This was a real donkey. I am willing to concede that I maybe just don't get this, because it seemed like the dullest, densest, least interesting mega-acclaimed book I've ever read. The only part that was vaguely interesting was the latter part, which has everything to do Caligula and nothing to do with Graves, who definitely wrote this as though it was a needlessly-detailed, meandering ancient text. Woof.

The 1976 BBC tv adaptation led me to this book, thankfully. I think an experience of both screen and text, in that order, gives the best experience one could yield from this very fine novel and its derivatives. (I highly recommend.) The tv show is very vivid and enlivened this reading: it puts colour into everything, and faces to the characters. Also, Jacobi's Claudius is wonderful and very likeable. My mental image of Claudius will forever be Jacobi's: the whole time I was reading this, I kept his image at the back of my mind. Claudius on-screen is an often-clueless, but honest, modest and affable fellow with more intelligence that he lets on. It is Claudius as he is, which is different from the novel which relies on Claudius' first-person point of view and, arguably, presents him as he sees himself--"garrulous, digressive, spiced with gossip and scandal ... strangely dispassionate and sober" (introduction by Barry Unsworth). In the adaptation he is truly "poor uncle Claudius" and elicits more sympathy, when the novel never realises much of that potential for pathos as an audience response. (It is however still very funny.) One also appreciates the wisdom of the selection of scenes, while happily discovering details which had been left out. Interestingly, several minor episodes only passingly mentioned in-text are elaborated more fully and given greater emotional and narrative significance. The characters on-screen are predictably more dilute and one-dimensional but that was probably inevitable. (Worthy of mention are Julia, who was presented as simply a young and superficial individual but who was much more than that, and Tiberius, whom the novel shows as made of less passive stuff. The novel has them in more substantial shapes.) In short, I am immensely pleased and will surely read this many times more.

I did not think I would like this tale of war and stammering and poison and Rome. There were far too many characters whose names seemed to blob together like one big drip of candle wax. And as soon as I thought I knew who one daughter of a brother of a possible emperor was they had been poisoned and so it didn't matter anymore. But as Claudius grew more bold and the Romans got more raunchy I decided "Hey now, these are some crazy guys in charge of this empire. And, boy, that is sure a time that I wouldn't have wanted to be around, rich or poor, nobility or slave." or something to that effect. And now at the end our lame historian is being carried around on the shoulders of Caligula's murderers and has been declared Rome's next emperor! I'll keep that sequel on my to read list. Yeah - it was good.

3.5