A TONGUE IN CLAUDIUS’ CHEEK

Although Charles Solomon’s short review of Robert Graves’ books about Roman emperor Claudius (“I, Claudius”; “Claudius the God,” Book Review, Nov. 12) was strangely inapposite, it nevertheless provided some food for thought.

Solomon joshed his readers by trotting out the usual critical cliches accusing Graves of basing his book solely on the works of Tacitus and Suetonius. Graves, some years ago, however, cited more than a dozen sources in addition to these two primers as having been used in his research.

Graves had a well-documented predilection for exactly that amount of exaggeration on which he felt could go undetected. So he probably did indeed use at least five or six other sources and may have remembered snippets from more.

Your reviewer is certainly tongue-in-cheek in suggesting that Graves ignored the Antonine emperors in ascribing the initiation of the imperial decline to Claudius’ immediate successors. Graves holds that the real key to the decline of Rome is traced through the monotonically increasing cowardly servility of the Senate from Claudius’ accession onward. (Familiar?) . . .

J.R. COLEMAN

CARLSBAD