I, Claudius

I, Claudius is a historical novel by the English writer Robert Graves, first published in 1934. Structured as the fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Claudius, it opens with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and carries the story through to the death of the emperor Caligula in AD 41, narrated by Claudius as an old man looking back on how he survived the murderous intrigues of his own family. Drawing heavily on the ancient historians Suetonius and Tacitus while filling their gaps with invented detail and psychological interpretation, the novel depicts Claudius surviving decades of poisonings, purges, and political murder under the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula largely because his stammer, limp, and awkward manner led everyone around him to dismiss him as a harmless fool, unaware that he was quietly recording the truth of what he witnessed. Graves later said he wrote the novel chiefly out of financial necessity, and continued the story of Claudius's own reign in a 1935 sequel, Claudius the God, but I, Claudius alone won the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was later ranked fourteenth on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, cementing its status as one of the most acclaimed and influential works of historical fiction ever written.