Whose family was rather quite naughtius,
Their dispositions so cruel,
He would stutter and drool
To keep them from thinking him haughtius.
It's been a television miniseries, a radio play, a stage production, even an aborted movie starring Charles Laughton. So why not a limerick? I suppose not. You really need a goodly amount of space to tell the story of this runt who would become emperor, at least as it is related here in this fictional reconstruction of his life by Robert Graves, a British World War I veteran who was both a celebrated poet and a Classics scholar in civilian life.
This story is a cacophony of plots and counterplots ranging across more than three generations of a family with life-and-death command over the whole of the known world.
We open in the final years before the birth of Jesus Christ, a time of turbulent transition for the great city of Rome. The Roman Republic has been overthrown by the dictator Julius Caesar, who has paid with his life. After a bloody civil war, command has been assumed by Caesar's adoptive son, who takes the name Augustus Caesar and ushers in an age of absolute power. Holding that power requires skill, fortitude, and a great deal of ruthlessness, all of which Augustus has. His successors possess mostly the latter quality, making a rough life for Augustus's gentler great-nephew Claudius. Claudius secretly dreams of restoring the old Republic, a dangerous belief, but his club foot and a tendency to drool and stutter keep him safely in the shadows while the rest of his line kill each other and plot to be the last Roman standing.
"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 honor of carrying me off," Claudius tells us near the outset of the novel, thus drawing a parallel between his physical condition and his equally tenuous situation regarding the rest of the Imperial clan.
And what a clan! There's Livia, Augustus's wife, who connived not only to marry Augustus, but manipulated him and others through liberal use of poisons and various mischiefs to make sure her son Tiberius becomes Augustus's successor. There's Tiberius, whose crimes are so heinous Claudius blanches to tell much about them other than they involve catamites and much wanton killing. Then there's Tiberius's successor, Caligula, who scorns his early popularity by acting even more viciously than Tiberius, draining the Roman treasury in the process.
Graves presents the narrative in the form of a first-person account. Subtitled "From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born B. C. X, Murdered and Deified A. D. LIV," it is written as if Claudius was bearing witness to his family's legacy of evil and scandal. Claudius indeed tells us, early in the book, that he is not only taking the precaution of writing it in Greek, but plans to have it sealed up and buried in a lead casket so no one will find it for 1,900 years.
"And then, when all other authors of to-day whose works survive will seem to shuffle and stammer, since they have written only for to-day, and guardedly, my story will speak out clearly and boldly," Claudius writes in the first chapter.
The story that lives on today isn't quite Claudius' of course, and neither is it all Graves, either. No, the way most people know the I, Claudius story today is in the form of the 1976 BBC-TV production, starring Derek Jacobi as Claudius and Siân Phillips as Livia, which aired on American television for years, and was subsequently a big seller on video and, now, on DVD.
It's a fantastic show, ruthlessly enjoyable, and it set me up for a big fall when I first attempted to read this novel. For one thing, what you get here is only half the story covered in the miniseries, which also adopts Graves' 1935 sequel, Claudius The God. For another, there is the curiously distant way the story is told.
For long stretches of narrative, Claudius is just talking to us, telling us what happened in a conversational way, with a minimum amount of inter-character dialogue. The stories he tells are gripping, involving spurned romance, nasty backstabs, sexual misbehavior, and ritual suicides, but you are still getting them second-hand, so to speak. I was spoiled by the scenery-chewing likes of Brian Blessed as an avuncular Augustus, berating a group of unmarried Roman men as "murderers of their posterity;" or Patrick Stewart as the smug Praetorian prefect Sejanus making Claudius get a divorce and marry Sejanus's sister in order to strengthen Sejanus's own position with the Imperial family. Watching Captain Picard break the news that Claudius' current wife is preggers by another man is a trip.
Yet having these and other big moments retold in a more formal, less kinetic way is not so much of a loss once you grow accustomed to the formal narrative and the figure telling it.
The humor is remarkably droll, more so for the way Claudius tells it. Even if you weren't familiar with the BBC version, you would swear the guy had an English accent from the way he addresses such subjects as his unfortunate final marriage, to the woman who was mother of his eventual successor, Nero:
"This was practically the first time I had been in love with anyone since my boyhood, and when a not very clever, not very attractive man of fifty falls in love with a very attractive and very clever girl of fifteen it is usually a poor look-out for him."
There is also something to be said about the way Graves presents the character of Claudius. I don't know when I've read a book, other than Boswell's Life Of Johnson, where I felt I really knew the character as intimately as I did Claudius. He's a rare combination of frailty, likability, and extreme cunning, that last facet being something I rejoiced in more and more as he used it to stay alive. Experiencing the depravities of ancient Rome through his eyes affords both a visceral sense of life being lived at dire extremity and a comfortable quality of reminiscence tinged with regret. You come away from I, Claudius feeling it was something you didn't just read, but lived.
We open in the final years before the birth of Jesus Christ, a time of turbulent transition for the great city of Rome. The Roman Republic has been overthrown by the dictator Julius Caesar, who has paid with his life. After a bloody civil war, command has been assumed by Caesar's adoptive son, who takes the name Augustus Caesar and ushers in an age of absolute power. Holding that power requires skill, fortitude, and a great deal of ruthlessness, all of which Augustus has. His successors possess mostly the latter quality, making a rough life for Augustus's gentler great-nephew Claudius. Claudius secretly dreams of restoring the old Republic, a dangerous belief, but his club foot and a tendency to drool and stutter keep him safely in the shadows while the rest of his line kill each other and plot to be the last Roman standing.
"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 honor of carrying me off," Claudius tells us near the outset of the novel, thus drawing a parallel between his physical condition and his equally tenuous situation regarding the rest of the Imperial clan.
And what a clan! There's Livia, Augustus's wife, who connived not only to marry Augustus, but manipulated him and others through liberal use of poisons and various mischiefs to make sure her son Tiberius becomes Augustus's successor. There's Tiberius, whose crimes are so heinous Claudius blanches to tell much about them other than they involve catamites and much wanton killing. Then there's Tiberius's successor, Caligula, who scorns his early popularity by acting even more viciously than Tiberius, draining the Roman treasury in the process.
Graves presents the narrative in the form of a first-person account. Subtitled "From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born B. C. X, Murdered and Deified A. D. LIV," it is written as if Claudius was bearing witness to his family's legacy of evil and scandal. Claudius indeed tells us, early in the book, that he is not only taking the precaution of writing it in Greek, but plans to have it sealed up and buried in a lead casket so no one will find it for 1,900 years.
"And then, when all other authors of to-day whose works survive will seem to shuffle and stammer, since they have written only for to-day, and guardedly, my story will speak out clearly and boldly," Claudius writes in the first chapter.
The story that lives on today isn't quite Claudius' of course, and neither is it all Graves, either. No, the way most people know the I, Claudius story today is in the form of the 1976 BBC-TV production, starring Derek Jacobi as Claudius and Siân Phillips as Livia, which aired on American television for years, and was subsequently a big seller on video and, now, on DVD.
 |
| Derek Jacobi played Claudius in the BBC-TV adaptation of Graves' novel, and presented Claudius in much the way he appears in the book: Cursed by nature, shocked by the antics of his extended family, and somehow finding ways to stay alive. [Image from www.theguardian.com] |
For long stretches of narrative, Claudius is just talking to us, telling us what happened in a conversational way, with a minimum amount of inter-character dialogue. The stories he tells are gripping, involving spurned romance, nasty backstabs, sexual misbehavior, and ritual suicides, but you are still getting them second-hand, so to speak. I was spoiled by the scenery-chewing likes of Brian Blessed as an avuncular Augustus, berating a group of unmarried Roman men as "murderers of their posterity;" or Patrick Stewart as the smug Praetorian prefect Sejanus making Claudius get a divorce and marry Sejanus's sister in order to strengthen Sejanus's own position with the Imperial family. Watching Captain Picard break the news that Claudius' current wife is preggers by another man is a trip.
Yet having these and other big moments retold in a more formal, less kinetic way is not so much of a loss once you grow accustomed to the formal narrative and the figure telling it.
The humor is remarkably droll, more so for the way Claudius tells it. Even if you weren't familiar with the BBC version, you would swear the guy had an English accent from the way he addresses such subjects as his unfortunate final marriage, to the woman who was mother of his eventual successor, Nero:
"This was practically the first time I had been in love with anyone since my boyhood, and when a not very clever, not very attractive man of fifty falls in love with a very attractive and very clever girl of fifteen it is usually a poor look-out for him."
There is also something to be said about the way Graves presents the character of Claudius. I don't know when I've read a book, other than Boswell's Life Of Johnson, where I felt I really knew the character as intimately as I did Claudius. He's a rare combination of frailty, likability, and extreme cunning, that last facet being something I rejoiced in more and more as he used it to stay alive. Experiencing the depravities of ancient Rome through his eyes affords both a visceral sense of life being lived at dire extremity and a comfortable quality of reminiscence tinged with regret. You come away from I, Claudius feeling it was something you didn't just read, but lived.
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