Book Review: Claudius the God by Robert Graves

Having taken, quite literally, decades to get around to read my copy of I Claudius, I took a mere handful of days to read this sequel. That’s how much I was impressed (or more accurately, turned) by Robert Graves’ first book. This book takes up where the first left off – with Claudius now emperor of the whole Roman Empire, and covers his thirteen years of rule before his death in in AD54.

Regular readers know, my key point for the success of any book is ‘do I care what happens to the characters after the last page is turned?’. With I Claudius the answer was very much ‘yes’. With Claudius the God the answer is kind of dealt with in the book (spoiler: there is no third book in this series for a good reason). With this book then, I was left with a sense of sadness. I liked cl-cl-claudius and his whimsical modesty. He doesn’t boast about his victories and he doesn’t try to excuse his faults. He portrays the events with a pursuit of honesty that is endearing.

Of course, this is all Graves’ imagination. It could be the real Claudius was horrific and perhaps as evil as his nephew, Caligula who preceded him and brought terror to all the citizens of Rome. But – and I acknowledge this may just be the author fooling me wholeheartedly – I trust Graves’ representation of Claudius. Certainly, the historical events are bang on every time. I checked often where there were events I had forgotten about from my wonky knowledge of Roman history or when I simply couldn’t believe things happened the way the narrator said they did. Sure enough, every time, Graves gets it right. That lends great weight to the idea this may be pretty close to what Claudius was really like.

All in all, Graves succeeds in making us sympathetic to this stuttering ‘fool’ of an emperor. He is wise, caring, clever but flawed in his trust of his wife. Nevertheless, we come away with the reasonable idea that he was a lot better than his predecessors. Graves gives this Claudius much more control over his eventual death than the historical records might suggest. This might be simply a literary device to bring the book to an appropriate close or it may be really what Graves thought happened. Either way, this Claudius, at the end, is world weary, tired, yet really quite content with his mark on the world. There’s something quite endearing in that. This Claudius, it turns out, is a hero after all. I like that thought.

My Verdict:

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

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