Claudius was a Roman emperor. He was born in 10 BC and died in AD 54, and he ruled from AD 41 to 54. One big thing he did was bring Britain into the Roman Empire. People in his own time often treated him as weak or strange — he walked with a limp, and his words sometimes stuck — and some of his family did not take him seriously. Then he became emperor and stayed in power for years. The English writer Robert Graves wrote two well-known books about his life, and in 1976 Britain made a famous television series from them, called I, Claudius. When English speakers say Claudius, they usually mean this man, not just any Roman with that family name. It is a history-and-story name: textbooks, museums, and that TV title.