Because now I am Emperor. Not by ambition—never that. By exhaustion. By the simple, brutal math of murder. They have run out of killers and victims, and only the "Claudius" remains.
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, that which was once thrown on the floor to die, now address you. They called me a fool, a stammerer, a cripple. They hid me behind the curtain during the massacres, believing I had neither the wit to understand nor the tongue to condemn. i claudia
I, Claudia—wife, mother, woman of a certain invisible age—stand at the window and watch the world walk past without me. Because now I am Emperor