I, Claudius - Robert Graves [0]
I, CLAUDIUS
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Copyright ©1934 by Robert Graves.
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Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd.
Bungay, Suffolk Set in Monotype Times
AUTHOR'S NOTE
THE "gold piece", here used as the regular monetary standard, is the Latin aureus, a coin worth one hundred sestertii or twenty-five silver denarii ("silver pieces"): it may be thought of as worth roughly one pound sterling, or five American dollars. The "mile" is the Roman mile, some thirty paces shorter than the English mile. The marginal dates have for convenience been given according to Christian reckoning: the Greek reckoning, used by Claudius, counted the years from the First Olympiad, which took place in B.C. 776. For convenience also, the most familiar geographical names have been used: thus "France", not "Transalpine Gaul", because France covers roughly the same territorial area and it would be inconsistent to call towns like Nîmes and Boulogne and Lyons by their modern names—their classical ones would not be popularly recognised —while placing them in Gallia Transalpina or, as the Greeks called it, Galatia. (Greek geographical terms are most confusing: Germany was "the country of the Celts".) Similarly the most familiar forms of proper names have been used—"Livy" for Titus Livius, "Cymbeline" for Cunobelinus, "Mark Antony" for Marcus Antonius.
It has been difficult at times to find suitable renderings for military, legal and other technical terms. To give a single instance, there is the word "assegai". Aircraftman T.E. Shaw (whom I take this opportunity of thanking for his careful reading of these proofs) questions my use of "assegai" as an equivalent of the German framed or pfreim. He suggests "favelin". But I have not adopted the suggestion, as I have gratefully adopted others of his, because I need "javelin" for "pilum", the regular missile weapon of the disciplined Roman infantryman; and "assegai" is more savage sounding. "Assegai" has had a three-hundred year currency in English and acquired new vigour in the nineteenth century because of the Zulu wars. The long-shafted iron-headed ''frames'' was used, according to Tacitus, both as a missile and as a stabbing weapon. So was the assegai of the Ama-Aaro warriors, with whom the Germans of Claudius' day had culturally much in common. If Tacitus' statements, first as to the handiness of the ''frames'' at close quarters, and then as to its unmanageability among trees, are to be reconciled, the Germans probably did what the Zulus did—they broke off the end of the ''frames'' long shaft when hand-to-hand fighting started. But it seldom came to that, for the Germans always preferred strike-and-run tactics when engaged with the better-armed Roman infantryman.
Suetonius in his ''Twelve Caesars'' refers to Claudius' histories as written "ineptly" rather than "inelegantly". Yet in certain passages of the present work are not only ineptly written but somewhat inelegantly too—the sentences painfully constructed and the digressions awkwardly placed—this is not out of keeping with Claudius' literary style as exhibited in his Latin speech about the Aeduan franchise, fragments of which survive. The speech is, indeed, thickly strewn with inelegancies of this sort, but then it is probably a transcription of the official shorthand record of Claudius' exact words to the Senate—the speech of a tired man conscientiously extemporising oratory from a paper of rough notes. ''I, Claudius'' is a conversational piece of writing; as Greek, indeed, is a far more conversational language than Latin. Claudius' recently discovered Greek letter to the Alexandrians, which may however be partly the work of an imperial secretary, reads much more easily than the Aeduan speech.