Susan in NC’s Reviews > I, Claudius > Status Update

“…she…complained to Augustus in far stronger terms than Tiberius (who was vain enough to believe that she still loved him in spite of everything) could have foreseen. Augustus had always had great difficulty in concealing his dislike for Tiberius as a son-in-law—which had of course encouraged the Gaius faction—and now went storming up and down his study calling Tiberius all the names that he could lay his tongue on.”

“ In place of Cato I now had good old Athenodorus for my tutor. I learned more from him in six months than I had learned from Cato in six years. Athenodorus never beat me and used the greatest patience. He used to encourage me by saying that my lameness should be a spur to my intelligence. Vulcan, the God of all clever craftsmen, was lame too.”

“I have written about old Cato more than I intended, but it is to the point: he is bound up in my mind both with the ruin of Rome, for which he was just as responsible…and with the memory of my unhappy childhood under…his great-great-great-grandson. I am already an old man and my tutor has been dead these fifty years, yet my heart still swells with indignation and hatred when I think of him.”

“ My tutor I have already mentioned, Marcus Porcius Cato who was, in his own estimation at least, a living embodiment of that ancient Roman virtue which his ancestors had one after the other shown. He was always boasting of his ancestors, as stupid people do who are aware that they have done nothing themselves to boast about.”

“I was a very sickly child—“a very battleground of diseases”, the doctors said—and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which should have the honour of carrying me off…I had malaria, and measles which left me slightly deaf in one ear, and erysipelas, and colitis, and finally infantile paralysis which shortened my left leg so that I was condemned to a permanent limp.”

“ My grandmother was a consummate actress, and the outward purity of her conduct, the sharpness of her wit and the graciousness of her manners deceived nearly everybody. But nobody really liked her: malignity commands respect, not liking. She had a faculty for making ordinary easy-going people feel acutely conscious in her presence of their intellectual and moral shortcomings.”

“Yet there were many leading Romans of the elder generation who could not forget that this seemingly admirable reconstitution of the State had only been made possible by the military defeat, secret murder or public execution of almost every person who had defied the power of this energetic pair.”