Ah, it’s summertime and time for the proverbial summer
reading. So what do I, a teacher of ancient history and literature, do in the
summertime? Well, this year I decided to read two historical fiction novels about
the early
Roman Empire simultaneously:
I, Claudius
by Robert Graves and
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
The premise for I, Claudius is that it is the
long-lost autobiography of Emperor Claudius. In writing this book in the 1930s,
Robert Graves was attempting to represent the latest scholarly data on
Claudius. Claudius was a weak-legged man whose head shook and who spoke with a
stammer. Because of this, his nephew Caligula never viewed him as a threat, and
he survived Caligula’s reign while every other member of the royal family was
killed. However, as emperor, his symptoms improved and he claimed to have
exaggerated his malady in order to survive. Most ancient historians held a low
view of Claudius and didn’t seem to buy this excuse. However, writings of
Claudius, discovered in the early 1900s, show that he was an erudite and
scholarly man with extensive knowledge of history. By telling the story from
Claudius’s perspective we get to see both this private Claudius and the public
Claudius of the ancient historians.
Claudius begins his book by telling of how Augustus became emperor,
and of his grandparents and parents in that time period. The book continues
through his childhood during the reign of Augustus, his life under Tiberius and
Caligula, and finally through Caligula’s assassination and Claudius’s accession
to the throne. This covers the period from 31 BC to AD 41. The characters were
all well crafted, in addition to being real historic figures, and I really came
to sympathize with Claudius despite his numerous faults. Of course, the novel
is being written from Claudius’s perspective, so one must always wonder if
Claudius’s perspective is completely accurate in every situation.
Along the way Robert Graves takes numerous opportunities to
show the “true story” behind the commonly accepted history through various
conspiracies and plots. Part of my joy in reading the story was seeing these
little excursions. For example, when Augustus died, his nephew, Postumus, who
was in exile, was put to death. A few years later, a slave named Clemens
appeared in Rome claiming to be
Postumus and causing quite a stir until he was captured. In I, Claudius,
before he dies Augustus decides to pardon Postumus, and, to keep his actions
hidden from his wife Livia, he secretly goes to the island where Postumus is in
exile and switches him for the slave Clemens. Thus when Augustus dies it is
Clemens who is executed and the man who pops up in Rome
a few years later is the real Postumus. Because of these things, it is best not
to get your history from I, Claudius (one should never get one’s history
from historical fiction), but more importantly, I would suggest reading Tactius’s
Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars before
reading I, Claudius to get the maximum enjoyment out of all the inside
jokes.
Near the end of I, Claudius, we meet Marcus Vinicius,
one of the conspirators who join in the assassination of Caligula. The novel Quo
Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz opens under the reign of Nero around AD 64,
about 23 years after I, Claudius ends, and features the fictitious son
of the real Marcus Vinicius. This son, also named Marcus Vinicius, may be
fictional, but almost all of the other main characters in the story are real
people who were nobles in Rome in
the time of Nero.
Returning from the wars, Vinicius meets Ligia, the daughter
of a foreign king who was taken as a hostage when she was very young and has
been raised in the house of Aulis Plautius and his wife Pomponia. Vinicius
immediately falls in love with Ligia and decides he must have her. His friend Petronius
pulls some strings with the emperor and has her removed from Aulis’s
house and brought to the palace from which Vinicius plans to take her to his
house as a slave/lover. However, Ligia is a Christian, like her adoptive mother
Pomponia, and when she is on her way to Vinicius’s house a group of Christians
from the city surround the litter and carry her off to a secret and safe place.
Vinicius is enraged to be cheated of his woman and hires a Greek spy to find
out where she is so that he can get her back. This inevitably brings him into
contact with Rome’s Christian
community and even into contact with the apostles Peter and Paul.
I don’t want to say much more about the book for fear of
spoiling the plot. However, while this private drama is playing out, politics
are moving forward as well, and for those who know their history, this can only
lead to one thing: the burning of Rome
and the persecution and mass slaughter of Christians in the aftermath. And
though, like Vinicius, Ligia is a fictional character, the Christian Pomponia
as well as most of the other major characters are real. By the last quarter of
the book, there are some heart-wrenching and gruesome scenes to slog through,
made all the more difficult to read by the fact that similar things really did
happen in Nero’s Rome.
The two books, I, Claudius and Quo Vadis are
both superb examples of historical fiction. (Quo Vadis even won
Sienkiewicz the Noble Prize for literature.) I, Claudius is a more
sweeping story about the family of the emperor over the course of about 70
years, whereas Quo Vadis is a more intimate story centered on the
relationship between Vinicius, Ligia and the Christians in Rome.
It takes place all in the course of about a year with an epilogue that briefly narrates
the last few years of Nero’s reign. I, Claudius is plot-oriented and
fast-paced; Quo Vadis is more slow-moving and focused on characters
instead of events. I highly recommend both for those interested in a snapshot
of Roman culture in the first century.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves 5/5 stars
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz 4/5 stars
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