I, Lame*

The Story of My Name

Sculpture of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus at Vatican City. Photo by iam.os on Unsplash.com

*With apologies to Robert Graves.

Originally published on Medium on April 18, 2014.

I am Lame. There now, so it is written — so let it be known.

The people who don’t like me — and I know there are two or three of you hiding out there somewhere — won’t dispute that statement. They will agree that I am lame, if not in the literal, physical definition of the word, than in its street-slang sense.

What I mean though is I am lame in name. Literally.

And it was with a big dollop of humility that I came to learn this at age 50: the ancient Roman name Claudius, from which mine is derived, actually means “lame, crippled.” A librarian told me so. Librarians know everything.

I was born Claudio. My mother named me after the late great Italian opera singer Claudio Villa. (Sorry kids, but this was way before your time — before even The Beatles.)

When you grow up listening to Zeppelin and Rush, you tend to hide the fact that your namesake is some dude who melted your mom’s heart with his rendition of Granada. So you bury that part of your identity.

Except, I could never shed the baggage that came with my name.

Had I been named Claudius, after the great first century Roman emperor, I may have escaped all the slings and arrows of my young cruel peers. Claudius sounds regal, the kind of name you say with reverence.

But Claudio? It’s that last vowel, I think, and the poetic lilt of the three-syllable construction of my name that has proven the bane of my early existence. Indeed, it haunts me still.

I have been mistaken for Claudia, the more well-known name, once too many times. Which wouldn’t be so bad except for the times I get called that after I’ve spoken to someone on the phone. (Is my voice really that soft?) Or when a Facebook ‘friend’ addresses me, “Dear Claudia.”

It doesn’t help that my last name adds more feminization and confusion: “Hello Andrea.”

I had a cousin who derived great pleasure in calling me Cumulus many years ago. See, I was a chubby kid — “husky,” to use the euphemism of the day — and Tino thought it was the funniest thing that young Cloudio resembled a puffy mass of condensed water vapour floating in the sky.

So I grew up, taking on alternate nicknames — Clyde, Cly and the too-French Claude — just to get away from that beastly seven-letter albatross that felt wrapped around my neck like an obscene birthmark. Mostly, I go by just cd (always lowercase and no periods, just like the poet ee cummings). I thought, How much cooler can you be than taking on the identity of a product that’s used to store music?

Then I happened to talk to that librarian who noticed my name while helping me place a reserve on one item.

“Claudio eh?” she said. “My sister’s name is Claudia.”

The librarian went on to give an etymological lesson on my name. She said it was derived from the great Roman emperor Claudius and means lame because that’s what he was. According to Allan Massie’s 1983 book The Caesars, my namesake was “lame and awkward” and he “slobbered and stammered; not surprisingly he quite lacked self-possession.”

Claudius’s grandmother Livia detested him, Massie writes, and his step-grandfather Augustus felt the kind of “horror” he reserved for dwarfs or deformed people “whom he regarded as freaks of nature and therefore bringers of bad luck.”

The librarian told me her sister was named after the Italian sexpot Claudia Cardinale which was ironic considering her sibling’s sweeter disposition as a ballet dancer. The librarian had no qualms about letting me know that her own name — Marie Louise — means “bitter warrior”. Showoff.

So to learn that I am lame, or that my name means lame, comes as a numbing middle-age revelation. And to read a little bit of history about this most unlikely of emperors who inspired future opera singers, ballet dancers and me doesn’t help.

Massie said Claudius’s “physical and temperamental defects…made people think him an idiot.” Unlucky in love, he desired beautiful women who “were unlikely to be satisfied by his slobbering embraces.” He died, apparently, by being smothered after a failed poisoning attempt by a nurse of Agrippina, his niece and last wife.

Claudius’ ascension to the throne was no less exalting. Paul Roberts, in his A Pocket Dictionary of Roman Emperors, said he became emperor almost by chance after the assassination of Caligula. Soldiers found Claudius hiding behind curtains in the imperial palace and the Praetorian Guard, the emperor’s bodyguards, declared him emperor.

By most accounts, Romans did well under Claudius. He built new aqueducts, roads and canals. And his bookish intellectualism and scholarship is certainly something that appeals to me.

But all of that gets lost in the harsh glare cast by this stark black-and-white Wikipedia entry:

The historian Suetonius describes the physical manifestations of Claudius’ affliction in relatively good detail. His knees were weak and gave way under him and his head shook. He stammered and his speech was confused. He slobbered and his nose ran when he was excited. The Stoic Seneca states in his Apocolocyntosis that Claudius’ voice belonged to no land animal, and that his hands were weak as well.

Maybe Cumulus isn’t so bad after all.