Claudius the God (Claudius, #2)

by Robert Graves

He told of his shame at having sunk so low morally as to steal a Persian merchant’s riding-camel. However, he wrote, shame had soon turned to a feeling of virtue for having done the owner so signal a service: the beast being apparently the permanent home of seven evil spirits, each worse than the last. The merchant must have been incomparably relieved to have awakened one morning and found his treasured possession really gone, saddle, bridle, and all. It had been a most terrifying journey through the Syrian desert, the camel doing its best to kill him at every dry water-course or narrow pass that they came to and even sneaking up at night to trample on his sleeping body. He wrote again from Alexandria to tell us that he had turned the beast loose in Edom, but that it had stalked him with a wicked look in its eye all the way down to the coast.

Another leading senator that I degraded was Caligula’s horse Incitatus who was to have become Consul three years later. I wrote to the Senate that I had no complaints to make against the private morals of this senator or his capacity for the tasks that had hitherto been assigned to him, but that he no longer had the necessary financial qualifications. For I had cut the pension awarded him by Caligula to the daily rations of a cavalry horse, dismissed his grooms and put him into an ordinary stable where the manger was of wood, not ivory, and the walls were whitewashed, not covered with frescoes. I did not, however, separate him from his wife, the mare Penelope: that would have been unjust.

“as quick as boiled asparagus”.’

‘As easily as a dog squats’

‘There are more ways than one of killing a cat’

‘A radish may know no Greek, but I do’.

Germans are like briars on the edge of a field: they grow quickly and have to be constantly checked with steel and fire to prevent them from encroachment.

Search out Salabus’s main force, crush it and kill or capture Salabus. Chase him all round Africa if necessary. If he runs off inland to the country where they say that men’s heads sprout from under their armpits, why, follow him there. You’ll easily recognize him by his having his head in a different place.’

Vinicianus was one of those little rat-like men who have the same love for women of abundant charms as rats have for large pumpkins;

Wasn’t it Plato who wrote that the only sound excuse that anyone can offer for ruling is that by doing so he avoids being ruled by people inferior in talents to himself? There’s something in that.

‘Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.’

we have prepared a grand surprise for them, and we’re going to give them such a beating as they’ll never forget so long as they live – I don’t mean the chickens, I mean the British.’

One effect of this speech – which, you will agree, reads very poorly by comparison with the other one – was that ever since I made it the Ninth have been familiarly known not as the ‘Ninth Spanish’ (their full title) but as the ‘Ninth Snails’. The Twentieth, too, whose full title is ‘The Conquering Valerian Twentieth’ are known to other regiments as the ‘Drunken Lions’; and when a man of the Fourteenth meets a man of the Second they are now expected to salute each other as ‘Comrade Backbone’. The French auxiliaries are always known as ‘The Ribs’.

I rode forward to the brook on a steady old mare, none other than Penelope, the widow of ex-citizen and might-have-been Consul Incitatus, who had recently broken a leg on the race-track and had to be destroyed.

Joshua bar Joseph,

Of popular zombie fame.

what I objected to was disorderly competition between religious cults, their priests and missioners going from house to house in search of converts and modelling their persuasive vocabulary on that of the auctioneer or the brothel-pimp or the vagabond Greek astrologer.

Gotarzes was such a cowardly commander that his generals had to chain him to a tree to stop him from running away.

It is curious how appropriate some people’s names are. Gallus means cock, and Asinus means donkey, and Asinius Gallus was the most utter little donkey-cock for his boastfulness and stupidity that one could find in a month’s tour of Italy.

the names of constellations had been changed: even the stars that composed them were not immortal – since the time of Homer, for example, the seven Pleiades had become six through the disappearance of the star Sterope, or, as she was sometimes called, Electra.

Asinius Pollio was right: ‘It will have to be much worse before it can be any better.’ Decided: I shall not, after all, carry out my plan. The frog-pool wanted a king. Jove sent them Old King Log. I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log. The frog-pool wanted a king. Let Jove now send them Young King Stork. Caligula’s chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief. My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent. I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread. I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again. Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar. Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful. King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings. By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error. By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error. Violent disorders call for violent remedies. Yet I am, I must remember Old King Log. I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool. Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.