I, Clavdivs

I'm probably not alone in feeling a certain amount of shame because I haven't read this-or-that classic book. I've never read the Iliad, or any Charles Dickens, or even Beowulf, though I can't imagine how I got through high school without having to. This gnaws at me a certain amount because I think one would probably benefit from reading the books that helped to form the cultural background of the west. It's somehow expected of us that we should struggle through The Republic and Of Mice And Men and feel ourselves to be, if not edified, then at least duly chastened.

But I'm not good at reading classics. There's too much new stuff to read, and I'll just come out and say it - many classics are just flat hard to read, especially fiction. Classical histories remain as interesting to me as ever, though it's important to leaven them with more modern histories so we don't get too wrapped around the author's preconceptions. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, remains a classic, but its fundamental conclusions - that Rome fell as a consequence of "immoderate greatness" and "superstition" require a bit more thought. But classical fiction? Hrm. A while back I picked up a copy of Dickens in a Barnes & Nobles and couldn't even last through the five-minute no-guilt test-drive.

But yesterday I finally finished an old book that's been nagging at me seemingly for years. Years and years ago I watched the PBS/BBS production of I, Claudius (better known as I, Clavdivs) and liked it well enough - John Hurt makes a creepy Caligula, let me tell you, and I can't think about Sejanus without visualizing Patrick Stewart - and not long thereafter I bought the paperback of the Robert Graves novel that the show was based on. That was in, oh, about 1977. So thirty years later I finally finished reading the book, whose binding and glue were failing and which sprayed loose pages and flakes of the cover in all directions. Even more fun, it turns out that it's only the first book of two; it ends at the moment the praetorians make Claudius emperor and one has to read the second book, Claudius the God, to get the rest of the story.

What to say about it? I feel better that I've finally read this classic, though since it was first published in the 1930s it's not really that classical. And I find some of its historical assertions unlikely, such as the allegation that Augustus was nothing but an affable, easily-led buffoon who was manipulated from beginning to end by Livia. I don't doubt that Livia did her fair share of manipulating, but the idea that Augustus was a mild-mannered buffoon is, frankly, kind of silly. I also think the book overestimates the achievements of Germanicus (not his esteem, but his achievements) and denigrates Tiberius to the extent that he is given no credit for ending the Ponnonian and Dalmatian uprisings.

I guess what I'm saying is that the book hits all the proper historical notes, but the inflection is what varies. And I often disagree with the inflection. I'll cite but one example. When Augustus was very old and felt that he was near death, he started the process of transferring his authority to his adopted son, Tiberius. This was a complicated procedure that required the sending of many letters and proclamations, and once started, it could not be easily stopped. But then Augustus didn't die and started to get better! The Robert Graves version of what happened next is that Livia poisoned Augustus so that Tiberius, her son, would become emperor that much sooner. The modern historical take is that Augustus wished to die - one author once described the Roman preoccupation with suicide as being "gloomily fashionable" - and he and Livia arranged for Livia to poison him as a means of assisted suicide.

Does it matter? I guess not. Augustus is still dead either way, and Tiberius turned out to be an efficient monster in human skin either way. But it makes a difference to how one views Livia, and I just don't see her being the efficient and busy poisoner that Robert Graves says she was. But is it a good book? It's a good book. Not a page-ripper in the modern fashion, and after a while the names run together into a horrible Greco-Roman multi-car pileup and you end up being unable to determine who did what to whom (I'm pretty good with the immediate heirs of Augustus, but when you get past, say, Agrippa Posthumus, I start to lose power). But it's not bad. Not as fun to read as Conn Iggulden's historical novels about Julius Caesar, and written in a style that makes it less accessible than The Grass Crown, but it's okay.

But I do wish - oh how I wish - that Graves had not assumed that we're all idiots and changed various Roman terms into equivalent but unrelated English ones. Colonels for military tribunes, assegais for spears, captains for centurions, regiments for legions, "protectors of the people" for tribunes, gowns for togas, sword-fighters for gladiators, guardsmen for praetors, and no word at all for lictors.

But anyway.