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

“ Calpurnia, a prostitute and the daughter of a prostitute, was more intelligent and loyal and kind-hearted and straightforward than any of the four noblewomen I have married. I soon began to take her into my confidence about my private affairs and I may say at once that I never regretted having done so.”

“ Tiberius was becoming more grasping than ever: he expected rich men to leave him at least half their estates in their wills, and if they were found not to have done so he declared the wills technically invalid because of some legal flaw or other, and took charge of the entire estate himself; the heirs getting nothing. He spent practically no money on public works…He paid the armies regularly, that was all.”

“…she told me everything that I wanted to know except about the haunting of Germanicus’s house at Antioch. She repeated that she had not ordered it... I saw that it was useless to press her further, so I thanked her for her patience with me and at last took the oath by my head to do all in my power to make her a Goddess.”

“But I was talking of Tiberius’s good deeds, not his weaknesses: and really, from the point of view of the Empire as a whole, he had been for the last twelve years a wise and just ruler.”

“Tiberius did not enter the Senate again for two whole months: he could not look the senators in the face with the knowledge that their wives had heard Augustus’s letters about him. Sejanus suggested that it would be good for his health to leave Rome for awhile and stay a few miles away at one of his villas, where he would escape from the daily throng of Palace visitors and the noise and bustle of the City.”

“I felt like a man living on the slopes of a volcano when it suddenly throws up a warning shower of ash and red hot stones. I had written far more treasonable things in my time…I realized well enough that all the recent victims of treason-trials were friends of Agrippina, whom I continued to visit whenever I went to Rome.”

“ Sejanus and Livilla had now to consider how to achieve their ambition of becoming Emperor and Empress. Nero, Drusus and Caligula stood in the way and would have to be removed.” 😳

“ What had begun to impress me as particularly ominous, though I could not altogether account for my feelings, was the strong bond between Livia and Caligula. Caligula had in general only two ways of behaving: he was either insolent or servile.”

“ Everyone was wanting to know what it meant when a grandmother gave gracious interviews to the murderess of her grandson and rescued her from the vengeance of the Senate. The answer could only be that the grandmother had instigated the murder herself and was so utterly unashamed of herself that the wife and children of the victim would not survive him long.”

“Livia and Tiberius then had their first quarrel…Tiberius asked, who was Emperor, he or she? Livia said that if he was, it was by her contrivance and that it was foolish of him to be rude to her, because as she had found means to make him, so she could find means to break him.”