I, Claudius

I don't know enough to have a view on the truth of the allegations, but there were some allegations about plagiarism to do with Condon's Manchurian Candidate novel, weren't they? They don't seem to have spread or really taken hold, but that doesn't necessarily mean those allegations were wrong.

Yeah, apparently I, Claudius, is the novel he's meant to have plagiarised from.

I'm not quite sure how you get...

I almost want to put...

How have you...

Is there a particular scene involving figs in the Manchurian candidate that I've just forgotten about? I feel

like, yes, my knowledge of I, Claudius, I suddenly feel, have I completely misunderstood what I, Claudius is? How do you get from one to the

other? Yeah, it's not like the Roman army is not climbing a ridge with bad silhouettes.

Because I think I can vividly remember saying to my dad, I was struggling with sort of, you know, classics and Latin.

And I remember my dad said, oh, you need to read I Claudius.

And he sold it to me in a brilliant way.

He said, it's like Dallas.

I've decided early on I would tell the story as a memoir, which has obviously quite often been done about ancient Rome.

I Claudius, a fictional memoir, the memoirs of Hadrian by Margaret Yorsner, It's a very good way, I mean for a start the Romans did actually write autobiographies, which is helpful of them, but also it enables you to get rid of a lot of extraneous matter and just focus on them and their lives.

And from the moment you begin a book like that, you have a character.

Obviously, the Cicero trilogy is also first person, though not Cicero.

She was like a kind of female crime boss.

So she's a very interesting character in the book and strong.

And also Livia, of course, famous from the I Claudius books, the great Roman matriarch.

She comes in at the age of 20, beautiful.

And being a bit swotty, I kind of read around the subjects of Antony and Cleopatra and I was quite interested to find that the villain in Antony and Cleopatra is Octavius Caesar and he turns into the good Emperor Augustus.

And I found that kind of juxtaposition quite interesting and I started to read more about Augustus and I actually started off reading like historical fiction, so things like I Claudius and things like that.

But I quickly ran out of Roman historical fiction because this was like the early 90s and there wasn't a great deal of it about.

So I started then reading Suetonius and Tacitus and our actual sources for ancient Rome.

Because they pop up a lot in terms of kind of taking, you know, being greedy and taking kind of money from the state and being, you know, unfairly wealthy, as Tacitus would probably put it, you know, being enormously wealthy because they're benefiting from the emperor's kind of lagras.

But you get a few of them who pop up and they really do influence events.

Claudius was renowned for taking the advice of his wives and his freedmen, both of which are seen as bad people to take advice from if you're a male Roman.

And he had three freedoms called Narcissus, Pallas and Callistus, who were enormously influential and who get quite a big mention.