Personally, I believe so. Claudius acted, at times, for the slaves and almost obeying their orders. Most ancient sources present him as a submissive idiot but they also ignore the good he did for the Roman Empire. I am aware of both but I still form a strong idea that Claudius was controlled by his freedmen. Freedmen were ex-slaves who were usually Greek. Their Roman master would often dismiss them for two reasons; firstly, even as an ex-slave, they still had to perform certain duties for their masters and secondly, once dismissed, the master no longer had to pay for the slaves to be kept and fed. Freedmen (and women) often remained under employment by their masters as they had the required skills and were skilled enough to complete them. This meant freed slaves gained a change in social status but not in job. Most Roman …show more content…
Suetonius was born in 69CE which was 15 years after Claudius’ death, this means that everything he says he got from other sources which were mostly unreliable. He also got a lot of his information from gossip which means many of his ideas are purely rumours. His writings are not in chronological order which makes them harder to understand and this is due to the fact he was aiming to write that of an instructional autobiography, not an explanatory history. Suetonius also wrote to fix the writing into his ideas of the black and white of good and bad. His focus on character and personalities make it harder in general to understand the events or get and explanation but may lend itself to finding out about Claudius and his freedmen. Suetonius was not all bad though, he used contemporary sources and was honest and accurate when reporting what was said by his sources. He also had personal experience in government and palace politics as well as understanding Roman religion well due to his life as a priest. There is also some evidence to support the ideas that he was neutral within his