I Claudius Characters

The history itself is tremendously exciting. There’s sex, violence, war, incest, murder, madness, murder, suicide, exile, more murder, and forced suicide. Claudius’s grandmother, Livia, is a schemer who will do anything to promote herself and her favorites, and even (especially) her own family cannot trust her to look out for them. After she’s gone, the mad emperor Caligula makes himself a god and torments his subjects with his changeableness and violence. There’s no denying that there’s drama.

When it comes down to it, however, the most dramatic story in the world still needs to be well-told to hold my interest, and I just did not find this story to be particularly well-told. The biggest problem for me is that there was no overarching storyline, no single source of tension. It’s just one exciting (or not) incident after another. I think Claudius himself is supposed to be the character who draws the reader into the narrative, but he’s often too far removed from the action for the tension to be palpable. When he’s writing about things that happened to him, the story is engaging, but too often, he’s reporting on events that he’s heard about secondhand. The effect is similar to reading a history book, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that if that’s what I wanted, I’d read a history book!