conspired against it, and had Caligula's public statues discreetly removed. Claudius was chosen emperor by Caligula's Praetorian Guard and consolidated his position with cash payments (donativa) to the military. The Senate were forced to ratify the choice and accept the affront. Claudius adopted the cognomen Caesar, deified Augustus' wife, Livia, 13 years after her death and in 42 AD was granted the title pater patriae (father of the country), but relations between emperor and Senate seem to have been irreparable. Claudius showed none of Caligula's excesses. He seems to have entirely refused a cult to his own genius: but the offer of cult simultaneously acknowledged the high status of those empowered to grant it and the extraordinary status of the princeps – Claudius' repeated refusals may have been interpreted as offensive to Senate, provincials and the imperial office itself. He further offended the traditional hierarchy by promoting his own trusted freedmen as imperial procurators; those closest to the emperor held high status through their proximity. It has been assumed that he allowed a single temple for his cult in Britain, following his conquest there. The temple is certain – it was sited at Camulodunum (modern Colchester), the main colonia in the province, and was a focus of British wrath during the Boudiccan revolt of 60 AD. But cult to the living Claudius there is very unlikely: he had already refused Alexandrine cult honours as "vulgar" and impious and cult to living emperors was associated with arae (altars), not temples. The British worship offered him as a living divus is probably no more than a cruel literary judgment on his worth as emperor. Despite his evident respect for republican norms he was not taken seriously by his own class, and in Seneca's fawning Neronian fiction, the Roman gods cannot take him seriously as a divus – the wild British might be more gullible. In reality, they proved resentful enough to rebel, though probably less against the Claudian divus than against brutal abuses and the financial burden represented by its temple. Claudius died in 54 AD and was deified by his adopted son and successor Nero. After an apparently magnificent funeral, the divus Claudius was given a temple on Rome's disreputable Caelian Hill. Fishwick remarks that "the malicious humour of the site can hardly have been lost by those in the know... the location of Claudius' temple in Britain (the occasion for