I, Claudius From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Born 10 B.C.… (urspr publ 1934; utgåvan 1989)

It hasn't really taken me 16 months to read this...

The first book I've finished in our brand new year is I Claudius, the fictional autobiography of the accidental emperor of Ancient Rome, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus (10BC-AD54). I wanted to read it because of my interest in Ancient Rome (which I studied at university when I did Classics.)

For those of us of a certain age, it's impossible to read this book without remembering the characters from the 1976 BBC series starring Derek Jacobi. It's still available in various re-mastered editions, and it's still good entertainment despite showing its age in terms of special effects, scenery and costuming.

The book, however, is a bit arduous to read. My edition comes in at 395 pages, but the font is small and dense, and most modern editions are 450+ pages. Robert Graves (1895-1985) based his historical novel on real events in the early Roman Empire using Tacitus and Suetonius as sources, and he spares his readers no detail. Since the participants in the history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty were an ambitious lot, much given to disposing of rivals in a variety of duplicitous ways, they adopted alternative heirs and successors willy-nilly and made things harder to follow by being wilfully unimaginative in naming offspring with the same old names over and over again. Which is why, when I started this book way back in August 2019, I abandoned it at page 67 and watched the TV series on DVD to clarify who was what and which ones had been bumped off and why. I then progressed to page 177 but the book got moved off the coffee table to make way for 2019 Christmas revelry (which we were allowed to have in those pre-Covid days, remember?) And then I forgot about it, except when I looked at my Goodreads 'currently reading' status, where it dropped down lower and lower as other shiny new books took its place.

So in very late 2020 I had to start at the beginning again...

The take-home message, cleared of all the murders and plots and depravity, is that somehow Rome was by and large a stable society. Yes there were assorted 'barbarians' at the borders that needed to be quelled, but the enthusiasm for that was largely because soldiers and their leaders were handsomely rewarded. It's telling that when Claudius slinks off to his estate to avoid the horror of Caligula's lunatic reign, his slave Calpurnia is able to help him restore his financial fortunes. She hasn't needed to spend the money he gave her in return for her wise advice; it's there to help him out after Caligula has bled him dry. While the Senate is too craven to rein in any emperor's excesses, the ordinary people went on farming and selling produce and paying their taxes, largely free of the shenanigans in Rome.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/05/i-claudius-by-robert-graves/ ( )

I think for its time it was an achievement to put voice to this ancient cast of depraved tyrants, but I found it rather impersonal, repetitive. and dry. The narrative is clear, but there isn't much lyricism, humour, or dramatic detail. There are also a number of historical side bars that bog things down. Diagramming the complex royal family tree was the fun part. Published today, I doubt something like this would do very well. ( )

Written in first person with Claudius, the stutterer, as the narrator. This book portrayed the increasingly brutal and mad reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula. The least "impressive" of the caesars was Claudius. With several important people named Tiberias and Nero, it was a bit difficult to keep people straight. I actually had to pull a family tree off the net to follow along intelligently. Most of the time I don't really like to work that hard to follow along. 472 pages ( )

At a certain point it became unreadable for me. I made it 1/5th of the book, and I thought the book should have been renamed, 'Livia is the Devil'. I just got tired of it. There wasn't a moment when Livia wasn't doing something evil. "These demonstrations expressed not so much pity for Julia as hostility to Livia, who everyone justly blamed for the severity of Julia's exile and for so playing on Augustus' pride that he could not allow himself to relent." I get it! She's bad! Move on! ( )

This book has been languishing on my to-read pile for nearly two years, and when I saw it mentioned in [Among Others](https://books.rixx.de/reviews/2020/among-others), I was reminded of it and plunged into it. I'm a bit of a history nerd, but I never got too much into Roman history beyond the basics: Maybe nine years of learning Latin left me scarred, or maybe it just felt a bit icky because I mostly see military history fans being into it. Pre-imperial Rome is fun though, and then later East Rome, too, because who can resist a good collapse?

Whatever the case, I approached this book with a healthy dose of ignorance about Roman emperors. "I, Claudius" is the fictional diary of Emperor Claudius, one of the early Roman emperors, the last one to have known the great Augustus himself, and not exactly the designated heir. We follow his life only up to his ascension, which is interesting, well-written, with a healthy dose of unreliability and a lot of apparent research.

As far as I could figure out afterwards, Robert Graves did a ton of research and followed it, and just chose the most scandalous or fun interpretation when he could chose – and who could fault him, even with the amount of scandal? The book wasn't something that pulled me in, but it wasn't unpleasant either, and I definitely have a sense for the order and character of the early emperors, and their extremely tangled relationships to one another. ( )