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I was going to write that Graves having translated The Twelve Caesars recycled the Suetonius with a dash of Tacitus and some added murders to create I Claudius - ostensibly the memoirs of the Emperor Claudius.

This, however, seems to be entirely false as Graves wrote I, Claudius more than twenty years before he made that translation. He was though living on Majorca, which is not quite Capri, and if isolated and obsessing over his muse, not quite in Tiberian style.

In my imagination then I have to place I, Claudius back in the 1930s, a few years after this memoir of the First World War Goodbye to all that and put this portrait of an imagined secret life of an Imperial family with its incest, non-normative elective sexual activities some of which remain illegal in various countries, and family murders to gain or maintain power mentally in the context of the official rigid Victorianism of the Britain of George V.

Is I, Claudius just a fictional interpretation of the really already quite turbulent Julio-Claudian dynasty, or is it worth thinking about it as the continuation of Goodbye to all that? Is this Graves drawing back the Imperial curtain and showing us the archetypal family life of all Emperors? Don't be fooled by the noble faces on the coins he says, they may not smell (view spoiler)[as Vespasian said to Titus about the money raised by a urine tax (hide spoiler)] but their daily reality is sordid all the same.

Alternatively this is just some whimsy on my part and the genesis of I, Claudius was simply Graves' need to earn some pennies while living on Majorca so that he could continue to obsess over his muse in decent isolation.

Anyhow this is a fun bit of historical fiction even if the reality may well have been slightly less murderous than Graves' novel, even without which the Romans seem to have been the least shy of all earthly empires to date when it came to prematurely terminating the reigns of Emperors.

Mary Beard in Confronting the Classics in a review of a biography of Augustus suggests that I, Claudius, and particularly the 1976 BBC TV version has influenced at least a generation of scholars so that when they are writing about Livia they are thinking of Siân Phillips' performance rather than the dark hints that she may possibly have been up to no good from Tacitus and Suetonius, still less of how one might reasonably understand a Livia in her times. One might look at Beard's argument with dismay, then again from another viewpoint it shows the power of fiction writing and characterisation, of creating a narrative.