I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)

by Robert Graves

My readers must not therefore be surprised at my practised style: it is indeed Claudius himself who is writing this book, and no mere secretary of his, and not one of those official annalists, either, to whom public men are in the habit of communicating their recollections, in the hope that elegant writing will eke out meagreness of subject-matter and flattery soften vices.

In the present work, I swear by all the Gods, I am my own mere secretary, and my own official annalist:

It was a dull book, I repeat. I was in no position to criticize the Emperor Augustus, who was my maternal grand-uncle, or his third and last wife, Livia Augusta, who was my grandmother, because they had both been officially deified and I was connected in a priestly capacity with their cults; and though I could have pretty sharply criticized Augustus’s two unworthy Imperial successors, I refrained for decency’s sake. It would have been unjust to exculpate Livia, and Augustus himself in so far as he deferred to that remarkable and—let me say at once—abominable woman, while telling the truth about the other two, whose memories were not similarly protected by religious awe.

This is a confidential history. But who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity.

I came into the inner cavern, after groping painfully on all-fours up the stairs, and saw the Sibyl, more like an ape than a woman, sitting on a chair in a cage that hung from the ceiling, her robes red and her unblinking eyes shining red in the single red shaft of light that struck down from somewhere above. Her toothless mouth was grinning. There was a smell of death about me. But I managed to force out the salutation that I had prepared. She gave me no answer.

But her eyes were closed. My knees shook and I fell into a stammer from which I could not extricate myself.

He shall have hair in a generous mop. He shall give Rome marble in place of clay And fetter her fast with unseen chains, And shall die at the hand of his wife, no wife, To the gain of his son, no son.

The hairy third to enslave the State Shall be son, no son, of his hairy last. He shall be mud well mixed with blood, A hairy man that is scant of hair. He shall give Rome victories and defeat And die to the gain of his son, no son— A pillow shall be his sword.

The hairy fourth to enslave the State Shall be son, no son, of his hairy last. A hairy man that is scant of hair, He shal...

And die from a kick of his aged horse That carrie...

My grandmother—who was still only seventeen years old, nine years younger than Augustus—then went to my grandfather and said, “Now divorce me. I am already five months gone with child, and you are not the father. I made a vow that I would not bear another child to a coward, and I intend to keep it.” My grandfather, whatever he may have felt when he heard this confession, said no more than “Call the adulterer here to me and let us discuss the matter together in

It was in vain that Augustus protested that with other women he was a Hercules. Either she would refuse to believe it or she would accuse him of wasting on other women what he denied her. But that no scandal of this should go about she pretended on one occasion to be with child by him and then to have a miscarriage. Shame and unslakable passion bound Augustus closer to her than if their mutual longings had been nightly satisfied or than if she had borne him a dozen fine children. And she took the greatest care of his health and comfort, and was faithful to him, not being naturally lustful except of power; and for this he was so grateful that he let her guide and rule him in all his public and private acts.

Because, as the proverb says, “truth helps the story on”.

It is this. My grandmother Livia ingeniously consolidated her hold on Augustus by secretly giving him, of her own accord, beautiful young women to sleep with whenever she noticed that passion made him restless. That she arranged this for him, and without a word said beforehand or afterwards, forbearing from the jealousy that, as a wife, he was convinced that she must feel;

Mark Antony, she pointed out, was a man of strong passions, and to hold him successfully a woman must temper the chastity of a Roman matron with the arts and extravagances of an Oriental courtesan.

“Men such as Antony, real men, prefer the strange to the wholesome,” Livia finished sententiously. “

maggoty green cheese more tasty than freshly pressed curds.” “Keep your maggots to yourself,” Octavia flared at her.

“For a woman to overdress,” he said, “is unseemly. It is the husband’s duty to restrain his wife from luxury.

How many mere kings paid tribute to Augustus! How many were marched in chains in Roman triumphs!

Most women are inclined to set a modest limit to their ambitions; a few rare ones set a bold limit. But Livia was unique in setting no limit at all to hers, and yet remaining perfectly level-headed and cool in what would be judged in any other woman to be raving madness.

Augustus approved of Livia’s educative methods with Julia and of her domestic arrangements and economies. He had simple tastes himself. His palate was so insensitive that he did not notice the difference between virgin olive oil and the last rank squeezings when the olive-paste has gone a third time through the press. He wore homespun clothes.

The name “Livia” is connected with the Latin word which means Malignity. My grandmother was a consummate actress, and the outward purity of her conduct, the sharpness of her wit and the graciousness of her manners deceived nearly everybody. But nobody really liked her: malignity commands respect, not liking. She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings.

“Let them hate me,” he once said, “so long as they obey me.” He kept the colonels and regimental officers in as strict order as the men, so there were no complaints of his partiality.

Whenever he was in Rome now my father chafed at the growing spirit of subservience to Augustus that he everywhere encountered, and always longed to be back in arms.

Soon Rome would have forgotten what freedom meant and would fall at last under a tyranny as barbarous and arbitrary as those of the East.

He needs a rest. The natural generosity of his soul has been perverted by the anxieties of campaign. Those German forests are no place for a man sick in mind, are they, Tiberius? The howling of wolves gets on one’s nerves the worst, I believe: the lamenting of women he talks about was surely wolves.

I was a very sickly child—“a very battleground of diseases”, the doctors said—and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which should have the honour of carrying me off. To

But such was not the case. She did all for me that could be expected of her as a duty, but no more. She did not love me. No, she had a great aversion to me, not only because of my sickliness but also because she had had a most difficult pregnancy of me, and then a most painful delivery from which she barely escaped with her life and which left her more or less an invalid for years.

“You’re going to be locked up in a room with nothing to eat, Child,” said my mother.

“This is my opinion; and my further opinion is that Carthage should be destroyed: she is a menace to Rome.”