How realistic are the court cases in Claudius the God

[justanotherdaduser]

Reading Robert Graves's Claudius the God with no background whatsoever in classical civilisation. So unsure what to make of various court cases and conversations in the book.

For example, in one case, the defence lawyer extemporises a poem mocking Claudius (emperor at this point) in response to a Greek epigram Claudius quoted.

Another place Claudius describes lawyers being rude to him, even catch him by the gown etc

Are these realistic descriptions? Could people get away with being rude to the emperor or even get that close to him to catch him by the gown?

And also in another case, an angry nobleman throws a writing-tablet at Claudius's head gashing his cheek.

My DD did Ancient History A-level and was passionate about how accurate Graves was to his source material, mainly Suetonius!

Have a read of Section 15 of Suetonius' "Life of Caludius"...
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Claudius*.html

*Claudius, obviously

It’s all directly quoted from Suetonius.

Thank you! Makes the book even more enjoyable then

Posted too soon…. The behaviour tolerated by the different Emperors varied considerably, but it is probably a reasonable synopsis to say that the expectations of ‘respect ‘ towards the Emperor increased over time. The ceremonial in the later Roman Empire would have been regarded as tyrannical by Augustus ‘ Primus inter Pares’ : First amongst Equals.

Also, do watch the 1970s TV adaptation!

Suetonius had himself been a lawyer, so court scenes might be relatively authentic, at least for his own day (he was born c. 80 years after Claudius). He also had access to the imperial archives, so some solid historical documents. And compared to some of his contemporaries, he was relatively impartial. But he also loved juicy gossip and it would be wrong to assume that the details of what he's writing is historically accurate and properly fact checked in a way a historian would be expected to fact check things today.

It's also based on the writings of Tacitus. Both Suetonius and Tacitus were writing after the Claudian emperors were dead. Tacitus was writing about 100 AD and Suetonius was about 20 years later.

So relatively recent history but no personal experience as Nero was deposed in 68AD when Tacitus was about 12.

Yes, yes, yes...and yes again.

As for the accuracy, I would never underestimate Graves. He was a brilliant man who knew his Latin inside out. I'm often amazed by writers like him. Their depth of knowledge is just staggering. I sometimes wonder if it's a generational thing. I mean, we live in an age of constant noise and distraction. We have TVs, podcasts, video games, IPhones, etc. We also live in a more crowded world, with more cars, more houses, and so on. It's hard to find the space and silence necessary for deep reading. People like Robert Graves lived in a different world – a quieter, emptier, less stressful one. You can sense it in their writing. It's the same with other writers from that period (Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, etc).

Absolutely, there's a reason that the words for "history" and "story" are the same in most European languages! The job of the "historian" in the classical world was to tell good stories, albeit based in fact. All the ancient historians freely made up quotations and entire speeches. (Without wanting to derail too much, that's also relevant to how people at the time would have seen other texts from the period... including the Gospels...)

@JaneyGee Graves was also a very thoughtful and moving poet.

We watched the BBC "I, Claudius" as revision for DD's A-level and she was very happy identifying which scenes came from which text (and telling us all about the biases of the different authors).