Claudius

Claudius was born at Lugdunum, the modern Lyon, on 1 August in the consulship of Iullus Antonius and Fabius Africanus, which is 10 BC (Suetonius, Claudius 2.1). The soldiers of the guard hailed him as emperor in his fiftieth year, on the day the emperor Gaius was murdered in AD 41, and he accepted the next day (Suetonius, Claudius 10). He died on 13 October AD 54, in the sixty-fourth year of his age and the fourteenth of his reign (Suetonius, Claudius 45), and was succeeded by Nero (Tacitus, Annals 12.69).

He appears in this history at four points. On his accession he gave Judea and Samaria to Herod Agrippa I (Josephus, Antiquities 19.274–275). The famine that Acts mentions fell in his reign (Acts 11:28). He ordered Jews to leave Rome, an order that brought Aquila and Priscilla to Corinth (Suetonius, Claudius 25.4) (Acts 18:2); see Claudius Expels Jews from Rome. And a letter of his, cut in stone at Delphi, mentions Gallio in words partly restored as “my friend and proconsul” and so helps to date Paul’s stay at Corinth (Gallio inscription (FD III 4, 286) lines 1–6).