Exactly so, but is not the story a little too complete to gain absolute credit? Is not the historian, justly indignant at the injustice done by Suetonius and others to Claudius, inclined to press down the balance too heavily in his favour? After all, Suetonius says there was no resistance or bloodshed, and that really is much the more probable story. We all know that Claudius, the deformed child who was regarded as an imbecile, the coward who hardly dared to accept power when it was thrust upon him by the Prætorians, showed a remarkable genius for administration, and had the ambition to imitate Augustus. He might easily have been a great general in spite of his gluttony, his vice, and his cruelty. For all that, this rapid entry into Colchester, combined with what we know of his delight in shows, and with the suspicious fact that he brought his elephants with him, gives the whole affair an air of pre-arrangement The chances are that Aulus Plautius did the work and that Claudius took the credit. Certainly he returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph in great style; and on his arch of triumph is an inscription (largely conjectural now) which, says Merivale, shows the estimation in which his exploits were held. It is much more likely to show the view which Claudius wished to be taken, for the incestuous, gluttonous, cowardly, and yet politically sagacious Emperor, had a pretty style in prose. Of course it is just possible that Plautius was doing but ill over his campaign, and that the Emperor with his elephants--tradition says that the Britons were very much afraid of them--turned the scale; but the probability is that the whole affair was what they call a "put-up thing" on the far side of the Atlantic, and that the elephants were brought over simply for the sake of pomp and circumstance.