein; he cleared out the harbour of Ostia; he planted flourishing colonies; he brought water to Rome from the Æquian hills by the aqueduct which bears his name. Could the poor timorous old man have ventured to rely on himself, and to act on his own initiative, his name had perhaps been revered as that of one of the best emperors of Rome. It was his reliance on his wives and his freedmen, the government of the boudoir and the servants’ hall, which ruined his reputation with posterity.