Excellent rendition
This is a book I love re-reading every few years, having been originally inspired to pick up the novel after seeing the superb BBC TV adaption when it was first aired in the 1970’s. The book charts the internecine squabbles and deadly conspiracies that envelop the Julio-Claudian family during the early decades of the Roman Empire. Graves lifts the dry latin prose of Roman historians (particularly Suetonius) and brings life to an epic succession of tragedies that never stops entertaining. It’s not necessarily an accurate history, but it is a fantastic imagining of 1st century Rome undergoing a period of tumultuous change from quasi-democratic republic governed by a hereditary patrician class to rule by a semi-divine aristocracy (that must never acknowledge the term “king”). The narration is very good, although slightly spoiled by the narrator’s constant mispronunciation of certain names like Agrippina and Plancina throughout. I wonder why this was not spotted and corrected before the audiobook was published.