Book of the Week

I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Recommended by Harry Shaw

I, Claudius by Robert Graves is a novel written about the life of Tiberius Claudius from his birth to the moment he becomes the Roman Emperor.

It is written as if it was an autobiography, so it contains more factual information than most novels would, especially in the first chapter of the book where he is describing his family.
Despite the less interesting but necessary first few chapters of the book, I both enjoyed reading it and learnt a lot about the Roman Empire and the people who ruled it.

Tiberius Claudius, born in 10 BC, was despised by his own family because of a birth defect which caused him severe illness and crippled him from a young age. Because of this, they dismissed him as an idiot and kept him away from important public occasions from fear that he would make a mistake in the ceremony and embarrass them. He was in fact more intelligent than many of his siblings and became an avid historian, writing several of his own books. For a while however, his intelligence wasn’t apparent to most people because of his unfortunate stutter which caused him much mockery and meant that he couldn’t fluently recite his work.

I, Claudius tells the story of how Claudius, who was always marked as a weakling, survived the poisonings of his grandmother, Livia, and the many executions during the reigns of his uncle and his mad nephew to become Emperor in 41 A.D. Robert Graves puts emphasis on the harsh nature of the Roman world and how one mistake in what you do or say could be interpreted as treason and result in a death sentence. The desire for power within Claudius’s family results in many poisonings and false accusations. Although most of the book is historically accurate, many of these outrageous actions which Graves portrays, are more down to his creativity and talent in fictional writing than definite historical fact. The exaggerated aspects of the book are what qualify it as a novel rather than simply an account of the life of Tiberius Claudius, keeping us captivated and reading on.

Much of the book is based around Claudius being a historian and chronicler himself, who supposedly is writing the book as an autobiography and the main source for people in the future to refer to concerning Imperial Rome. This also enables Robert Graves to write about Rome as it was, while still being able to retain its fictional nature. The idea is that Claudius was the only one out of all the emperors from that era who was both neutral and sane enough to write this kind of autobiography, since his uncle was too secretive and his nephew, Caligula, was too mad. This would be the main reason why Graves chose to write the book from Claudius’s point of view.

I would definitely recommend I Claudius, despite the first few chapters containing too much information to be able to remember later on in the book. If you keep reading on past this then you are rewarded with a well-crafted, interesting and enjoyable narrative .