Claudius The God: And His Wife Messalina

by Robert Graves

Nobody can, in my opinion, make a hard-and-fast pronouncement that one form of government is essentially better than another.

I could.

The suitability of each form depends on the temper of the people, the capacity of the ruler or rulers, the geographical

True.

“Please, dear Brigand, let me have it.” “My advice to you, old fellow, is this: never trust anyone! Never trust your most grateful freedman, your most intimate friend, your dearest child, the wife of your bosom, or the ally joined to you by the most sacred oath. Trust yourself only. Or at least trust your own fool’s luck, if you can’t honestly trust yourself.”

And my own advice to you, my friend Silas, is never to remind people of services that you have done them in times past. If they are grateful and honourable men they will not need any reminder, and if they are ungrateful and dishonourable the reminder will be wasted on them.’

The discovery that religion is a marketable commodity like oil, figs or slaves was first made at Rome in late Republican times, and steps had been taken to check such marketing, but without great success. There had been a notable breakdown in religious belief after our conquest of Greece, when Greek

philosophy spread to Rome. The philosophers, while not denying the divine, made such a remote abstraction of it that a practical people like the Romans began to argue: “Very well, the Gods are infinitely powerful and wise but also infinitely remote. They deserve our respect and we will honour them most devotedly with temples and sacrifices, but it is clear that we were mistaken in thinking that they were immediate presences and that they would bother to strike individual sinners dead or punish the whole city for one man’s crime, or appear in mortal disguise. We have been mistaking poetical fiction for prose reality. We must revise our views.”

I think that every nation ought to worship its own gods in its own way (so long as it is a civilized way) and not idly adopt exotic deities. As high priest of Augustus I have had to accept him as a god; and after all the demi-god Romulus was only a poor Roman shepherd to begin with, and probably far less gifted and industrious than Augustus.

if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god. And if a god ceases to be worshipped he is nothing.

But no claim is stronger than that of arms; for everyone who possesses superior force always appears to have the greater right on his side,

Mmmmm. No.