I, Claudius; Claudius the God

In a hardcover omnibus for the first time: the beloved novels about the unlikely, overlooked man who survived the turbulent reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula and became Emperor of Rome in spite of himself.

A grandson of Mark Antony, young Claudius is mistaken for a weakling and an idiot because of his stutter and his physical infirmities, and grows up learning to use his reputation for harmlessness as a shield. Dismissed as insignificant by his powerful relatives as they compete with each other for power, he spends his time writing a secret history of the first three emperors of Rome as observed from his remarkable ringside vantage point—a dramatic tale that makes up the pages of I, Claudius.

Claudius’s impersonation of a fool enables him to escape the intrigues and poisonings that mark his predecessors’ reigns, including the machinations of his murderous grandmother Livia and his dangerously mad nephew, Caligula. After assassinating Caligula, the Praetorian Guard declare Claudius the next emperor—over his protests. He accepts only to avoid civil war, and Claudius the God traces his attempts to strengthen Rome and restore the Republic. But his efforts are undermined by his corrupt wife, Messalina, and the ambitions of his own son, Britannicus, and he is unable to prevent the doom he foresees for Rome when his great-nephew Nero succeeds him as emperor.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985) was a British poet, novelist, and critic. He is best known for his novel, I, Claudius (1934), which won the Hawthornden and James Tait Black Memorial prizes, and its sequel; his 1929 memoir of World War I, Goodbye to All That; and his influential 1948 book about mythological patterns in literature, The White Goddess.