8. The Family of Claudius

An unflattering likeness of Claudius based on the fragment of a statue found in England, and now at the British Museum in London.

Claudius married four times. All were pretty disastrous unions, but the last two were the worst. Messalina (bust at top) cuckolded him and was executed in 48 for plotting against him, while Agrippina (Agrippinilla, bust below), wicked daughter of his brother Germanicus (a change in the law made the union legal) was suspected of murdering him to make way for her
16-year-old son Nero. The coins link Agrippina with Claudius's power.

Claudius's son Britannicus 
as a boy and pictured on a coin, looking much older than his
14 years. Under pressure from Agrippina, Claudius passed over his son for the succession in favor of his step-son Nero, which effectively
  ensured Britannicus would never
  make his majority. His likeness
  would have be lost to history if it
  were not for his boyhood friend,
  Titus Flavianus, who would
  become the second of the
  Flavian Dynasty, who
  placed many statues of
  his lost friend around
  the Palatine Palace.

A mounted warrior of the Atrebates, armed with shield and spear, decorates a coin minted by the British client king Verica, whose ousting from Britannia offered Claudius a political excuse for an invasion.

King Antiochus IV of the Seleucid Dynasty. In AD 44 Claudius gave Antiochus Comagene in Asia Minor to rule as Legatus Augusti.