"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves

When is a novel not a novel? On the whole, I dislike rules. They tend to become rigid. When Christopher Booker postulates that there are Seven Basic Plots his thesis becomes so fossilised that he dismisses James Joyce's Ulysses as an inadequate story. The definition Jane Smiley uses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel is that a novel is "a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” By this definition, I, Claudius is clearly a novel. And yet I felt there was some key ingredient lacking.

I, Claudius is a retelling of the story of the first three emperors of Rome, as narrated by the fourth, Claudius. It is fundamentally a fictionalised history and, as such, is limited by the need to follow the facts. And as historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1957: "History is just ‘one damned thing after another’". This meant that the narrative, covering fifty incident-packed years, was immensely cluttered with details and events and anecdotes, and I lost any sense of pattern or theme. Characters came and went (often being put to death) so fast that I found it very difficult to empathise with any of them. Perhaps inevitably, given the scope of the book, the narrative distance was far off, like a long (far too long!) establishing shot in a film, and this further reduced my ability to empathise. Finally, the first person narration meant that what focus existed was on Claudius so the subsidiary characters became mere puppets. Lots of people died but it didn't affect me because I didn't care for any of them.

As Claudius says of another historian: "He had no critical sense and wrote miserably, the facts choking each other like flowers in a seed-bed that has not been thinned out." (Ch 5)

This changed in the last few chapters which deal with the assassination of Caligula. Here the pace slowed down, the focus became much closer, and I started to get involved. But that was the exception.

There are other moments through the book when the focus becomes close and individual conversations are reported and they stood out like cherries in stodge (even if one of them was a somewhat academic discussion of the nature of history).

It made me wonder how Tolstoy managed to get people involved with his characters in War and Peace and I think that his secret was to have a small core cast of characters, a third person 'omniscient' narrator, and to tell his story (even the battle) almost entirely through close focus scenes. 

In short, I didn't think I, Claudius worked as a novel and I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. 

Selected quotes:

• "Others prophesy, indeed, but seem more inspired by Bacchus than by Apollo, the drunken nonsense they deliver" (Ch 1)
• "With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy, and every other un-Roman vice." (Ch 1)
• "Augustus ruled the world, but Livia ruled Augustus." (Ch 2)
• "She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings." (Ch 3)
• "The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again." (Ch 3)
• "He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about." (Ch 5)
• "The Empire was very big and needed more officials and senior army officers than the nobility and gentry were able to supply, in spite of constant recruiting to their ranks from the populace. When there were complaints from men of family about the vulgarity of these newcomers, Augustus used to answer testily that he chose the least vulgar he could find." (Ch 7)
• "The cleverest leader is one who chooses clever people to think for him." (Ch 7)
• "You can always tell a Paduan. By bathing in the water of the spring or drinking it – and I’m told that they do both things simultaneously – Paduans are able to believe whatever they like and believe it so strongly that they can make anyone else believe it. That’s how the city has got such a wonderful commercial reputation." (Ch 9)
• "There are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth." (Ch 9)
• "The tax-collector exercised his right of seizing good-looking children from the villages which could not pay and carrying them off to be sold as slaves." (Ch 11)
• "To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration." (Ch 12)
• "As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned." (Ch 22)
• "My mother had always been very economical, and in her old age her chief delight was saving candle-ends and melting them down into candles again, and selling the kitchen refuse to pig-keepers, and mixing charcoal-dust with some liquid or other and kneading it into cakes which, when dried, burned almost as well as charcoal." (Ch 27)
• "All theatre-pieces are much the same except to connoisseurs" (Ch 30)
• "Mad, Caesar? You ask whether I think you Mad? Why, you set the standard of sanity for the whole habitable world." (Ch 32)
• "‘It’s a very difficult thing, you know, Claudius,’ he said confidentially, ‘to be a God in human disguise'." (Ch 32)

November 2021

As a history of Rome it reminded me of Livy's Early History of Rome which is full of exhausting detail. If you want to read about the Roman emperors read Suetonius The Twelve Caesars or the brilliant Dynasty by Tom Holland.

I, Claudius, together with its sequel, Claudius, the God, won the 1934 James Tait Black memorial prize. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the hundred best novels since Time began (1923)

Other reviews:

• Annie on goodreads described it as an "endless, joyless recitation of facts and events"
• Peter on goodreads says that "Robert Graves does a great literary impersonation of a rambling bore"
• Taka on goodreads calls it "432 pages of dense and complicated Roman history, 98% of which is told in a narrative instead of rendered in scene".
• lethe on goodreads described it as "all telling, not showing"
• Isaac Cooper on goodreads abandoned it. "The marriages, cousins, uncles, wives, divorces, conspiracies and characters are shot at you one after the other. ... Claudius recounts the various exploits of Rome like he’s merely ticking off a checklist."

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God