Abstract: Robert Graves’s Claudius novels represent an essential case study for Classical Reception, in that they represent a successful reshaping of the reception of a Roman Emperor in the twentieth century via historical fiction. Despite their insistence in keeping to the classical sources, both their didactic enterprise and their context of production are evident at certain nodal points. Robert Graves himself had consistent didactic motivations throughout his career, which we will review as we consider who the potential readers of Claudius were, and what they might have known, heard, or absorbed about Claudius as a historical figure of some cultural standing. First, we go over portrayals of the emperor through the ages, then we go into the didacticism embedded in the books. From there, we take the immediate historical context into account, delving into the unrest of 1930s Europe and how that might have bled into the text and its interpretations, particularly in Germany and Italy. In order to do this, we have drawn from relevant scholarly debates about historical novels in the 1930s as well as Graves’s own journals. The final section of the article analyses the section of Claudius dealing with Herod Agrippa and how that might have been affected by the immediate cultural and political climate of antisemitism.

Keywords: Claudius Novels, Classical Reception, Didacticism, Historical Novel in the 1930s

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Introduction

This article will focus on the audience that made the Claudius novels best-sellers — the general public. Although Robert Graves’s historical novels had at least a dual audience, and definitely accounted for a highly specialized reader, the text can also serve as an entry point to Roman History. The educational purpose of the Claudius novels shines through both in particular moments and in editorial decisions.

In order to further our understanding of how the text interacts with its readers, we first must conduct a brief survey of what readers might have known about the figures and the history approached. To do that we need to review the main streams of reception available to the dual audience, the first of which was an unspecialized, educated public. The generalization must be forgiven as readers of best sellers can hardly ever be categorized. I do believe Graves erred on the side of caution and clarity by including para- and peritexts which Andrew Bennet has characterized as ‘insouciant’.[1] Graves also included his own translation of the Apocolocyntosis as an appendix to Claudius the God, as a taste of an authentically classical work.

In any case, the first part of this article is concerned with the main projections of Claudius as carried through history. Those projections are by no means an account of a scholarly tradition, but rather what culturally might have been present (consciously or not) in the public’s historical imagination about Emperor Claudius, as well as what the most recent developments in academia had been regarding consensus around Claudius. These cultural assumptions we will investigate as horizons of expectation in the second part of the article, once we have discussed Graves’s educational tools apparent in the Claudius novels and the affective properties of narrativization.

Finally, we will examine signs in the text of the age in which it was composed, the early 1930s. At key moments, those signs become pellucid in their plea to readers. Here, we will describe how Graves’s didacticism expands into ethical digression, and how he sought to influence the politics of his reading public.

Claudius Through the Ages

The reception of Claudius needs to be examined if we wish to speak of Graves’s Claudius either as counterpoint or alternative to existing traditions. As mentioned above, it is not this work’s objective to gather a complete history of the figure of Claudius, only to point to representations as they affected the Robert Graves novels. In this section, the goal is even more modest: we shall go over only the hypothetical cultural refractions of Claudius a reader could have encountered before picking up I, Claudius, and how Graves sets about dispelling (or condoning) those images.

As Pumpkin

The representation of Emperor Claudius as a pathetic despot who cannot stop stuttering is owed in great part to Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis.[2] The Stoic philosopher resented Claudius for his second exile, and composed this imaginative katabasis anonymously after his death. Despite the debate surrounding its authorship, the Apocolocyntosis has been attributed to Seneca for so long it is as connected to his own historical reception as that of the emperor. And that is only the first difficulty of the Ludus de Morte Claudii, since nobody knows exactly what apocolocyntosis might mean apart from an obvious pun with apotheosis (Claudius was deified after passing away) and an association with a type of gourd-like pumpkin. The text sees ridiculous, misshapen, staggering Claudius present himself to the Counsil of gods for his deification, only to be denied apotheoses by an accusatory Augustus, who lists his crimes and persecutions. The gods proceed to turn him into the titular vegetable.

It would be remiss to ignore the associations between Claudius’s disability and his incompetence, especially given the dehumanizing weight of words such as monstrum. This is the scene in the beginning when Hercules finds a confused creature wandering about heaven:

He seemed to be uttering some threat or other because he kept on shaking his head; and when he walked he dragged his right foot. He had been asked his nationality and had answered in a confused nervous manner, and his language could not be identified. It was not Greek or Latin or any other known speech. Jove told Hercules, who had once travelled over the whole earth and so might be expected to know all nations in it, to go and find out where the stranger came from. Hercules went, and though he had never been daunted by all the monsters in the world, he really got quite a shock at the sight of this new sort of creature, with its curious mode of progression and its raucous inarticulate voice, which was like that of no known terrestrial animal but suggested some strange beast of the sea. Hercules thought that his Thirteenth Labour was upon him. However, he looked more closely and decided that it was some kind of a man. (p. 518)

Taking this into account, one of the most attractive interpretations of the Apocolocyntosis comes from Baldwin,[3] who argued that Claudius uses his disability to his favour — his bizarreness offered a comedic distraction from his very serious crimes. In that way, the Ludus de Morte Claudii is a counterpoint to Aristotelian Poetics:[4] tragedy can, in fact, speak about unserious characters to a point, as the text sees Claudius get a happy ending sorting through red tape and pushing papers in hell.

Claudius the God includes Graves’s translation of the Apocolocyntosis as an appendix, located right after a section that also features Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio, titled ‘Three Accounts of Claudius’s Death’. [5] It is possible that, by arranging it in such a manner, the author was distancing himself from the allegations made by the Pumpkinification. It is worth noting, too, that biographer Seymour-Smith includes a significant portion from Graves’s diary from 1929, in which he sketches out an idea for ‘a historical romance or interpretative biography’ titled The Emperor Pumpkin. [6] In it, he would attribute the Apocolocyntosis not to Seneca, but to Claudius himself: a rather ingenious idea. This could perhaps be a marginally viable interpretation, though I would not defend it given all of the other proposed deviances (Agrippina does not kill Claudius, the emperor’s doctor has a reduced role, Britannicus does not agree to his father’s plan, etc.) seem to have been discarded.

The book, moreover, does not let Seneca have the last word (as he has had the first). Right after the Apocolocyntosis closes, without so much as a page break, the reader is immediately reminded that ‘Seneca was forced to commit suicide in AD 65 at Nero’s orders. He survived most of the other characters in this story’ before moving on to more relevant prolepses. That is because Seneca is not nearly as important to Claudius as Claudius was to Seneca. For this reason he is hardly ever present in Claudius the God and not even a character in I, Claudius. What’s more, Seneca’s narrative function is mostly comic relief relating to his intrusive adulation, which is vouched for in a text we can be sure was authored by him, the Consolation of Polybius (also partly translated by Graves in the text).

Elsewhere,[7] I have analysed Seneca’s portrayal in Claudius the God and argued that, by relegating Seneca to the background and treating him as a sycophant, Graves was writing an apocolocyntosis of the author of Ludus de Morte Claudii. We might say that the Claudius novels, though largely sympathetic to Claudius, do not absolve him of his great errors of judgement, or what Claudius deems as errors by the end of the second book. When it comes to Seneca, however, Claudius is either justified or absolved — in fact, the emperor comes to embody stoic principles of resignation to fate much more intently than the philosopher, whose stoicism only comes up in contrast to his opulence. Despite that, we do get frequent allusions to pumpkins in Claudius the God (‘Are we to allow a creature as weak-minded as this pumpkin-headed Clau-Clau-Claudius to rule over us?’). Pumpkins are even mentioned in relation to stoicism:

Old Athenodorus used to explain to me the Stoic idea of God: God was a perfectly rounded whole, immune from accident or event. I always pictured God as an enormous pumpkin. Ha, ha, ha! If I eat any more of this goose and drink any more of this wine I’ll become pumpkinified too.[8]

In a way, this really spells it out for the reader that the inclusion of the Senecan appendix suggests a much closer association between apotheoses (deification) and apocolocyntosis (pumpkinification) than Seneca might have expected. After all, as the novel reminds us, one cannot avoid becoming a god if one is worshipped as a god — that is Roman mentality. Graves’s novel suggests that Claudius, at this point, becomes a pumpkin because he had become a god. This happens in the context of Messalina’s death, which is Claudius’s personal anagnorisis, and after which he relegates his decisions to fate, which he also views in a particularly stoic manner.

But there is even more to this. The direct reference to tragedy and turning into one’s own food is a form of apotheosis, too: as Jan Kott describes in his The Eating of the Gods, ‘the first human beings grew out of the Earth, like plants’.[9] He even cites Graves’s depiction of the Dionysian myth: ‘But later Orphic priests, who wore Egyptian costume, called the demi-god whose raw bull’s flesh they ate “Dionysus.”’[10]

Kott cites Plutarch’s De E Delphico analysis (where the biographer is deemed ‘almost like a structural anthropologist’) to argue for an interpretation of the Dionysian as dismemberment — more precisely, a ritual in which priestesses eat the body of a man in ritual sacrifice. (Kott, pp. 197–98). This victim is the son of the Great Mother (Graves’s White Goddess) whose ‘scattered fragments’ must be made whole again. If (actual) structural anthropologists are right, and the eating of the gods is an essential element of becoming a god, it might explain why Seneca chose to pumpkinify Claudius. As Suetonius tells us, he was ‘unfinished by nature’ — and so his apotheosis might have been left unfinished, too; stuck in the ‘eating’ stage.

Through this lens, it is not difficult to see why such imagery appealed to Graves, especially at that moment in the narrative, where Claudius is shunning his son Brittanius. One might recall that the tragedy about Dionysian ritual, The Bacchae, ends with a father (Cadmus) being presented with his son’s (Pentheus) severed head in a stick. In Graves, it is the father (Claudius), not the mother, who tears both himself and his son apart.

As Messalina’s Husband

The reputation of Messalina is much more widespread than that of Claudius, so much that her name is a synonym for ‘prostitute’ in several languages, including English. Historical sources are almost unanimous in their condemnation of her licentiousness, except for the Apocolocyntosis, which lists her among Claudius’s victims. It seems that Messalina managed to create her own archetype and, in that, erase the historical individual. On the other hand, the literary reception of Messalina presents a few parallels with Cleopatra, who Horace had deemed a prostitute a couple of generations prior.[11] Cleopatra’s association with the Orient and the exotic also bleeds through the ancient portrayals of Messalina disguising herself in a barbarian blonde wig for her alleged visits to the brothels, where she of course adopted a Greek name. That such tales were already being reported by Juvenal in his Seventh Satire not even a century later (115–132 AD) shows the level of paradoxography to which the figure of Messalina was susceptible.

In contrast, Claudius’s mistakes seemed far less interesting (if not less grave) than his wife’s. A medieval (1413–5 AD) prose work from France featuring an illumination titled ‘Tiberius, Caligula, and Messalina Reproach One Another in the Midst of Flames’[12] describes the state of the question perfectly: Messalina had overshadowed Claudius, therefore getting ‘more heat’ (literally) than him. Nowhere is that clearer than in Dumas’s play La Femme de Claude. In a letter, Dumas posits that his Claude is a healthy, hard-working, simple man of consciousness.[13]

As a matter of fact, the second half of the nineteenth century saw Messalina gain prominence as a symbolist Muse,[14] inspiring poems by Charles Baudelaire (1857), illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1895, 1896), and several historical novels. Despite her damnatio memoriae — or, most likely, because of it — Messalina has been consistently remembered and misremembered. Claudius, as her poor idiot husband, is portrayed as a harmless fool in this context as well — if he is portrayed at all.

The subtitle to Claudius the God, ‘and his wife Messalina’ was most likely a marketing strategy, as Messalina’s protagonism is nowhere near Claudius’s. It would in fact have been more appropriate to add to I, Claudius the subtitle ‘and my grandmother Livia’ — although, again, for marketing purposes, they might have wanted to mention ‘my nephew Caligula’.

Like a movie poster advertising a recognizable actress, Claudius the God sees in Messalina’s infamy a selling point. The comparison is not beside the point as a Claudius film was already in the works and Graves himself was writing the script by the time Claudius the God was published. We might even think of Messalina’s addition as a cinematic ‘and’ credit. 

As Scholar-Emperor

Writing in 1960, T. F. Carney reflected that ‘perhaps the most striking feature of the modern estimate of Claudius is the tremendous change which it has undergone’.[15] In the paper, Carney is assessing the ‘rehabilitation’ of Claudius by scholarship in the early twentieth century. Graves is not mentioned, probably due to not being an academic, but Carney’s reflection is valid as it touches on an undercurrent in the scholarship around Claudius that influenced Graves, and therefore bled into the cultural imagination about the emperor originating from the novels.

Therefore, we must briefly review academic discussion around Claudius in the decade before the publication of Graves’s novels. In 1924, the emperor’s letter to the Alexandrians, translated in full in the second book, appeared in a scholarly journal after being found in 1912. Arnaldo Momigliano, in the original introduction to L’Opera Dell’ Imperatore Claudio (1934), cites this and other developments, such as reinterpretations of archaeological materials, as a reason for tackling the reign of Claudius as a subject poised for changing views.

Indeed, although Graves’s biographer Martin Seymour-Smith mentions a couple of volumes about Claudius that came out during that time,[16] the one that Graves himself cites as an influence is by Arnaldo Momigliano a translation of which was made by W. D. Hogarth in 1934 and reprinted in 1961 (from which I cite below).[17]

The classical historian’s interpretation of the emperor, at least in terms of ideology, is exactly what we encounter in the second volume of Claudius. We could even use Momigliano’s claim that he means to show ‘how much of what happens in every age lies outside the control of men who may govern a state but cannot rule history’ as a tagline for the Claudius duology (Momigliano, p. 15). It is clear that Graves had an understanding of the emperor’s personality that was quite similar to Momigliano’s.

Of course, there is controversy even in that. Ronald Syme described L’Opera Dell’ Imperatore Claudio as ‘an example of the natural and inevitable sympathy of a modern pedant for an ancient one’, (Momigliano stated in the preface to the 1961 edition that he almost took that as a compliment), which brings to mind P. H. Newby’s characterization of the BBC Third Programme, where Graves was a frequent speaker, as ‘dons speaking to dons’.[18] Meanwhile, Vincent Scramuzza, who in 1940 wrote an influential volume on Claudius, did not think Momigliano had given the emperor enough credit.

In truth, the monograph presents Claudius as a sincerely contradictory policy maker, arguing that his background as a scholar (or pedant) shaped his governmental priorities, but that his post negated his ideological justifications. This is exactly the emperor whom we meet in Claudius the God.

All in all, indeed, Momigliano’s monograph was received as a positive reconsideration of his reign. Whereas reception had been focused on Suetonius’s ridicule or Tacitus’s snide remarks, archaeology had opened new alternatives for interpretation. On these terms, Claudius deserved to be judged seriously — not simply as a fool or a cheated husband, but as a statesman. Momigliano drove the discussion away from debates about his intelligence and the ‘mind-body problem’, covering actual policy.

It is this version of Claudius that is proposed to us by the Claudius novels. A cultural figure that (to borrow from Momigliano’s wording) had not been delineated that carefully, was in a favourable position to be reevaluated in the historical imagination. Claudius had been the underdog once in his life, and now he would be the underdog in death. What’s more, this version of Claudius would reach far more people than Tacitus, Suetonius, and even Seneca.

We must then consider the role of historical fiction in both educating and miseducating the reading public. After all, Robert Graves knew that his novels would be ‘best-sellers before he even published them’[19] (perhaps because he wrote them with that intention). Speaking clearly is a fundamental aspect of the Claudius novels, starting with the prophecy that Claudius will finally speak clearly, correcting false notions in the histories.

Didacticism

In 1956, Robert Graves wrote, in a letter to Percy Howard Newby, a BBC producer:

As for the assumption you make that the Third Programme listeners can all be supposed to have read Suetonius: a Finnish publishing house once wanted to cut two or three chapters out of a book of mine on the plea that: ‘All Finns know that about the early history of the Vandals.’ No, Howard! The fact is: that ‘everyone’ will soon have read Suetonius, because I am translating him for Penguins into really readable English; for the first time since the 17^th century; but that, so far, few have read it. As they hadn’t really read The Golden Ass until it got similarly Penguinized.[20]

What a fragile notion is general knowledge. It seems that everyone may well know Suetonius, but none have read him. By mentioning the seventeenth century, Graves is referring to the 1606 Philemon Holland translation, which he owned and is in his library at Oxford University, along with this letter and other correspondence. While he seemed to have approved of the Holland translation, the English language had changed a great deal since the time when Shakespeare was still alive — though one wonders if Graves thought Shakespeare needed a rewriting for accessibility purposes.

He certainly thought so of Charles Dickens, whose David Copperfield (1850) he rewrote and published in 1933 under the title The Real David Copperfield.[21] The implication was that, under the rubble of two hundred and fifty thousand words cut, Graves had excavated a ‘first-rate’ classic buried in diluted padding. Not only that, he added some scenes that offered narrative resolution to the love story, since, according to him, Dickens had ‘falsified some implications’. Again, Graves’s notion of falsification versus fiction is slippery, and it should be noted that he believed David Copperfield to be an autobiographical novel where Dickens ‘felt committed to the truth’. Whether that truth to Graves was akribeia or aletheia — or even, perhaps, fictional truth — is not transparent. The title The Real David Copperfield, however, points towards an idea of authenticity to be found in potency, which in turn was a product of brevity.

In the preface, Graves controversially declared that ‘three out of four readers’ of Dickens know his most famous books only in abridged form. As dedicated Dickensians expressed their frustrations, a positive review at Time called it ‘an actual improvement’ that might end up as the version that makes it to posterity.[22] However, Graves’s David Copperfield is not exactly aemulatio, not only because it is not in reference to the classical tradition, but also because it only uses one text as its source (for obvious reasons). Rather, The Real David Copperfield could be described as an epitome, a practice so common in antiquity some of our main sources (a number of Dio’s volumes) survive only in that condensed form. An epitome, nonetheless, is not an abridgement, which cannot include additions. The revised The Real David Copperfield (ed. Merill P. Paine), for instance, was an abridgement, as it failed to include Graves’s new chapter. This edition, the only one published in the United States, was sold as a schoolbook. Curiously, Graves once named The Real David Copperfield as his own favourite work in an interview with the BBC.[23]

The BBC, in fact, would go on to become one of Graves’s most frequent employers: he would frequently give lectures for the aforementioned Third Programme, where dons debated dons. As reported by Mick Morris, ‘There are extant over 400 recordings of Graves’s broadcasts at the BBC, in most cases reciting his own poetry. There are, however, a significant number of audio recordings and, in addition, scripts and letters where Graves very directly discusses his attitude to the ancient world’ (Morris, p. 303).

As we can infer from the letter to BBC producer Howard Newby, Graves did not have a particularly generous conception of the Third Programme audience’s background knowledge. It is, then, safe to say he was on a didactic mission, though of course the primary goal of his BBC lectures was money. While the Third Programme seemed to conceive of its public as educated —Graves was hardly impressed with the standards of education of postwar Britain, as Burton has suggested.[24] Though Graves’s perception of Suetonius’s audience is not a perfect parallel to Claudius, one might take this information as suggesting that perhaps the author was careful not to assume his readers were aware of what might have been considered general knowledge.

Incidentally, Graves published a tale in 1956 titled ‘Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound’, in which the first reprimands the latter (Ezra Pound) for a creative translation of Propertius: ‘But, pray, would you be kind enough, for the benefit of the slower-witted members of the Fourth Form, to give a literal, unpadded, word-for-word translation of the Latin, however bald?’[25]  Again, we see from Graves the defence of things ‘as they are’, betraying an assumption that there is an ideal, ‘honest’ translation of a poem, going against Pound’s ‘make it new’ by suggesting that many people knew not enough. Alternatively, Graves was closer to defending ‘make it known!’. The Dickens rewrite elucidates that this perfect, platonic version might not even be the author’s intended vision, but the most readable.

All this considered, it is no surprise that the Claudius novels are often an entry point into Roman history.[26] The volumes are accessible without becoming patronizing; informative without overloading the reader. As such, we must give weight to the notion that the books exist within a larger didactic project that runs from critical mishaps like The Real David Copperfield to respected children’s poetry such as ‘The Cool Web’. From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand why Graves would change the names of important characters and places in Claudius. However, other views exist.

Burton regards the anachronisms as a way of signalling satire. The example he uses to make this argument is the substitution of the German framea with the Zulu assegai. Although Graves had justified this in the sense that the German Barbarians of Claudius’s time had ‘much in common’ with the Zulus, this was not simply a comparison but an analogy of similarly balanced power conflicts. As Burton points out, ‘neither the Romans nor the British wanted to admit defeat at the hands of a pack of savages utterly devoid of any redeeming features’. In addition, Graves in his autobiography cites the Boer War as the first time he began to question the British Empire, leading to inter-generational conflict. In any case, I don’t think a sincere desire to educate and satirical elements are mutually exclusive — they are often spotted together.

An interesting feature of Claudius the God’s Author’s Note is Graves’s added justification for the didacticism of the text. Though the first volume had made it clear that Claudius had to spell out to readers information that was obvious to his contemporaries due to his intended audience existence only in posterity, Graves felt the need to point out that Claudius was writing in Greek (‘the scholarly language’), which is why he must translate Latin terms and explain Latin jokes. He had in fact already mentioned this in the first volume:

‘As you see, I have chosen to write in Greek, because Greek, I believe, will always remain the chief literary language of the world, and if Rome rots away as the Sibyl has indicated, will not her language rot away with her? Besides, Greek is Apollo’s own language.’ [27]

That Graves did not know ancient Greek did not discourage him from this narrative choice. As a matter of fact, another interesting document in Graves’s library is his copy of Earnest Cary’s 1922 translation of Cassius Dio’s Roman History.[28] He spent the first few pages of Cary’s translation rewriting it, as if it were David Copperfield.

He simplified the more epic style of Cary’s translation into ‘readable English’ , replacing for instance ‘heartily’ with ‘deeply’, ‘race of mortals’ with ‘human race’, and ‘throng that inhabits’ with ‘population of’, to list a few obvious changes. Some of those edits are justified, while others seem a bit nitpicky (substituting ‘as well’ with ‘too’). But I think this is vital to the point I want to make about Robert Graves as above all an avid reader of the classical sources. Here, we can see him do on a text level what he has done on a conceptual level in the Claudius Novels. Just as he had rewritten Dickens to match his own mental model of the story, he would rewrite the histories how he saw fit — avoiding falsification and prioritizing clarity, sure, yet in a way also tying up ends that perhaps would be better left loose.

Writing about Greco-Roman historiography in general, Benedetto Croce defends its ‘falsifications as great historians’ obligation to teach and advise. [29] Many times, however, such embellishment served the ends of history, as they had them, towards a more transcendental truth’. Once again, Graves pledges his allegiance to ancient historiography.

Horizons of Expectation

It is in Heidegger that we can start to articulate ‘horizons’ — this term, originally coined by Viktor von Weizsäcker, then borrowed by Karl Mannheim for his work on generations, is used by Heidegger as Zeitlichkeithorizont (horizon of temporality) and Geschichtlickeithorizont (horizon of historicity), which are where the individual must exist in the world. With this, historicity was brought back into the fold of aesthetic discussion.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose philosophy was very much inspired by Heidegger’s, then used the concept in his Hermeneutics. Another concept Gadamer took from Heidegger was that of Unverborgenheit, or ‘unconcealment’, which denotes the work of art’s strategy of concealing one thing to expose to the sense of truth (aletheia) of something else.

Perhaps didacticism could be accused of ‘too much’ unconcealment, in that, however one looks at it, it may conceal too much (as any history will, no matter its Rankean goals) or too little (therefore losing its more artistic and literary qualities, which to some demands a certain strategy around how events become uncovered). The latter is what the Claudius novels could be negatively criticised for, as their didactic urgency in confirming or unconfirming suspicions as soon as they arise in the narrative may strike some as ‘unliterary’, especially considering the investigative elements present in the novels. Suspense, of course, is entirely dependent on narrative expectation.

In textual hermeneutics a horizon of expectation is the reader’s ongoing mental model of what the full text is as the text is being apprehended linearly. In other words, it is the teleological hypothesis of the argument before the text is complete, and it changes as expectations are met or disproved. Gadamer describes interpretation as a merging of the horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) of text and reader.[30] Such a ‘fusion’, in a way, is knowing where the reader’s anachronism meets the text’s anachronism in order to produce that peculiar kind of knowledge which is art.

The concept of Erwartungshorizont, whether the critic takes historicity into account or not, is the basis of modern narratology (even if Gadamer did not cherish rules of engagement). The narratological mental model may have holes in it, but it still longs for a full picture — Gadamer called this Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit, or anticipation of completeness.[31]

Gadamer’s pupils Hans Robert Jauss and Reinhart Koselleck have applied his notions to their own work. Jauss presents the concept of horizon of expectation, in line with Gadamer, as what a reader culturally and historically expects from a text. Koselleck, on the other hand — also in reference to Heidegger — uses Erwartungshorizont as a term to describe his notion of ‘futures past’, that is, futures projected by historical time which influence the agent’s historical understanding.

In Narratology, the process of writing a hypothesis in one’s head is the mental model in linear storytime (the anticipation that contrasts the ‘space of experience’). Lowe explains in The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative:

This illusory experience of living the story in time is not the only thing that is going on dynamically as we read. All the while, we are simultaneously building up a mental model of the story as a whole. […] This narrative model does not develop in the timelike way that the text does as if a curtain were rolling back and exposing everything to view an inch at a time. Rather, its linear development is holographic: from an initial blur to increasing focus and clarity. From the start of our reading, it is a total picture of the story, with successive details filled in as we go along. It is finally complete only when the story is ‘over’— that is, when we read the last word of the text.[32]

Interestingly, Lowe is writing about the Odyssey, whose affective mental models are certainly different from the mental model being written, for example, about an obscure thriller. In this way, frames of reference influence the reader’s interpretation of a text. If the text is one of the foundational texts of narrative tradition, fabula and sjuzhet are bound to be more recognizable, even if the reader has never read nor heard a word of it.

Michael Wood, in his introduction to Robert Graves’s Homer’s Daughter, a ‘retelling’ (or rather a meta-telling) of the Odyssey through Nausicaa, the work is an ‘invitation to a rereading’.[33] But what of those who haven’t read it at all yet? Judging by Graves’s comment about Suetonius, the author apparently perceived his work as an entry point for many — a first telling. Italo Calvino tells us classics (and here he uses a more wide-ranging meaning, though the point still stands) are books that are always being re-read; never being read for the first time.[34] It could be said that we as readers already have a set of expectations in relation to those texts, not only in a ‘cultural and historical’ sense, as Jauss puts it, but also in a ‘cognitive and narratological’ one, which is Lowe’s argument.

Historical novels are particularly interesting in terms of expectation horizons because they are openly acknowledging the anachronism at the heart of Jauss’s concept, which centres the cultural codes of the readers. If readers have cultural and historical expectations of texts, the opposite is also true. Claudius is not writing for his contemporaries, but for the audience whose advanced thought might finally come to understand him — which is how he gets away with explaining concepts and customs that would be obvious to a Roman. This idealization of the reader also works to make the text feel more inviting. ‘This is a confidential history’, says Claudius, peaking the reader’s curiosity. [35] But you, reader, are worth telling it to.

One could think Julia Gaisser might have been inspired by this when she reprimanded certain practitioners of Classical Reception for looking at texts as if they were ‘teflon-coated baseballs through time […] gazed up at uncomprehendingly by the natives of various times and places, until they reach our enlightened grasp’ (her emphasis). [36] Yet such is the level of enlightenment of that who keeps reading I, Claudius.

It is a rhetorical strategy. We know that Graves felt that the general population was greatly lacking in a Classical education. There is no telling exactly what the range of Roman historical knowledge was in 1930s British middle class and below, but we can see from his comments that he did not think the general public had been particularly fond of his source material. Riyuthka Raghunath presents us with a palatable ‘Reader Knowledge’ model, which she divides between complete, partial, and zero. She proposes that: ‘a reader with a complete RK-world will have all the prior knowledge that is required to cross-reference all historical deviations in the text to their corresponding facts in the actual world.’[37]

Though Raghunath’s objective here is more restricted to the specific genre of counterfactual historical fiction, it is useful for us as cross-referencing for accuracy is not limited to third conditional clauses. We will get back to this later, because Raghunath’s view that a counterfactual account cannot be perceived as such by a reader with zero historical knowledge is in agreement with Barthes’s proposition that historical and fictional discourses are inherently neither.[38] Yet I wonder if the counterfactual narrative structure, and indeed historical fiction generally, cannot hinge on conditional clauses (be they in first, second, or third) in text, not so much in gesturing towards fictionality, but rather in insistently pointing to the world (or, better yet, texts) referenced in and by the text. Can a process that implies the need for cross-referencing stand, in itself, as a testament of legitimacy? In regular grammar, one can separate conditional clauses, but they would retain their conditional marks (subjunctives, word order, ‘if’ or ‘unless’). Are there systems analogous to this in the grammar of historical fiction (which is not necessarily exactly counterfactual, but must be conditional), which would help us trace a line to the references? In other words, who knows what, and how much of it do they know?

Graves was, consistently, preoccupied with such questions. Is this the first time his interlocutor is hearing of Claudius? Is this the first time they are hearing of the conquest of Britain? If not, could the reader place them in a historical timeline? Could the reader narrativize little bits of history he might have heard here and there? The frame of reference varies widely, but the advantage is that we all have some kind of frame of reference.

The presence of such references may elicit confirmation bias in a first-time reader whose familiarity with Claudius is not based on literature, but rather on isolated historical facts such as the Conquest of Britain or the sexual exploits of Messalina. This reader would not seriously consider the literary and historical tradition of the figure’s reception. One could argue that Graves’s Claudius replaced (to the general public) the Senecan Claudius so effectively because of what cognitive psychologists and neurologists have named the primacy effect:

The primacy effect refers to the formative period where individuals form the most conclusive opinions as a result of information that is first acquired. Initial opinions tend to shape information in their favour despite being confronted by contesting and compelling evidence, which may not be accepted. This pattern of reinforcement is described as belief persistence.[39]

By offering general audiences a history in ‘readable English’, Robert Graves bypassed the discussion around Claudius. Most of his readers did not need to have their minds changed because they had not made up their minds at all. The Claudius they were presented to was much closer to the one in Momigliano’s monograph than past versions.

That is not to say that Graves thought of his audience as wholly uninformed on matters of the Roman State. On the contrary, there are clear nods for those familiar with the original materials, more than enough to suggest that the Claudius novels’ intended audience included specialised scholars as well. However, the Claudius novels are as much of an invitation to a first reading than they are to a rereading.

Construal Level Theory (CLT) is a framework in Psychology that hypothesises that one’s level of abstraction depends on the distance of the object considered. The closer the object is, in terms of time or space or likelihood, the more real it becomes. Though usually applied in experiments interested in how people think about the future, CLT can help us understand why narrative history — which the episodic form would render concrete — is more attractive than dialectic abstractions, especially if we are considering ‘in-narrative’ futures.

When we consider Construal Level Theory as applied to the past, something unusual happens: according to Kityung, Menon, and Trope,[40] it seems that people who are more familiarised with a historical event are more prone to narrating it in abstract terms. This is not what happens in the future, as invariably events become ‘more real’ as they get closer. To unfamiliarised individuals, however, the effect of closeness is the same: concreteness.

It’s possible that unfamiliarised readers are more able to engage with a narrative’s experiential elements, while the educated historian will read from a teleological perspective. Indeed, a 2009 study of primacy effect in wine tasting confirmed that less experienced tasters would more often prefer the first wine offered to them, while experienced winetasters demonstrated recency bias. In vino veritas, it seems. [41]

The 1930s in Claudius

In the reception of the Claudius novels, there is a strong tendency to connect the Julio-Claudian narrative to the rise of fascism at the time they were written. This interpretation is not easily dismissed, but its formulations are problematic. For instance, we have already questioned J. M. Cohen’s suggestion that the decadent sphere of the novels reflects the decadence of the British Empire. On the surface, this may even make sense, but Cohen does not engage with the multiple warnings against nostalgia found in the text, nor does he consider that after the First World War Graves demonstrated significant disdain for those who lived off the exploitation of others. In fact, the ‘All That’ to which he waved goodbye in the title of his autobiography, he said in an interview, was the United Kingdom.

One of the central points of Claudius, even if this escapes the conscious awareness of its protagonist, is that the present always seems decadent because the past is portrayed under a glorious light. Graves’s novels draw safeguards against the romanticization and exoticization of the past. We must keep this in mind when considering production of the novels in their historical context.

I wish to argue in this section that, while Graves did address the rise of fascism in the Claudius novels, it was not done in the spirit of reviving the Republic / the West India Company. Rather, the critique of fascism in the novels was rooted in warding off anachronistic revivalisms. In addition, as noted by Chris Hopkins, the Claudius novels significantly differ from other 1930s historical novels (which included many Roman stories) in one sense: they do not preach direct action.[42] In fact, Hopkins notes that the only ‘ethical’ solution to politics in the novels is to be found in attempting to narrate the truth. Hopkins’s attempt to fit Claudius within a certain tradition may be outstretched, as one could argue texts of this tradition differ on multiple points — chiefly historical accuracy — but his contribution is vital for being the first to consider marks of the age in the novels.

Graves began writing I, Claudius in 1932. For the purpose of this analysis, let’s limit the scope to Italy and Germany.

Io and Ich, Claudius

On 28 October 1932, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Via dell’Imperio, which connects Piazza Venezia, where his office was located, to the Forum and the Colosseum. Those who had the pleasure of going to Rome may remember that the street was renamed Via dei Fori Imperiali. Those who have studied archaeology may also know that the construction was complete chaos, since buildings from other periods, whose archaeological value could not have been ignored, were reconstructed in other places. Excavated artifacts were not catalogued or classified and were all stored together to the despair of archaeologists. In some cases, the connections between the buildings were covered with cement. Mussolini obviously did not care about the classical heritage, but rather about its appropriation and refiguration.[43]

The road’s inauguration took place on Augustus’s birthday. At this point, Mussolini had been conjuring the memory of the Roman Empire for years, regularly comparing himself to Augustus. He did that so frequently, in fact, that Italian critics felt that the portrayal of the emperor in I, Claudius (trans. Carlo Coardi) was an intentional satire of their head of state. As pointed out by Jonathan Perry,[44] critics were offended by the supposedly emasculating portrayal of Augustus as a pawn in Livia’s game. Mussolini had connected himself to Augustus’s image so successfully that to criticise one was to criticise the other. The irony is that Augustus does not get a ‘bad edit’ in I, Claudius — yet somehow, subordination to a woman was much too ridicule for Mussolini.[45] That this has come to be the habitual characterization of the relationship between Augustus and Livia in the twentieth century, precisely because of I, Claudius and its adaptations, is what surprises us about the initial response. One does not often consider reactions that might have been evident at an initial context, such as the obvious comparison between Augustus and Mussolini, but that have thankfully dissipated. It is in any case alarming that Fascist Italy understood more of what the novel had to say, not directly about Mussolini or Augustus, but about the idealization of historical narrative, than specialist critics like J. M. Cohen did fifty years later.

Arnaldo Momigliano, the Jewish author of the influential monograph about Claudius, fled from Italy in 1938 due to escalation of Anti-Semitic laws forbidding his teaching at the University of Turin. Both of his parents died in concentration camps. He became a professor in England.

Lorna Hardwick, one of the founders of Classical Reception Studies, has written about Classical Reception in both Italy and Germany, pointing out that the Nazi regime’s relationship to Rome was not as easily conjured.[46] C. B. Krebs speaks of the influence of Tacitus’s Germania on theories of racial purity,[47] noting that Hans F. K. Günther, the Nazi’s ‘expert on questions of race’, frequently quoted Tacitus. He was largely responsible for Nuremberg race law.

The situation in Germany was such at the time of the writing of the Claudius novels: in 1932, President Hindenburg had noticed a shift in Nazi votes, which, despite being in the majority, decreased. Meanwhile, votes for the Communist Party increased. The Conservative Party then allied itself with Adolf Hitler to confront what they saw as the greater threat, leading to Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. German historian Rainer Zilkenat offers us a comprehensive timeline of that year.[48] In April, the so-called Arierparagraph was released, the first wave of anti-Semitic legislation. The package of laws excluded Jewish individuals from public office, paving the way for private companies to do the same. The legislation also limited the number of Jewish students allowed to enter universities, barred Jewish accountants from practicing their trade in some towns, and Jewish doctors from being paid through public-funded insurance.

As for what Graves was doing during this time, despite Perry’s assessment that the rise of fascism did not faze him, one finds in his journals and projects a growing disquiet about it, as well as encounters with people directly affected. He himself would have to temporarily leave Mallorca due to the Spanish Civil War. In any case, there is a notable shift in transparency when it comes to allusions to current events from the first to the second novel. I, Claudius was first published in 1934. In 1935, Graves helped to translate and publish Almost Forgotten Germany, by their Jewish neighbour and friend Georg Schwarz,[49] whose discomfort with Hitlerites was at times noted in Graves’s journal. Schwartz had fled Nazi Germany with his wife.

Furthermore, Graves had several issues with royalties from the German translation of I, Claudius (Ich, Claudius). Beginning in February 1935, his personal journal registers his grievances with the German publisher, List.[50] One of the key problems was the vague reports of sales. List recorded five thousand sales of Claudius, reportedly on its tenth edition (which Graves jokes probably means they are at least at the twenty-eighth), meaning a lot of money was owed to the author. He however had no means of receiving his royalties due to Hitler’s protectionist measures. In March, Graves considered going to Germany to ‘collect & spend the money on useful non-dutiable articles’ (Diaries, 23 March 1935), then to hire somebody to buy him a car in Germany, ‘which could then be resold with about 2% loss’. None of the plans panned out, and by April he was so frustrated with List that he wrote to a member of Oxford University, pleading that he speak to Parliament ‘about non-payment of royalties to British authors while Hitler and Company profit from their works’ (5 April 1935).

In May 1935, List Verlag backtracked on the number of copies of Ich, Claudius sold. Previously, their quarterly returns had been five thousand, now the figure totalled 1800. Whether List was bloating the previous records or coming clean about the updated sales figures is a question for accountants, but Graves seemed to believe the latter. Either way, this represents an interesting (if confusing) statistic vis-à-vis the success of Claudius in Nazi Germany. At one point in the first book, Claudius muses:

If Germans ever become civilized it will then be time to judge whether they are cowards or not. They seem, however, to be an exceptionally nervous and quarrelsome people, and I cannot make up my mind whether there is any immediate chance of their becoming really civilized. Germanicus thought that there was none. (I, Claudius, p. 281)

This could be in reference to simultaneous events in Germany, though it’s more likely that Graves is reflecting on the First World War and his experience, narrated in Good-Bye to All That, of the Germans as more honourable warriors than the English and the French.

Furthermore, the German publisher’s report of astounding success of the first Claudius in their country may have played a part in the section of Claudius the God where the author seems to address Germans and anti-Semite policies transparently. If he thought Germans were reading, he might have been more encouraged to speak to them through the novel.

After all, the connections between the early Roman Empire and the 1930s, subtle enough in the first volume, become rather pointed in the second. This is greatly owed to the first section of the novel, the ‘Herod Interlude’, in which the events in Rome take a backseat to the tale of Herod Agrippa, last king of Judaea. It is here, in Herod’s story, that the narrative transparently reverberates through millennia. In order to understand how that passes, we must, as Claudius, allow for an aside.

The Odyssey of Herod Agrippa

The beginning of Claudius the God freezes the action of Claudius being declared emperor for some 100 pages, in order to familiarise the reader with the tale of Herod Agrippa I. Readers of the Bible will recognise Herod as the king of Jerusalem who dared to compare himself to a god and subsequently had a long and painful death. Readers of Flavius Josephus will have a somewhat more positive impression. These are the two main classical sources employed by Graves in his reconstruction of Herod’s life and its intersections with Claudius’s.

Herod is sent to Rome at the age of 4, after the Herodians are deposed in Judea, although they continue to rule in neighbouring kingdoms. Starting out as students, the two maintain a friendship that culminates in the event recounted by Josephus, in which Agrippa plays a key role in Claudius’s rise after the assassination of Caligula, the natural ending of the first volume. His diplomatic manoeuvres ultimately secure the future of the dynasty.

We are guided by our narrator Claudius from Herod’s childhood to this moment in the first part of the second volume. Formally, the first part of Claudius the God functions as a repeating analepsis (a previously on), with the focus shifted to Herod.

As reported by Josephus, Herod accumulated astronomical debts. Graves dates his flight from Roman creditors to coincide with the death of Drusus (Castor), his most powerful friend. What follows is an aimless odyssey, in which Herod, his family, and associates wander through the Middle East. Most of these movements are indeed confirmed by Josephus.[51]

From Rome, Herod takes refuge in Edom but hates the desert.[52] They move to the kingdom of his uncle Antipas, but he offends the quality of his wine (ibid). Having been raised in Rome, Herod cannot help but complain about his relatives’ hospitality.

Herod flees to Syria and gets a job as an ambassador for the governor but loses his position after accepting contradictory bribes (ibid, 18.6.3). To avoid being arrested, he crosses the desert on a stolen camel and sails to Alexandria (ibid). There, his wife begs the alabarch for a loan. This alabarch was the brother of the historian Philo of Alexandria, of the Embassy to Gaius.[53]

Upon returning to Rome, Herod, with the help of his loyal ally Antonia, manages to have his old debts forgiven. Tiberius even arranges for him to take a position as an instructor. Herod, however, initially very close to Caligula, lets slip that he can hardly wait for Tiberius to die. This is reported by servants, causing Tiberius to arrest him. If the emperor’s death was desirable before, now it was essential.[54] Fortunately he only needs wait six months.

Here, I would like to highlight the most transparent moment in the work, which I would call a Hybrid intervention. According to Lorna Hardwick’s lexicon of Classical Reception, a Hybrid Intervention is ‘a fusion of material from classical and other cultures reworking the source to create a political, social or aesthetic critique of the receiving society’ (Hardwick, p. 9). In a scene described by Flavius Josephus (18.6.7), a German prisoner approaches Herod in prison to inform him that an owl had defecated on his cloak, and that, in ornithomancy, this signified a change of fortune that would make him very powerful. Graves includes a kind of mise-en-scene, in which the German declares that, as we see here, the Jews are not inferior to the Germans, and that they have much to teach.

This man asked his warder, who understood a little German, to tell him about that melancholy, handsome young man standing under the tree. Who was he? The warder answered that he was a Jew and a man of great importance in his own country. The German begged for permission to speak to Herod, saying that he had never in all his life met a man of the Jewish race, but that he understood the Jews to be by no means inferior in intelligence or courage even to the Germans: one might learn a lot from a Jew. He added that he too was a man of great importance in his own country. ‘This place is getting to be quite a university,’ said the warder, grinning. ‘If you two foreign gentlemen care to swap philosophy, I’ll do my best to act as interpreter. But don’t expect too much of my German.’[55]

The underlined parts were added by Graves to the Josephus account. Having had to abandon his usual historical disguise to offer a parable, the narrator’s voice seems resentfully conscious of its obvious allusions. Having failed to find a precise technical term, I have chosen to call such evident ‘breaks of the fourth wall’ in historical fiction ‘echoic anachronisms’, as their inclusion’s goal is to be recognised. Whether intentionally or not, they work as signposts of fictionality, to use Cohn’s (1999) descriptor.[56]

Overall, the passage carries a didactic and perhaps reprimanding tone. The reprimand centres on the notion that even in the distorted times of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the Germans understood that the Jews had much to contribute, and by positioning the two characters as leaders of their respective communities, he confers an allegorical character to the interaction. The guard’s observation that the prison was becoming a university highlights the mutual benefits and historically remarkable results of the collaboration between the two, perhaps also vaguely alluding to the recent mass dismissal of Jewish professors from universities (due to the Arierparagraph) and the exclusion of non-Aryan students. Indeed, the university had moved into the prison. Here, the author might see himself as the interpreter (he also knew German) and diplomat, embodying the benevolent guard.

Furthermore, the symbolism of the owl, which, according to the German prisoner, shall return to announce the end of this period of prosperity, refers to the moment of Herod’s death, narrated in the Bible, in Acts 12:20–23. In a much-criticised translational injustice, Eusebius, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, translated the ‘owl’ described by Josephus as an angel who had descended from heaven to punish Herod for his actions against Peter.[57] This error is seen as intentional. Graves returns to the source, Josephus, who had used the owl as a literary figure, a symbolic parallel between ascension and fall. That is the narrative function it serves in the novels as well, although they do not abandon the implication that Herod’s demise is a punishment — here, not for Peter’s treatment, but for his own divine ambition. In this, Herod and Claudius mirror each other and portray the main theme of this volume, as indicated by the title, Claudius the God. The attentive reader will not fail to make the connection between such pretentions of divine incarnation and the autocratic trend of the 1930s. Graves even reports in his journal that Hitler’s supporters seem to think Hitler is ‘God’s representative on Earth’, which they claim is quite different from believing that Hitler is, himself, God.[58] Claudius the God seems to question the effectiveness of this arrangement. It seems also that Graves was taking a cue from Momigliano, who had focused extensively on Claudius’s religious policy.

But let us return to prison. After Tiberius’s death, Herod is released by his friend Caligula, and demands that his new German friend also be granted freedom. Caligula initially seems like the solution to all of Herod Agrippa’s problems: he’s finally bequeathed with a satellite kingdom to administer and large sums of money. The tides turn, nonetheless, once Caligula proclaims himself a god (bad form for a Roman emperor, who should only expect to become a god after death). He is adamant that all subjects of the Roman Empire worship him, including the monotheistic minority that has historically been excused from such decrees: Caligula insists a statue of himself be raised in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The events of this period are discussed by both Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, in his Embassy to Gaius.

When the Jews refused to swear by Caligula’s godhead or admit his statues within the synagogues the Governor published a decree declaring all Jews in the city aliens and intruders. The Alexandrians were jubilant and began a pogrom against the Jews, driving the richer ones from other parts of the city, where they lived in style side by side with Greeks and Romans, into the crowded narrow streets of ‘The Delta’. Over 400 merchants’ houses were sacked, and the owners murdered or maimed. Countless insults were heaped on the survivors. The loss in lives and the damage to property were so heavy that the Greeks decided to justify their action by sending an embassy to Caligula at Rome, (…). The Jews sent a counter-embassy, led by the Alabarch’s brother, one Philo, a distinguished Jew with a reputation as the best philosopher in Egypt. When Philo reached Rome he naturally called upon Herod, to whom he was now related by marriage;(…). Philo asked Herod to intervene on his behalf with Caligula, but Herod said that he preferred to have nothing to do with the embassy: if events took a serious turn he would do what he could to mitigate the Emperor’s displeasure, which he expected to be severe – and that was all that he could say at present. [59]

The use of ‘pogrom’, a Yiddish word, is one of the most anachronistic choices of the Claudius novels, but its anachronism is hardly careless. Within the context of the cumulative loss of rights suffered by Jews during the first century and the 1930s, it appears as a line connecting one to the other.

As the reader of Philo’s Legatio ad Gaium will know, the embassy sent to Caligula was unsuccessful, though ultimately Caligula changed his mind. Josephus insists that it was Herod who had convinced the emperor to give up the idea to raise a statue at the Jewish temple. However, the reasons given (Caligula’s respect for Herod) seem insufficient for Graves’s Caligula, who was no longer easily convinced. Therefore, Herod, ever astute, concocts an absurd description of secret Jewish rites.

The God of the Jews, Caesar, is an extraordinary fellow. He has been described as an anti-God. He has a rooted aversion to statues, particularly to statues of majestic bearing and dignified workmanship like those of the Greek Gods. In order to symbolize his hatred for other divinities he has ordered the erection, in this inner shrine, of a large, crude, and ludicrous statue of an Ass. […] The leading Jews are afraid that if your statue were erected in the Temple it would cause profound misunderstandings; that in their religious fanaticism the common people would subject it to the gravest indignities, while thinking to honour you by their zeal.[60]

In this, Herod takes advantage both of Caligula’s curiosity, which is only aroused by what he cannot know, and his abject ignorance, such that he would believe any paradoxography about a people he knows nothing about — a requirement for the proliferating of prejudice in every era.

It is to address this issue that Herod is in Rome at the time of Caligula’s assassination. Following Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, Claudius the God attributes a considerable role to Herod in stabilizing the situation, which was quite delicate and could have just as easily culminated in civil war. After this, we are back to the main narrative and Claudius.

Claudius showers Herod with rewards. He returns to Judea and recurs through the book in epistolary form. As the novel goes on, Herod grows not only more powerful, but also more religious. After having spent so much time with Herod, we feel just as betrayed as Claudius once it becomes clear that he has been plotting to unite the kingdoms of the Middle East under his command.

His motive seems to be that he has become convinced that he is the Jewish messiah of prophecy. We are even graced with a letter of his to Claudius that spends an inordinate amount of time on a certain Joshua (also known as Jesus) who believed himself to be the Messiah.[61] This interest in Christianity we may also call echoic anachronism, although the description of Christianity seen from the outside points to its idiosyncrasies, while the description of Jesus as a shrewd communicator who considered the political dimensions of all his speeches is not particularly generous. Similarly, as we mentioned before, Herod’s death does not occur as described in the Bible, but as described by Flavius Josephus. It is not an angel who abducts him, but an owl that, like a revenant, foretells his death. His downfall occurred not because of offenses against Christians, but rather because of his despotic inclinations.

Claudius’s grief over this, and the parallels to his own story, must not be ignored. We must also draw attention to Claudius’s subsequent approach to Jewish disputes in the novel: his policies following Herod’s death, in Claudius the God, is more diplomatic than historically narrated. Historiographical tradition maintains that it was Agrippina who convinced Claudius to listen to the Jewish delegation after the revolt in the Temple of Jerusalem. In the book, he is more reasonable and does not request interference.

Furthermore, the return to the Jewish version of Herod’s death is also a notable questioning on the part of the author, since it casts doubt on the credibility of the Bible and exposes the political motivation of its interpreters.

Finally, for all intents and purposes, the first 100 pages of the second volume, published two years after the Arierparagraph, feature a Jewish protagonist. By turning Herod into a sympathetic character, Graves manipulates the reader’s dispositions to his advantage. Herod Agrippa is a revenant, a witty and astute hero who embarks on his own odyssey, a kind of rogue for whom we root, encouraged by our narrator, Claudius. The narrative fits into an established literary tradition of fantastical journeys. The Romanesque tone also makes a certain reference to German Romanticism in its use of extremes, and draws an obvious parallel between Claudius’s sedentary life, dedicated to academic research, and Herod’s adventures.

In this sense, Claudius is both narrator and reader of Herod, the reader of the novel who seeks a counterpoint to his own world. Digression into other people’s stories and useless parentheses defines the Claudius novels in ways that lead us to a paradoxographical connection between the Romanesque and historiographical anecdote.

Conclusion

I hope to have successfully showcased the marks of the 1930s in the Claudius novels, mainly through a lens of didacticism, but also in terms of political commentary. We began with a review of Claudius as a historical figure in the cultural imagination and the changes this figure begot in the early twentieth century. Then, we discussed Robert Graves’s potential conceptions of his audience’s historical knowledge and horizons of expectation, and how that might have affected the general public’s cultural imagination of the historical Claudius. Finally, we theorised that there is a level of didacticism beyond the history lesson in the Claudius novels, and that the political issues of the 1930s are apparent in some sections of the novels. In the last section of the article, we provided a case study of the Herod interlude as a clear instance of this particular anachronism, where the reader can even find exempla.

Reinhardt Koselleck comments on historical data that exists somewhat removed from the ‘main narrative’ — they are a mix of res factae and res fictae, in that they are not actual events, yet they still tell us something of the time, and therefore still count as data, or, as he puts it, the ‘facticity of the fictive’.[62] Indeed, Claudius can be studied as the res fictae of its own time, although in my view that is hardly its objective. Rather, the novels are more concerned with redefining its classical sources. Another observation of Koselleck’s is also pertinent when talking of Claudius’s approach: ‘Each retrospective interpretation feeds off the pastness of an occurrence and seeks to articulate it anew in the present. A history thus enters a complexly fractured temporal succession and is continually rearticulated, whether consciously or unconsciously handed down.’

Beatriz Sealander is a master’s student of Classical Reception at the University of Sao Paulo. Her dissertation is about the ways Robert Graves adapted Roman historiography into his narrative of Claudius.

NOTES