In that world of murderous power struggle, no one took him seriously as a rival, no one thought him worth killing. He was in fact regarded as little better than an idiot by the imperial family, and left to his own devices. "Cripple, stammerer, fool of the family," as he calls himself. Childhood illness left him with a permanent limp, he had a speech impediment that earned him general derision and he suffered from acute abdominal pains all his life. He was an outsider, always a good thing in a writer. No, Claudius is the only one in all that company who we can believe in as a chronicler, the only one who would have been capable of the detachment and introspection needed. His grand-uncle Augustus, founder of the Empire, was too much concerned with promulgating his own glory and establishing the central authority of the state to give us more than propaganda his cruel and gloomy uncle Tiberius was too secretive to make any kind of autobiographer it could hardly have been his demented predecessor Caligula, who believed himself to be a god, or the posturing and perverted Nero who followed.
Others lived there with him but none of them would have done.
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