I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I used to be interested in Greek mythology and Roman history when I was about 11-15, but by now I have sadly forgotten everything, and my knowledge of Roman history before reading this book was pretty much confined to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and the Smiths line about 'Caligula would have blushed'. Luckily, there's no need to know much about Roman history to read this book, because it tactfully explains almost everything. It took me a while to get into it, and until the very end I kept getting tangled up in the relationships between characters who either have the same names or names derived from one another's. It's a rather dry book, meaning that there's very little emotion, and a lot of history, so it's very un-modern, I usually start reading a book written in the 1930s expecting a lot of emotion and psychic exploration, or else bitter satire. Actually what I liked best is Claudius's very subtle and dry humour, it feels like he's just past being horrified by all the terrible things going on, and can only cynically comment on them. I loved his grandmother Livia, who has a nasty habit of poisoning her near relations and husbands, or getting them banished to tiny islands. I also loved Claudius's clever prostitutes (strictly business) and the two senators who spend their time baiting and mocking Tiberius, for some reason those characters seemed really vividly alive to me. The depiction of the senseless cruelty of Caligula was really terrifying, but it's related in a masterfully resigned way. It feels like Claudius has just completely abandoned any hope and accepted the world as utterly mad, and doesn't even care about his own life. Several times he is on the point of being killed, but is very flippant about it. But overall, I don't think I really liked the book very much, it's very well-written and executed, but it's not really my thing. I kept sort of zoning out during some of the descriptions of military or political conflicts. I certainly now know a great deal more about Roman history, but I didn't enjoy it so much that I want to read the sequel.