Note. Yet another installment in reading books that take me far away from the pandemic crapstorm. Hope you’re doing okay.
My wife switches to Game of Thrones and I flee. I usually hate historical dramas filled with enough intriguing, cruelty, fanaticism, superstition, and conflict to make me despise the human race. What is history but the story of endless struggles and violence for what is out of control of kings, warriors, artisans and farmers: power, wealth, property adulation, station, longevity, et cetera ad nauseam?
So you’d think a story of the completely sick Roman emperors, told by a member of their family, would make me turn up my nose. Not so. This is a full-bodied novel that begins with the re-birth of the monarchy and ends with the acclamation of Claudius, the last man standing, spared for years because he was considered a simpleton, good for only writing about safe historical topics like the long-gone Etruscans.
Our narrator Claudius was a seven-month baby so he is lame, deaf in one ear, and stammers. Therefore, in a culture that prized a smooth tongue and athletic and military prowess, from boyhood he has been shunted to the sidelines by his entire noble family. He finds himself observing the different political moves made by his ruling family, but especially by his evil genius grandmother Livia, wife of Augustus, to further her own goals, get her favorites plum positions, and ensure the continuance of the Roman Empire under a monarchy.
Livia is not treacherous, but she is unscrupulous, ready to do anything for what she believes to be the good of the state. She does terrible things to people in her way – mostly those sympathetic to a republic - because she thinks she is doing right by the Empire. Claudius grants that she, Augustus, and Tiberius all administer the empire skillfully, limiting lawlessness by brigands, pirates, and administrators and creating the stable conditions in which common people can prosper. Caligula’s major problem, besides his cruelty, was his maladministration. He wanted to be emperor but he didn’t like the tedious details of governing, a situation we ourselves have gotten a bellyful of since 2016.
Claudius, a historian himself, collects evidence, finds reliable sources and in so doing does not shrink from recording the most arrogant, most disgusting, bloody, impious deeds of his family members, especially as regards the endless machinations of Livia, the ultimate spoiled brat-monster Caligula, and the police state tactics and preposterously aberrant sexual practices of Tiberius. What I appreciated most was Claudius’ ironic, sharp and yet regretful eye. He himself says that he takes the Stoic way of looking at things from his tutor Athenodorus. His keeping a low profile by shamming weakness and foolishness has in fact saved his life. Discretion is a sub-virtue of the stoic emphasis on wisdom.
In the end it is Claudius, who has been a spectator the entire drama and who has never demonstrated a yen for power, comes out on top, in a position he never wanted. The story makes us understand Nature provides for both fate and fortune. Stuff happens because that's the way Creation says it going to be; e.g. you're mortal so you'll sicken and die of something. But stuff also happens out of pure luck. To negotiate as much complexity as an ordinary human can, reason is the key. Reason tells me that I could get run over by a bus next Sunday so I had better enjoy while I can. Nor is it reasonable for me to expect life to reach some stasis point and then remain unchanged. Everything changes.
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