I, Claudius
- May 26, 2016
- 1 min read
★★★★★
After reading Mary Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, I was more than ready to continue my foray into that world with I, Claudius. I knew enough about Claudius to know that he was considered an imbecile by his family (and most everyone else), what with his stammer and his limp, and that he came to power through either luck or fate and by no ambition of his own. What I didn't know, and what SPRQ largely skips over (perhaps because Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, which I have not yet read, more than accomplishes the task), was the sheer, unbridled, goes-to-eleven drama (sometimes delicious, oftentimes disturbing) that daily plagued the imperial family and anyone who was unlucky enough to come within sight of it—not to mention the ways in which all this lunacy trickled down and affected the average Roman citizen. And, through Robert Graves, we have "Poor Claudius," underestimated by his family, and lacking in both wealth and ambition, to thank for bestowing on us this outrageously entertaining and most operatic of histories.
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