I, Claudius and Claudius the God

This text re-edits "I Claudius" and "Claudius the God" as part of the 21-volume Robert Graves Programme. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1998.
|...| From the back covers of the two books:

“ … the grandeur and folly and vileness of Imperial Rome.

Into the racy ‘autobiography’ of Clau-Clau-Claudius, the pitiful stammerer who was destined to become Emperor in spite of himself, Graves packs the everlasting intrigues, the depravity, the bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, soon to culminate in the deified insanity of Caligula.

|…| In the sequel to I Claudius a republican Roman Emperor writes the inside story of his reign.

Men classed Claudius as a pitiful fool. But the reign he describes is far from folly. Reluctantly launched into the purple, he emerges as a man who erred on the side of good nature and credulity. It is the common people and the common soldiers who sustain him in his efforts to repair the damage of Caligula’s reign, in his relations with the Jewish king, Herod Agrippa, his conquest of Britain, and his final reckoning with his promiscuous wife, Messalina.

In one of the finest historical reconstructions of the century Robert Graves has created a character to compare with Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin.”