The Values of a Classical Education: Satirical Elements in Robert Graves's Claudius NovelsAuthor(s): Philip BurtonSource: The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 46, No. 182 (May, 1995), pp. 191-218Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/518554Accessed: 05/06/2009 12:48

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THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION: SATIRICAL ELEMENTS IN ROBERT GRAVES'S

CLAUDIUS NOVELS1

By PHILIP BURTON

THERE has always been a two-way relationship between the ancient world and modern attitudes towards it. Classicists have traditionally claimed that study of antiquity gives us an insight into the society of today; at the same time the questions we ask of the past, and the answers we receive, depend to a large extent upon the preconceptions which we import from contemporary society.2 This article deals with one particularly strong instance of the use of the Roman world as a locus for the analysis of the problems of the twentieth century, the historical novels of Robert Graves, I, Claudius, and (more particu- larly) Claudius the God (both 1934). I suggest that these novels are not only well-researched and imaginative reconstructions of the early Principate, but also offer a wry and often satirical commentary on events in Graves's own life and on the wider political climate of Britain and Europe in the mid-1930s.

This analysis is admittedly somewhat tendentious. However, so is a great deal of Graves's own writing; and his novels can be read with greater understanding if we approach them with a view both to their literary antecedents, and to their creator's critical preoccupations.

1 I am indebted to friends and colleagues at Cambridge and St Andrews who have commented on this paper in its various incarnations: especially Dr J. Henderson, Dr M. Whitby, and the anonymous reader for the Review of English Studies.

2 Of the various recent works in this field see esp. H. Lloyd-Jones's Blood for the Ghosts and Classical Survivals (both 1982), F. Turner's The Greek Heritage in Victorian England (1981), R. Jenkyns's The Greeks and the Victorians (1981), and more recently G. W. Clarke's Rediscovering Hellenism (1989) and 0. Taplin's Greek Fire (1989). The titles reveal a general concentration on the Greeks rather than the Romans, and the latter half of the 19th century as opposed to any other epoch. Clarke in Rediscovering Hellenism argues that this reflects a real preoccupation with Hellas over Rome at this time. This is in part a function of his very high definition of 'culture'; but R. F. Betts ('The Allusion to Rome', Victorian Studies, 15 (1971)) states (p. 159) that there was little 'allusion to Rome' in middlebrow and popular culture. The subject should still be open. For the background to the Claudius novels see R. P. Graves, Robert Graves: The Years With Laura, 1926-40 (1990), chs. 10 and 15, and M. Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, His Life and Work (1982), ch. 16, II. On historical fiction of the ancient world see H. Riikonen's excellent Die Antike im historischen Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts (Societas Sci- entiarum Fennica, 1978), R. Poignault, 'Images de l'empereur Hadrien d'apres l'Histoire Auguste', relue par M. Yourcenar, Revue des Etudes latines, 69 (1992), 203-18. (Place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.) RES New Series, Vol. XLVI, No. 182 (1995) ? Oxford University Press 1995

Accordingly, I discuss first Graves's literary progenitors in the genre of Roman historical fiction, and especially the influence of Samuel Butler upon him. I then consider some of the incidents in the Claudius novels (and in his 1938 novel of sixth-century Byzantium, Count Belisarius), which can be linked directly to events in his life and in the contemporary scene. The final section addresses some instances of more complicated allegories between past and present, and in particular Graves's love-hate relationship with the traditions of classical education.

The Historical Novel Tradition

There is no shortage of historical novels on Roman life from the late Victorian to the Edwardian period, when Graves was growing up. Bulwer-Lytton had set the tone for the earlier Victorian era with his melodrama of love, rivalry, religion, and murder, The Last Days of Pompeii (1835); but the mood of the late Victorians was more serious and moralistic. Walter Pater's now scarcely readable Marius the Epicurean (1885) combinedfin-de-siecle aestheticism with an earnest medievalism owing to the Arts and Crafts movement, while William Morris's House of the Wolfings (1889) described the life of a band of 'Goths', a peace-loving folk unconscionably harrassed by the intruding Romans. Morris's idealized picture was interpreted at the time by some critics as a projection back into the past of a primal proto- Socialist community such as he was trying to foster in England. Morris denied the applicability of such a strict allegorical reading, but in view of the close relation in his thought between art and ideology, a connection of some sort must be acknowledged.3 These novels show a common suspicion of the value of purely academic scholarship for a re-creation of 'what it was really like' in the ancient world, which is sometimes made explicit; Bulwer-Lytton has frequent gibes at the opinions of 'the blundering learned'.4 Occasionally too the theme of contemporary relevance is spelt out: in the introduction to his work Bulwer-Lytton avows that his intention is to 'select those [materials] which would be most attractive to a modern reader . . . the shadows that, when reanimated, would present to him such images as, while they represented the past, might be least uninteresting to the specu- lations of the present'.5

Alongside these works may be set the numerous books written by schoolmasters (and not infrequently with Roman schoolboys as hero)

3 On the politics of this novel, see A. Hodgson, The Romances of William Morris (Cambridge, 1987), 133 ff.

4 The Last Days of Pompeii (edn. of 1902), 97. 5 Ibid. 6.

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THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION 193

to arouse their charges' interest in things ancient, often providing moral exempla for those who will soon go out to govern the far-distant provinces of the 'second Rome'. For the most part these now appear jejune and didactic, though the self-deprecation with which the authors often make ancient schoolmasters the butt of their humour is touching. This equation between the British and Roman empires is found not infrequently in Kipling, and is given a grim twist by Joseph Conrad in the opening pages of Youth, where the narrator, as a prelude to his own tale of imperial expansion, reflects on the sordid world that the Romans found on the banks of the Thames.

Samuel Butler and the Utopian Tradition

We do not know which of these historical novels were on the young Graves's bookshelves. His earnest parents probably knew their Pater and (despite his Socialism) Morris, of whom Graves often speaks highly.6 But the most important influence on Graves was that of Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Butler does not strictly belong among the historical novelists, being best known for his semi-autobiographical work The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903), for the Utopian satires Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), and for his half-jesting riposte to nineteenth-century Homeric criticism, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897); however, there is a similarity between the use of the past as a means of discussing the present found in historical fiction, and his use of Utopian satire and fictionalized autobiography. As Butler is now regarded as something of a period piece, it may be appropriate to give a few specimens of his work, especially those aspects of it that were picked up later by Graves.

The first passage illustrates the reductive, ironic technique by which Butler attempts to undermine both the internal rhetoric of the Odyssey and its status as a 'classic'. His thesis is that the style and concerns evinced by the writer of the Odyssey could only be those of a woman, and one 'excessively jealous for the honour of her sex'. Here he alleges that Penelope connived at the continued attentions of the Suitors, and that the Authoress is 'whitewashing' her:

Sending pretty little messages to her admirers was not exactly the way to get rid of them. Did she ever try snubbing? Nothing of the kind is placed on record. Did she ever say, 'Well, Antinous, whoever else I may marry, you may make your mind easy that it will not be you.' Then there was

6 e.g. in the essay 'Wordsworth and Coleridge' from Epilogue (the short-lived journal edited by Laura Riding and dedicated to her cult, c.1936), repr. in The Crowning Privilege (Harmondsworth, 1955), 291: 'Of [the Pre-Raphaelites] only William Morris had the healthy energy for carrying the group's idealistic principles into healthy practice.'

boring-did she ever try that? Did she ever read them any of her grand- father's letters? Did she sing them her own songs, or play them music of her own composition? I have always found these courses successful when I wanted to get rid of people. There are indeed signs that something had been done in this direction, for the suitors say they cannot stand her high art nonsense and aesthetic rhodomontade any longer ...7

The Authoress, he suggests, obligingly leaves a portrait of herself in the person of Nausicaa; a suggestion which invites comparison with his own self-portrait in The Way of All Flesh. The references to 'high art nonsense and aesthetic rhodomontade [sic]' are of obvious contem-

porary relevance in the era of Pater, Beardsley, and Wilde, while the mention of the value of one's own music in driving guests away strikes a wistful autobiographical note; Butler was a highly unsuccessful

composer. The two-way relationship between past and present is

nearly explicit. The next two passages relate to the schooling of the anti-hero Ernest

Pontifex (Samuel Butler) at Roughborough (Rugby) under Dr Skinner (Arnold), while in the third passage he is up at Cambridge and publishing in a university magazine:

[Ernest's unspoken thoughts]: Besides, Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are; the nice people whom you delight in either never knew any at all or forgot what they had learned as soon as they could ...

Only once in the whole course of his school life did he get praise from Dr. Skinner for any exercise, and this he has treasured as the best example of guarded approval which he has ever seen. He had to write a copy of Alcaics on 'The dogs of the monks of St Bernard,' and when the exercise was returned to him he found the Doctor had written on it: 'In this copy of Alcaics-which is still excessively bad-I fancy that I can discern some faint symptoms of improvement.' Ernest says that if the exercise was any better than usual it must have been by a fluke, for he is sure that he always liked dogs, especially St Bernard dogs, far too much to take any pleasure in writing Alcaics about them.8

'Why, I ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts of Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles . .. yet find myself at once repelled by even those works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which are most generally admired ... How far, I wonder, did the Athenians genuinely like these poets .. . . . [The most reliable guide to popular opinion is Aristophanes, who] makes no secret of heartily hating Euripides and

7 Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), 130. 8 Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903; Harmondsworth, 1966), 158 (ch. 31), 217 (ch. 44). In

subsequent references the page nos. are those of the Penguin edns. (unless stated otherwise), whose year of publication will also be given on first citation.

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THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION 195

Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only praises Aeschylus that he may run down the other two with greater impunity ... It may be observed that while Euripides accuses Aeschylus of being "pomp-bundle-worded," which I suppose means bombastic and given to rodomontade, Aeschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a "gossip gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher," from which it may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than Aeschylus was.'9

This theme is resumed in the next passage, from Erewhon. Even without a key it is easy to see what is being satirized:

Thus they are taught what is called the hypothetical language for many of their best years-a language which was originally composed at a time when the country was in a very different state of civilisation, a state which has long since disappeared and been superseded. Many noble maxims and valuable thoughts which were at one time concealed in it have become current in their modern literature, and have been translated over and over again into the language now spoken.... But [the store] the Erewhonians ... set by this hypothetical language can hardly be believed; they will even give any one a maintenance for life if he attains a considerable proficiency in the study of it; nay, they will spend years in learning to translate some of their own good poetry into the hypothetical language-to do so with fluency being reckoned a distinguishing mark of a scholar and a gentleman.10

It is clear from Butler's work that he was exposed to classical texts at an early date and retained a lively interest in them; however, it is a sign of the intellectual maturity of his counterpart, the young Ernest, that he is able to criticize the classical authors. It may further be noted how Ernest's description of Aristophanes' affecting a respect for Aeschylus purely in order to do down Euripides and Sophocles is

exactly paralleled by his own expressions of respect for Homer, Thucydides et al.-perhaps made ironically with the purpose of

revealing the others in an unfavourable light. I suggest that such methods are present also in the work of Graves.

Butler and Graves's Satirical Technique

The early influence of Butler upon Graves is well documented. The posthumous publication of The Way of All Flesh in 1903 put Butler's

reputation higher than it had been since the Erewhon novels. His guerrilla campaign-a sort of intellectual Boer War-on the twin institutions of Evangelical Christianity and the British public-school system captured the imagination of the young Graves as he sought to cope with the miseries of life at Charterhouse and the pressures of his pious family (the details of which are related in Goodbye to All That,

10 Erewhon (1872; Harmondsworth, 1981), 186 (ch. 21). 9 Ibid. 226-7 (ch. 46).

chs. 1-8). Siegfried Sassoon, who met him as a young officer in the trenches, writes that 'At that period Samuel Butler was the source of much of David's [i.e. Graves's] ingenuity at knocking established names and notions off their perches';11 among the heresies with which Graves had shocked his brother-officers was the Butlerian notion that the Odyssey was the work of a woman. Graves himself recounts how he 'infuriated' his uncle, 'a good Victorian', by using a 'tip' to purchase Butler's Note Books, The Way of All Flesh, and the Erewhon novels.12 Graves's novella My Head! My Head! (1925), a work which anticipated his later historical and biblical reconstructions, sprang from 'a lightheartedly rationalistic correspondence between "Erewhon" Butler and his friend Miss Savage'.13 This influence persists into his later work; in his Utopian novel Seven Days in New Crete (1949) he evokes a community founded in part on the ideas of 'an Israeli Sophocrat named ben-Yeshu' (i.e. 'Son of Jesus'), whose book A Critique of Utopias was 'a detailed and learned analysis of some seventy Utopias ... including Plato's Timaeus and Republic, Bacon's New Atlantis . . . Morris' News from Nowhere, Butler's Erewhon'.14 Seven Days in New Crete is a linear descendant of Erewhon, but I suggest that Graves's historical fiction, like the Utopian tradition, creates an imaginary world whose values mirror (and therefore invert) those of the writer's own world.

Butler, then, was influential in giving Graves an intellectual stimulus which was to last well into his mature work. He was the model Graves set himself to emulate and outpass, the King of the Wood whom Graves had to slay to succeed. So as late as 1960 Graves published his highly eccentric version of the Iliad, a work showing the persistence of Butler's influence. But the thesis on the character of the Iliad advanced in the Introduction is a radical re-evaluation on a scale worthy of his mentor:

Now, the original High King of the Achaeans was a living god; his palace, a temple; his courtyards, holy ground. He corresponded on equal terms with the High King of the Hittites, a fellow-god. But by Homer's time this religious High Kingship had perished, all the great cities had fallen, and the

I Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Pt. 6 ch. I (p. 106 Faber and Faber edn. of 1969). Sassoon's two series of autobiographical works-Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Mian (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), Sherston's Progress (1936), and The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), Siegfried's Journey (1945)-in some ways parallel Butler and Graves in their combination of autobiography and fiction. To this genre may be added Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907), probably also known to Graves, and Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth (1917).

12 Goodbye to All That (1929; Harmondsworth, 1986), 62 (ch. 10). This reproduces Graves's revised text of 1957, which in places is considerably different from that of the 1929 original; however, the variations do not touch on the passages quoted here.

13 From the Argument to My Head!My Head! 14 Seven Days in New Crete, ch. 4.

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THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION 197

semi-barbarous princelings who camped on their ruins were ennobled by no spark of divinity. It is clearly these iron-age princes . . . whom Homer satirizes in Mycenean disguise as Agamemnon, Nestor, Achilles and Odysseus....

The Homeridae, being sacrosanct servants of Apollo, could risk satire, so long as they remained serene and unsmiling throughout their performances, pointed no finger, tipped no wink.15

Here we may trace directly the Butlerian motif. Butler had given the Odyssey a reductive, non-heroic treatment by reading it according to the canons of contemporary fiction as if it were a bourgeois novel. Graves outbids this; he chooses the Iliad-a work still more 'heroic' than the Odyssey-and likewise interprets it in the light of modern literature. The genre he chooses is, however, more earnest than that chosen by Butler; he reads it as a satire on incompetent military commanders, along the lines of the war-poetry fostered by the experiences of his generation of poets over forty years before. His reading is altogether more rigorous than Butler's. Butler's theories on the Odyssey, though he was genuinely convinced of them himself, are presented frivolously, as an intellectual tour deforce which effectively devalues the work. Graves's Iliad is deadly serious. The theme of the Apollonian bard, under the protection of the god and using the figures of a distant past to satirize the leaders of the present, should also be noted; it will be central to our understanding of the Claudius novels.16

A further instance of Graves's attitude towards satire and war-

poetry may be seen in his response to a poem of Sassoon's written in 1917.

[Sassoon's poem] To these I turn, in these I trust, Brother Lead and Sister Steel; To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust ...

had originally been inspired by Colonel Campbell, V.C's bloodthirsty 'Spirit of the Bayonet' lecture at an army school. Later, Siegfried offered it as a satire; and it certainly comes off, whichever way you read it.17

There is a continuity between this and Graves's later views on the Iliad; the satirical poem may equally be read perfectly 'straight', or as an Apollonian, vatic utterance, whose true meaning is hidden from the unenlightened. Indeed, Graves comes across as something of a

15 The Anger ofAchilles (1960), pp. xiv-xv. 16 The same characterization of the court poet as satirist is made in The Crowning Privilege,

20. 17 Goodbye to All That, 226 (ch. 25).

conspiracy theorist for his readiness to impute a covert and satirical motive behind a work. In 1956 he published a translation of Lucan, whose introduction is a fine specimen of his mind at its most idiosyncratic. His thesis is as follows. Lucan is a bad poet. However, most of the modern poets currently in vogue are also bad. Therefore a translation of Lucan is likely to be well received among those who cannot read this ancient poet for themselves. The essential badness of Lucan's poetry could not have escaped the notice of his main editor, A. E. Housman (a good poet); why then had Housman not com- mented on it? Graves's answer is that-he had:

Prevented by the self-denying ordinance to which textual critics subscribe from expressing any poetic judgement, he merely allows himself a few dry comments, in an appendix, on Lucan's astronomical ignorance. But the savagery of his attack on former editors suggests that he was using them as whipping-boys for Lucan; did not Lucan himself use Caesar as a whipping- boy for Nero .. ?18

Whatever the merits of Graves's theories on Housman at this point, the mental pattern behind them is becoming clear. He is very ready to impute satirical intention to the work of others, who use the figures of one historical period to ridicule those of another. These satirists are under the patronage of Apollo, and like him love to hide the true import of their words; their work has to be coherent within its own primary frames of reference, both to conceal its subversive message from the people it mocks, and to add pungency to the enjoyment of those who penetrate to the hidden core. We shall see how this theory works when applied to some of Graves's own works.

Satire and Allusion in Graves's Fiction

The Claudius novels (and Count Belisarius) are primarily works of historical fiction. This, however, does not of itself preclude the possibility that they may contain allusions to the world in which and for which they were written; we have seen how this is something of a feature of the genre, and one in which Graves had a special interest. In this section I give a fairly random, and by no means comprehensive, choice of instances where Graves consciously and ironically toys with the relationship between the ancient and modern worlds. Not all these cases are alike. Sometimes the parallel is obscure, and sometimes it is explicit but apparently gratuitous. Sometimes Graves uses obviously anachronistic language to convey the similarity, sometimes the re- lationship is more broadly thematic. We are fortunate in possessing

18 Lucan, The Civil War, trans. R. Graves (1956), 23.

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THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION 199

not only Graves's autobiography Goodbye to All That (a title which has now become proverbial, but which was a coinage of Graves's-loosely reminiscent of The Way of All Flesh), but also his social history of the inter-war years, The Long Week-end (1940, with Alan Hodge), a useful index of what Graves regarded as the important social phenomena of the period.

Graves wrote the Claudius novels while living in Deya, Majorca, in 1933-4. Like many other English intellectuals of this period he was concerned by the worsening international situation; and the most general themes of the novels-the paradoxes of power, the dangers of corruption and the perils of compromise, the position of the notionally absolute ruler-are of great relevance in the decade of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Franco. Certainly the resonances of his work were not lost on Mussolini, who, intent on reviving the ideology of the Roman Empire, had Graves's novels banned for their unfavourable representation of imperial Rome. Even the choice of characters may have curious overtones; it is interesting to note how the consonants of the name 'Messalina' are precisely those of 'Mussolini'. Historically this is the merest accident (though one against which the odds would be fairly formidable). But Graves was probably aware of this simi- larity; his father was a keen pan-Celticist, and at an early age Graves had learnt the cynghanedd verse-scheme of Welsh bards, which depends on the use of the same sequence of consonants in successive lines, but with different vowels.19 There is no direct correlation between the actions of Messalina and those of Mussolini, but Graves may have enjoyed casting the portentous dictator in the role of Claudius' lascivious and intriguing wife.

The resemblance between these two characters is admittedly tenu- ous. However, a clearer instance of Graves's satirical technique may be found in his treatment of the Germans in his 1930s novels. Graves was himself half-German, through his mother, and had written of the Germans with great respect in Goodbye to All That. In the aftermath of the 1933 putsch that put Germany in Hitler's hands, his attitude shifted. By his own account he perceived earlier than many the threat posed by a resurgent Germany; in The Long Week-end he quotes from his own diary how he met with Churchill to discuss the situation at a time when any talk of war was regarded as militaristic.20 A large part of I, Claudius is given over to the campaigns of Claudius' elder

19 He illustrates it with the English lines 'Billet spied | bolt sped I Across field I Crows fled I Aloft, wounded, I Left one dead'. See The White Goddess, ch. 1. R. P. Graves also records similar word-games played by Graves and Riding in the early 1930s. See also 'The Ghost of Mr. Milton' in The Crowning Privilege, 341.

20 The Long Week-end (1940), 410-11 (ch. 24).

brother Germanicus (whom he idolizes) in the Rhineland, avenging the massacre of Varus' legions in AD 9. The Germans he encounters are bold and warlike, but unstable, and need to be beaten firmly and shown their place: If Germans ever become civilized it will then be time to judge whether they are cowards or not. They seem, however, to be an exceptionally nervous and quarrelsome people, and I cannot make up my mind whether there is any immediate chance of their becoming really civilized. Germanicus thought that there was none.21

The myth of the hardy, primitive vigour of the Germans (for which Tacitus is largely responsible) was one which Germany's new rulers were keen to foster. A particular hero of the National Socialists was Hermann, the brave chieftain who repelled the Romans. In Graves's account, Hermann is valiant but lacking in statecraft and responsible for the defeat of his folk; he is ridiculed in a curious quasi-Aris- tophanic ditty for having 'lost his sweetheart | And his little pot of beer'.22 Despite the threat they pose to the northern frontier of the Empire, the Germans perform a vital service in Rome by providing the Imperial Bodyguard; the Emperor is thus obliged to retain the goodwill of the Germans if he is to keep his life. However, when Claudius, in a successful attempt to discover the whereabouts of the missing Roman Eagle, makes trial of their oft-professed yearning for the rude life they had left behind, he finds it wanting: 'And these Germans at Rome, though technically slaves, lived a most easy and enjoyable life, and their regret for home was not at all a sincere emotion, merely an excuse for tears when they were maudlin- drunk. '23

The Germans, then, are portrayed as fierce warriors, but lacking in counsel and prone to demoralization in times of peace. If this interpretation is set in the context of the mid-1930s, it is hard not to see it as a response to recent German history-to the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of the Third Reich. As noted above, Graves was among the first to acknowledge the necessity for rearmament in the face of the deteriorating situation in Europe, though his own views on the German soul were not wholly logical; around this time he comes to 'explain the schitzophrenia [sic] in the German soul in terms of an unresolved conflict between their patriarchal Aryan strain and their matriarchal Mediterranean strain'.24

21 The Anger ofAchilles, pp. xiv-xv. 22 I, Claudius (1934; Harmondsworth, 1975), 192 (ch. 16); cf. the parody of Euripidean

metrics in Aristophanes' The Frogs 1208 ff., XA'KV0Qov aTorwn e ('lost his little pot of oil'). 23 Claudius the God (1934; Harmondsworth, 1976), 137 (ch. 10). 24 See The Crowning Privilege, 271, repr. from Epilogue.

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The same theme of the conflicts and deficiences of the German national soul is reiterated in Count Belisarius; when Belisarius attacks the Vandal settlers in North Africa, he finds that

these fair-skinned, fair-haired Northerners had now, by the third generation, become acclimatized to Africa. They had intermarried with the natives, changed their diet and yielded to the African sun (which makes for ill-temper rather than endurance)-and to such luxuries as silk clothes, frequent bathing, spiced foods, orchestral music and massage instead of exercise. This enervating life had brought out strongly a trait common to all Germanic tribes, namely an insecure hold on the emotions.25

Later Belisarius again faces a Germanic people, the Goths holding Italy. These had fallen into the other extreme:

They had not degenerated, as the Vandals had, under the luxurious spell of civilization; but neither had they profited by their sixty years' residence in Italy to improve their good sense by literary education . . . Thus they neglected to reinforce their barbarian fighting qualities with such military knowledge as can be derived from books.26

It is important to note here that while William Morris's Goths had been a prototype of the English people, Graves's Germans are not. The Britons in the Claudius novels are Celts, and Graves's represen- tation of Celtic customs functions as a subtle parody of contemporary British institutions (see pp. 212ff. below).

If the prevailing ideologies of Italy and Germany are criticized in the Claudius novels, that of Spain comes in for some oblique comment in Count Belisarius (the former novels having been written before the Spanish Civil War, the latter after). This novel is rather less susceptible of the sort of wider allegories found in the Claudius novels; there seems to have been a steady shift in Graves's writing away from the overtly political. Nevertheless, there are elements of the Spanish Civil War to be found in Belisarius. The hero's reconquest of Italy is opposed by a 'Gothic Army of National Defence'27-a blatant anachronism in the context of sixth-century Germanic war-bands, but quite at home in the Spain of the mid- 1930s. Similarly the Persian commanders whom Belisarius encounters in the East are sometimes described as 'generalissimo'28-a term in use in English since the seventeenth century but applied particularly by the Nationalist partisans to General Francisco Franco. It is not found in the Claudius novels, written before the Spanish Civil War, and its

25 Count Belisarius (1938), 181 (ch. 11). 26 Ibid. 214 (ch. 12). 27 Ibid. 246 (ch. 15). 28 e.g. ibid. 110 (ch. 7); the term is used of Belisarius himself, 319 (ch. 15).

presence in Belisarius is therefore likely to be a direct spin-off of the Civil War.

However, it is not merely the Right which attracts Graves's attention. Although Graves had, as he says in his autobiography, 'called himself a socialist' in the early 1920s, his fervour had evap- orated as the decade wore on. He never seems to have subscribed to Communism, though that doctrine appears-and by name-once in Count Belisarius:

Khosrou abhors and persecutes Christianity. . . . He also persecutes a doctrine called Communism; this was first preached by one Mazdak, who derived it from early Christian practice, but who wished the community of possessions to include not only goods and money but also women.29

I have not been able to trace the Persian cult in question, if indeed it is not wholly invented by Graves. The motivation for giving this detail (irrelevant to the plot) is a desire to bang Christian and Communist heads together by reminding them of the fundamental similarities of their beliefs. Less explicit, but in some ways more interesting, is a minor episode in Claudius the God in which Messalina encourages her husband to adopt a centralized control of the grain supply of Rome through a system of state monopolies.30 The narrative is too long to be conveniently quoted here, but the concepts and the language are closely modelled on classical socialist theories. Claudius-who expounds a surprisingly prescient version of market-force economics -allows himself to be persuaded. Messalina, however, accepts bribes in exchange for the right to administer the monopolies, and the system collapses. Claudius is indeed known to have attempted such a policy,31 but in choosing to relate this incident (not important for the action of the novel, save in so far as it illustrates Messalina's hold over her husband), Graves is giving a historical event a contemporary twist.

There is one more brief allusion in Count Belisarius which a British reader may remark. On the day after Belisarius' defeat of the Vandals in Africa, Justinian promulgates his new Digest, in the prologue to which

he had already styled himself 'Conqueror of the Vandals and the Africans'- Pious, Victorious, Happy and Glorious-and, without mentioning that anybody else had shared in the victory, referred to 'the sweats of war and the night-watches and fasts' on his own part that had secured it.32

29 Count Belisarius, 388-9 (ch. 23). 30 Claudius the God, 204-7 (ch. 15). 31 See B. Levick, Claudius (1990), 84, 110; A. Momigliano, Claudius (Oxford, 1934; repr.

Cambridge, 1961), 49-50. 32 Count Belisarius, 199-200 (ch. 12).

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The reference is a not inaccurate translation of the title given to Justinian in the 'Confirmatio Digestorum'-'pius felix inclutus victor ac triumphator'-but its inclusion here, combined with the slight shift in word-order, and the terms used to translate them, must be a sidelong glance at the National Anthem-'Send him Victorious, Happy and Glorious'. Justinian is criticized for claiming credit for a victory in which he was a non-combatant-and it is implied that such a ploy is not confined to sixth-century Byzantium.

Indeed, Graves's wider practice of translating ancient terms into English deserves attention. It is evident that any translation from a classical language must perforce seek to strike a balance between comprehensibility to the modern reader and fidelity to the original text. There are, however, some recognized conventions for Angliciz- ing some of the more common Latin technical terms. Most moderately educated readers would, I suggest, be familiar with words such as 'Forum', 'centurion', and 'legion', even if they lacked a detailed knowledge of Roman military and social life. Graves will have none of this. He regularly uses the terms 'Regiment' (= 'legio'), 'sergeant' ( 'centurio'), 'captain' (the Latin terms here seem to vary; perhaps = 'tribunus', 'centurio primipilus'). These patent anachronisms may be justified on the grounds that it is the duty of the translator, and even more of the historical novelist, to represent the ancient world in contemporary terms. Yet it is hard to dismiss the suggestion that this choice of phrase is actively misleading, in that it implies a degree of similarity between the ancient and modern world which does not in fact exist. But this also serves to emphasize the conscious playing-off of the two cultures. As an extreme example, Graves chooses to render the Germanic 'framea' as 'assegai'-and in a lengthy apologia explains that it is not misleading, as 'the Germans of Claudius's day had culturally much in common' with the Zulu warriors of the nineteenth century;33 Latin had borrowed the Germanic word just as English had borrowed the Zulu. This similarity is most apparent in the way these two peoples were perceived by the dominant imperial powers of their day. The Germans, unlike the Parthians, were seen not as a major threat to the stability of the Empire, but as a primitive tribe at the edge of the civilized world, who had preserved their primitive vigour. The Zulus were viewed by the British in much the same light. Even the massacre of Varus' legions and the carnage of Rourke's Drift could be seen as evidence of the fighting qualities of these peoples, in taking on and defeating a better-trained and previously invincible force- though this may be partly because neither the Romans nor the British

33 I, Claudius, 7-8 (Author's note).

wanted to admit defeat at the hands of a pack of savages utterly devoid of any redeeming features.34 So in using 'assegai' to render 'framea', and in his general translation practice, Graves is not basing his choice on purely linguistic criteria. Rather he is actively exploiting the cultural resonances between the ancient and modern worlds.

Although the Claudius novels (or at least I, Claudius) have through their TV dramatization become the most widely known of Graves's works, he saw himself primarily as a poet rather than a novelist. However, as his politics had diverged from his 1920s socialism (which would arguably have been more at home in the 1930s), so his poetics veered away from the increasing preciosity of the modernist move- ment with which he had associated himself at first, towards a grittier and more physical style. It is therefore not surprising to find his Claudius too reflecting on contemporary tastes in poetry:

For my part, I would exchange all twelve books of Virgil's 'Aeneid' for a single book of Ennius 'Annals'. Ennius ... was what I would call a true poet; Virgil was merely a remarkable verse-craftsman. Compare the two of them when they are writing about a battle: Ennius writes like the soldier he was (he rose from the ranks to a captaincy), Virgil like a cultured spectator from a distant hill.35

This preference for Ennius over Virgil is not wholly unhistorical, though it seems that Graves has attributed it to Claudius in error; the Historia Augusta ascribes it to Hadrian.36 But it appears that Claudius is acting as Graves's spokesman on this issue. On going up to Oxford after the First World War Graves had been obliged to study both Anglo-Saxon and Augustan poetry-and had found the former much more to his liking:

The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject: it was, he said, a language of purely linguistic interest, and hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry extant possessed the slightest literary merit. I disagreed. I thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a 'promenade' to Holofernes' staff-tent; and 'Brunanburgh' with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting-all this came far closer to most of us than the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century.37

34 An attitude which finds its classic expression in Kipling's affectionate apostrophe of the Sudanese warrior in his poem 'Fuzzy-wuzzy': 'You're a pore benighted 'eathen but you broke the British square!'

35 Claudius the God, 318 (ch. 24). 36 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Hadrian 16.6.1. 37 Goodbye to All That, 239 (ch. 27). Graves similarly compares the boxing-match in Aen. v.

362-483 with that in Idyll XXII of Theocritus, who had 'obviously been a bit of a bruiser himself'; see The Crowning Privilege, 65 (Lecture 3).

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There is a strong thematic similarity here. Both Graves and Claudius express a preference for the older, more earthy poetry, above the merely technical virtues of more recent writers. Even the fragment of Ennius that Claudius goes on to cite ('Fraxinus frangitur atque abies consternitur alta . . .') is reminiscent (in its alliteration and verse-structure) of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Graves's paraphrase of Anglo-Saxon poetry is cast in anachronistic language ('platoon', 'billet', 'staff-tent') which recalls the anachronistic translations of Roman terms already noted. There is also a certain historical irony in Claudius hypothetically saying that he would trade all the Aeneid for one book of the Annales. In his day Ennius' epic was presumably still extant, and therefore the question did not arise. It is, however, the sort of comment that latter-day classical scholars make when discuss- ing which of the lost works of antiquity they would wish most to have preserved.

It seems furthermore that Graves is perpetrating a particularly bad pun in his description of Ennius as a soldier who 'rose from the ranks to a captaincy'. Graves too had been a soldier-poet, and one, like his Ennius, noted for his realistic battle-scenes. He did not rise 'from the ranks', having enlisted as a second lieutenant, but he did rise 'to a captaincy'. Rather unusually, he achieved that rank at the age of 20-a feat of which he was rather proud and at which some of his fellow-officers were rather jealous. This resentment was fuelled by the fact that he was half-German and had the aristocratic middle name, von Ranke.38 Ennius therefore rose to his captaincy despite being 'from the ranks', Graves despite being 'von Ranke'.

At this point it may be appropriate to quote further from the introduction to Graves's version of Lucan (see p. 198 above), in which he asks

why the modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry which Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hulme, and others started over forty years ago, by way of revolt against the Virgilian tradition of Tennyson, Longfellow, William Morris and others, has enjoyed such success. The truth is that at the close of the First World War much the same moral and aesthetic gap separated neo-Georgian from Victorian London, as had separated Neronian from Augustan Rome.39

Again there is a two-way relationship between the classical and the modern. On the immediate level the modern world and the success of modernist poetry are adduced to help the modern reader understand

38 References in Goodbye to All That: promotion and age, 141-2 (ch. 16); age and German name, 172 (ch. 19); age again, 200 (ch. 22); post-war attitude to rank, 248 (ch. 28).

39 The Civil War, 23.

the ancient. But given Graves's outspoken damnation of Lucan's poetry, there is also a backhanded jibe at the modernists. Like Lucan, they are technically unskilled poets who gain popularity more by their novel effects than by their intrinsic worth. It is interesting to note that elsewhere in his introduction Graves taxes Lucan and the 'modernists' (ancient and modern) with a fondness for 'rodomontade'40-a criticism which seems to have been something of a favourite with Samuel Butler (see pp. 194-5 above).

Two more examples will suffice to illustrate the relationship between Graves's own world and that of his novels. In 1916, just before his 21st birthday, Graves was severely wounded in an artillery bombardment, one of his injuries being caused by 'a little chip of marble ... Later I had it cut out, but a smaller piece has since risen to the surface under my right eyebrow'.41 This may be compared (even down to the eyebrow) with an injury to a Roman commander during Belisarius' reconquest of Italy:

Trajan . . . was pierced close above the right eye and near the nose by the long, barbed head of an arrow. The shaft had been insecurely fastened and fell off at the moment of impact ... but he lived on ... for days and months ... and suffered no pain or inconvenience, though the barbed head remained embedded in his flesh. Five years later it began slowly to emerge again. Twelve years more, and he was able to pluck it out like a thorn.42

There is no allegory intended here, as with the case of the allusions to Communism. It is, in fact, a fusion of an event in Graves's life with one found in our main historical source for the period, Procopius.43 It is not particularly subtle, and does not serve any great thematic or narrative purpose. Rather it gives the novel the appearance of being something of a pot-boiler; Graves himself wrote around this time that historical fiction was to him a job, a source of income-as opposed to his true vocation of poetry.44

A more delicately handled example of the same technique may be found by comparing another incident in Goodbye to All That with one in Claudius the God. From his sojourn in Egypt Graves recounts a story which may be summarized as follows: A wealthy Egyptian in a fit of temper with his wife shouts out the Islamic divorce-formula 'I divorce you I divorce you I divorce you'. Immediately he repents, but the domestics have overheard and therefore the divorce is legally binding. But he and his wife are unable to remarry immediately, as the law dictates that a second marriage must intervene. The woman is

40 The Civil War, 13. 41 Goodbye to All That, 181 (ch. 20). 42 Count Belisarius, 263 (ch. 15). 43 Procopius, Wars VI. 5. 25-7. 44 See The Crowning Privilege, 212.

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then given a marriage of form to an aged servant, with a view to being divorced by him and remarrying her first husband. But before this last stage of the plan can be completed the woman is run over and killed, leaving the servant to inherit her considerable estate.

This incident is recycled, but to good effect, at the 'catastrophe' to Claudius the God. Again a bare summary will bring out the points of comparison. Claudius' wife Messalina wishes to dispose of her husband, usurp the Empire, and marry the handsome Consul-Elect Silius. She tells Claudius that she has had her horoscope cast, and that a violent death is portended for her husband. They consider a temporary divorce; but Claudius points out that under Roman law a second marriage must intervene. They agree therefore that she is to be married, 'as a technicality', to Silius, who will then be killed off, allowing them to remarry. Claudius approves of this scheme, seeing a way to liquidate a political opponent. The plan goes ahead; but Messalina has seduced Silius and after their marriage the two take advantage of Claudius' absence from Rome to stage a revolt. This fails, and leads to the death of Silius, Messalina, and their conspira- tors.45 The similarities are unmistakable, and here Graves has some historical authority for the incident. The fact that Messalina had celebrated a proforma wedding to Silius prior to the attempted coup is known to Tacitus, who, however, does not seem to know why this should have occurred.46 Suetonius too is puzzled and very dubiously retails the story which forms the kernel of Graves's account.47 But in the choice and the handling of the story, Graves seems to be recalling the Egyptian incident. His treatment of it is notably more work- manlike than that of the wound-story in Count Belisarius. It is not lifted wholesale from one text to the other, and it serves to advance a major incident in the action of the novel.

Apollo and Claudius in Britain

In this section I draw together some of the themes discussed above, and concentrate on two aspects of the novels: the importance of Apollo as the patron and guarantor of the text, and the significance of Claudius' British campaigns.

We have already seen (pp. 6-7 above) how Graves regarded the Iliad as a satire on the incompetent Bronze Age chieftains, and how the Homeridae, under the patronage of Apollo, could risk their satire so long as it was not explicit. Though this was written a quarter of a century after the Claudius novels and Graves's views no doubt

45 Claudius the God, 362-73 (ch. 28). 46 Tacitus, Annals xi. 27. 47 Suetonius, Claudius 26.

evolved over this time, it is probable that they did not change in their general tenor. The Claudius novels, like the Iliad, are Apollonian texts. In the opening chapter of I, Claudius, the young narrator goes to consult Apollo's prophet the Sibyl of Cumae.48 She foretells his unlikely accession to the imperial throne, and prophesies: 'But when he's dumb and no longer here I Nineteen hundred years or near | Clau-Clau-Claudius shall speak clear.'49 Claudius interprets this oracle as meaning that his work will be discovered nineteen hundred years thence, and suggests that his work may have more relevance then than many of the established classics: 'all other authors of to-day will seem to shuffle and stammer, since they have only written for to-day, and guardedly, [but] my story will speak out clearly and boldly'.

A similar pattern occurs in relation to another Apollonian text, Horace's Hymn to Apollo and Diana,50 which Claudius has performed at the Secular Games after his British victory:

Moved by the solemn voice of prayer Both deities shall make great Rome their care, Benignly turn the direful woes

Of famine and of weeping war From Rome and noble Caesar far,

And pour them on our British foes. As he observes, this verse 'was now more appropriate than when it was first composed'. The same may be said of much of Claudius' putative autobiography, whose real relevance is as a commentary on contem- porary life.

One of the most significant passages for our understanding of these novels is an argument between the historians Livy and Asinius Pollio, on the writing of history. It takes place in Augustus' new Library of Palatine Apollo; the significance of this is emphasized by an explicit pun on Pollio/Apollo. The young Claudius has been surprised while reading a volume of Pollio's work:

Pollio appealed to me. 'Now sir-I don't know who you are but you seem to be a lad of sense-have you read our friend Livy's work? I appeal to you, isn't that at least trashier than mine?'

I smiled. 'Well, at least it's easier to read.' 'Easier, eh. How's that?' 'He makes the people of Ancient Rome behave and talk as if they were alive

now.' 48 The Sibyl's disjointed, prophetic utterances seem to have appealed to the modernist

imagination: cf. Eliot's citation of Petronius' description of her in the preface to The Waste Land (1922).

49 , Claudius, 13 (ch. 1). 50 Odes i. 21, though Graves seems to be confusing it with the Carmen Saeculare; Claudius

the God, 348 (ch. 27).

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Pollio was delighted. 'He has you there, Livy, on your weakest spot. You credit the Romans of seven centuries ago with impossibly modern motives and habits and speeches. Yes, it's readable all right, but it's not history.' . . .

Livy said: 'The trouble with Pollio is that when he writes history he feels obliged to suppress all his finer, more poetical feelings, and make his characters behave with conscientious dulness, and when he puts a speech into their mouth he denies them the least oratorical ability.'

Pollio said: 'Yes, Poetry is Poetry, and Oratory is Oratory, and History is History, and you can't mix them.'

'Can't I? Indeed I can,' said Livy. 'Do you mean to say that I mustn't write a history with an epic theme because that's a prerogative of poetry or put worthy eve-of-battle speeches in the mouths of my generals because to compose such speeches is the prerogative of oratory?'

'That is precisely what I do mean. History is a true record of what happened, how people lived and died, what they did and said; an epic theme merely distorts the record. As for your generals' speeches they are admirable as oratory but damnably unhistorical.'51

The immediate irony is apparent, as Pollio's plain and unvarnished works are lost and much of Livy's colourful and rhetorical account has survived to be one of our major sources of Roman history. But there is a second irony. Graves's novels have something in common with both the Livian and the Asinian approach. Claudius insists that his books are a straightforward telling of the truth, and Graves was at pains to stress that his works were well documented and not at odds with the historical evidence. Pollio's insistence that history 'is a true record of what happened' recalls the oft-quoted dictum of Graves's great-uncle the historian Leopold von Ranke that history is a record of what

happened as it actually happened ('wie es eigentlich gewesen ist'). But at the same time Graves does credit his characters with motives and habits and speeches which are aggressively, if not impossibly, modern. The novels are thus at once Livian and Asinian.

The debate between Livy and Pollio forms a convenient bridge between the Apollonian aspects of the novels, and the theme of Claudius and the Britons. Following his invasion of Britain, Claudius

fights a pitched battle with the main body of the natives at Brentwood. He composes a speech to whet his men's mettle:

I had prepared what I considered a very suitable speech. It was somewhat reminiscent of Livy, but I felt that the historical importance of the occasion called for something in that style. It ran:

Romans, let no tongue among you wag and no voice bellow vainly, praising the days of old as the days of true gold, and belittling the present age, of

51 I, Claudius, 104 (ch. 9).

whose glories we should be the doughty champions, as a graceless age of gilded plaster ...

... The Roman soldier, whether his battlefield be the icy rocks of Caucasus, the burning sands of the desert beyond Atlas, the dank forests of Germany, or the grassy fields of Britain, is never unmindful of the lovely City which gives him his name, his valour, and his sense of duty.

I had composed several more paragraphs in this same lofty strains [sic], but strangely enough not one word of the speech was delivered.

Instead, Claudius is overcome by the moment, delivers a short, colloquial and humorous speech, and 'They cheered me till they were hoarse, and I knew then that Pollio was right and Livy was wrong. A

good general couldn't possibly deliver a studied oration on the eve of battle. .'52

The allusion to Livy and Pollio is casual and easy to miss. There have been no references to their debate since it occurred in I, Claudius; in the framework of Claudius the God alone it is meaningless. But it serves to re-emphasize, at a critical point, the problematic nature of the historical novel. Furthermore, within this passage there are references to the world in which the novels were written. The style is presented from Claudius' point of view as a respectful pastiche of Livy, and doubtless a Latin 'original' could be prepared in that vein. But from the

point of view of a classically trained Englishman such as Graves, it is as much a parody of the sort of translationese that schoolboys were (and are) encouraged to produce; a creaking style, heavy with archaisms, which only serves to make the author in question seem more remote and alien. In this respect it may be compared to Housman's famous 'Tragic Fragment', in which the excesses of the tragic style, and

contemporary public-school translationese, are similarly ridiculed. Again, themes from Goodbye to All That resurface; Graves observes:

Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me grumbled, 'Christ, as if one bloody push wasn't enough to worry about at the time!' A Roman Catholic padre, on the other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven or, at any rate, be excused a great many years in Purgatory. When I told this story to the Mess, someone else said that on the eve of a battle in Mesopotamia the Anglican chaplain of his battalion had preached a sermon on the commutation of tithes. 'Much more sensible than that Battle against Sin. Quite up in the air, and took his men's minds off the fighting.'53

52 These two passages are from Claudius the God, 253 ff. (ch. 19). 53 Goodbye to All That, 159 (ch. 17).

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The similarity is evident. Likewise (though not quoted here) some words of Claudius' speech become the basis for the nicknaming of several of the legions who fight in the battle. This too is paralleled in the Great War, where there is good attestation for such nicknaming of British regiments, and for the accompanying aetiologies.54

The attention given to Claudius' British campaigns, which Roman writers such as Suetonius and Strabo were apt to play down, is an anachronism, but one with special relevance for a British public. Some aspects of Claudius' Battle of Brentwood bear a loose resem- blance to the fighting of the Great War; Claudius counters the British chariot-charge by stretching ropes knee-high in the grass to disable the horses, and by deploying a camel-corps, whose smell distracts the horses and whose appearance terrifies the charioteers. This is followed by an attack by African auxiliaries, who also strike terror into the British hearts. These are similar, in broad terms, to the use of barbed wire to repel the cavalry, and of poison gas, tanks, and colonial troops in the 1914-18 war. These similarities should not be over-stressed, but their presence would not be inconsistent with Graves's technique.

More significant is Claudius' account of the Druidical system of education. Now Graves had a long-standing interest in Celtic lore, and no doubt could justify much of this account from later Irish or Welsh sources. But the use to which he put those sources can best be understood in the light of British educational practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His father had been a distinguished educationalist (another similarity with Samuel Butler, whose grandfather had been a celebrated headmaster of Shrewsbury School), and had withdrawn him from his first dame-school on finding him studying'a Question and Answer history book ... which began: Question: Why were the Britons so called? Answer: Because they painted themselves blue.'55 It is just this sort of learning, albeit at a higher level, which will delight Claudius. The choice of public school for the young Robert was dictated by his 'inability to conjugate 1uTrhLL, and IqrLt conventionally' in the Common Entrance paper: 'But for these two verbs I should certainly have gone to the very different atmosphere of Winchester.'56 Instead he goes to Charterhouse, and receives much the same education that Butler 'Ernest Pontifex' had at 'Roughborough'.

The Claudius novels provide a complement to the picture painted in Goodbye to All That. I have suggested that Graves is using the world of Claudius to discuss many topical issues of his own world.

54 e.g. ibid. 79 (ch. 12); Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; Harmondsworth, 1987), 181 (ch. 18).

55 Goodbye to All That, 21 (ch. 3). 56 Ibid. 25 (ch. 3).

This relies in part on an identification between the Roman and British empires, an identification which is something of a commonplace in the late Victorian to Edwardian period, when Graves was a boy, and though by this time probably less self-evident, nevertheless implicit in the text. So when Claudius describes the Britons of his day, he observes that they 'speak a language akin to primitive Latin',57 and quotes Julius Caesar on the affinity between Briton and Roman. The reference to a relationship between Latin and Celtic may mean no more than that they are both Indo-European languages; but Graves is classifying them together, over against the Germans, who also speak a language of Indo-European stock. This suggests that he was aware of and is exploiting the hypothesis of a distinct 'Italo-Celtic' group within Indo-European. The modern Britons therefore are sometimes rep- resented in the figure of the ancient Britons, who can claim a special kinship with the Romans.

Graves's account of Druidical training is written with the detached fascination of the ethnologist, but shows many similarities to the contemporary education of the British elite:

The Druid priesthood is recruited from young men who have attained a high rank in their secret societies and to whom certain marks of divine favour have been given. But twenty years of hard study at the Druidical college are first called for ... The first twelve are spent in being initiated in turn into all the other secret societies, in learning by heart enormous sagas of mythological poetry and in the study of law, music and astronomy. The next three are spent in the study of medicine. The next three are spent in the study of omens and magic. The tests put upon candidates for the priesthood are immensely severe. For example, there is a test of poetical composition. The candidate must lie naked all night in a coffin-like box, only his nostrils protruding above the icy water with which it is filled, and with heavy stones laid upon his chest. In this position he must compose a poem of considerable length in the most difficult of the many difficult bardic metres, on a subject which is given him as he is placed in the box .... Another test is to stand before the whole body of Druids and be asked verse-questions in riddling form which must be answered in further riddles, also in verse. These riddles all refer to obscure incidents in the sacred poems with which the candidate is supposed to be familiar .... The candidate's last test but one is to spend the longest night of the year seated on a rocking-stone called the 'Perilous Seat' which is balanced over a deep chasm in the mountains somewhere in the west of the island. ... There are three ranks of Druid priests. There are those who have passed all the tests, the true Druids; then come the Bards, those who have passed in the bardic tests but have not yet satisfied the examiners in soothsaying, medicine and magic .. 58

7 I, Claudius, 212 (ch. 16).

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58 Ibid. 221 ff. (ch. 16).

THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION 213

Graves's source for this passage is Caesar's account of the training of the Gallic Druids,59 but again the language in which Graves chooses to couch it suggests that he is thinking of more modern times. At the most obvious level, the reference to candidates satisfying 'the exam- iners in soothsaying, medicine and magic' is little less than a pastiche of the Statutes of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But there are other parallels. The youth of Britain's ruling class, ancient and modern, spends much of its time swallowing vast tracts of mythological poetry. The ritual cold baths and freezing dormitories of the public-school legend correspond to the trainee Druid's night in a water-filled coffin. Apart from the formal examinations, the Druid is 'initiated . . . into all the other secret societies'; this is not unlike the sort of furtive locker-room sodality which Graves encountered at Charterhouse.60 The verse-composition has no specific counterpart in Goodbye to All That, but the 'many difficult bardic metres' recalls Ernest Pontifex's struggles with Alcaics (probably as hard a metre as any, except such oddities as Galliambics). Graves is not averse to airing his expertise as a Latin versifier, and on one occasion rather smugly shows off his ability to handle dubious quantities; an effect rather marred by the fact that in the verses in question there is one quantity which is indubitably false.61 The last ordeal of the aspiring Druid, the night on the Perilous Seat in the west of Britain, has some similarity with the young Graves's mountaineering exploits on the hills of Wales.

Graves, then, is using the world of the ancient British to poke fun at the world of the moderns. The finest education of his day is represented in the guise of a set of remote and barbaric practices. In this his satirical technique resembles that which he ascribes to the Homeridae in the Iliad; he is pointing no finger and tipping no wink, but the satire is there. But it would be mistaken to assume that that is the end of the story. The same classical education which he satirizes is also the one which has given him the training to enable him to write these novels. In this respect too he may be compared to Butler, who had mercilessly mocked his classical formation yet had continued to write works of Homeric criticism. So while on the one hand Graves uses his novels to attack the British public-school system, on the other

59 De Bello Gallico vi. 13. 60 Cf. especially the 'New-bug's Exam' described in Goodbye to All That, 48 ff. (ch. 8). 61 Ibid. 167 (ch. 19); the verses are O si bracchipotens qui fulminat ore clericus and O si

bracchipotens clericus qui fulminat ore (with long and short i respectively in clericus, which should have a long e (Gk. KXYPLKoS")). I suspect, however, that Graves may purposely have left the false quantity in the verse, to insult the intelligence of all who fail to spot it. This would not seem out of character. I also suspect that the original of the bracchipotens clericus (why this adjective?) was a Revd Armstrong, but Crockford's has not supported this.

hand there are various incidents and themes in them which amount to a defence of old-fashioned classical education. These deserve attention.

After receiving his prophecy from the Sibyl guaranteeing the survival of his work (see p. 208 above), Claudius determines to write in Greek, on the grounds that 'Greek ... will always remain the chief literary language of the world, and if Rome rots away, will not her language rot away with her? Besides, Greek is Apollo's own language.'62 As with the reflections on the relative merits of Asinius and Livy as historians, and of Virgil and Ennius as poets, Graves plays ironically on the reader's knowledge that Latin has not perished. The ancient language is known and used much more than Ancient Greek, and the number of Romance speakers is much higher than that of Greek-speakers. Claudius in effect writes Latin off as being ultimately a dead language, even if it is not so yet. To the objection that Latin is inevitably a dead language, and so of no use in the modern world, Graves is implicitly replying that such pessimism is premature.

Claudius spends most of his life, before becoming Emperor, working as an antiquarian, and in the course of his studies he has occasion to learn various languages which were being or had been killed off by the spread of Rome and Latin, such as Sabine and Etruscan. His family regard this as a pedantic irrelevance and advance the sort of arguments that are often used against the teaching of the classical languages; Tiberius jibes: 'There's no ancient Etruscan left to protest and no modern Etruscan who cares, so you can write as you please.'63 But this knowledge is to serve Claudius well. When Augustus dies, Claudius' knowledge of Etruscan and the Etruscan art of interpreting portents enables the imperial family to proclaim his apotheosis.64 Again, years later, when Messalina plots her coup with Silius, Claudius receives a secret message from a former prostitute and companion of his, Calpurnia, to whom he had taught Etruscan. The note, written in Etruscan so as to be unintelligible to all others, warns him of his wife's actions; he is able to return to Rome in time to quell the uprising. Claudius' education in the 'dead' languages enables him to survive in the harsh political realities of the present.

Claudius also shows considerable respect for the institutions of British education, which, as I have argued, in many ways reflect the Victorian-Edwardian public-school system. When towards the end of his life he muses upon his successes and failures, he finds himself turning to British verse-forms:

62 I, Claudius, 14 (ch. 1).

214

63 Ibid. 266 (ch. 23). 64 Ibid. 162 (ch. 14).

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My statements fell, for some reason or other, into related groups of three, like the 'tercets' of the British Druids ...

I love liberty: I detest tyranny. I have always been a patriotic Roman. The Roman genius is Republican.

The British public-schoolboy learns to write Latin verses; conversely, the Roman Emperor writes British verses.

His final plan for the restoration of the Roman republic, after his death, rests on his son, significantly called Britannicus. Claudius perceives that if he grows up in Rome, he will either be disposed of or become corrupted by the prevailing decadence. Instead Claudius resolves to send him off to Britain, where he will be safe from Agrippina, Nero, and the moral turpitude of Rome. When the time is right he will return to Rome and restore the republic.65 Just as a

background in the classics formed the ruling class of the British Empire, so a British education will be the salvation of the Roman. But the experiment is never tried; when Claudius puts the plan to Britannicus, he objects that such education is outmoded, and opts for a more vocational training: 'The Republic's dead, except for old- fashioned people like you and Sosibius. Give me proper tutors. My present ones are no use to me. I want to understand finance and legal procedure, I want to learn how to be an Emperor!'66 Britannicus' wish is granted. But his training in the latest political theory does not save him. Shortly after Nero's accession he is murdered.

The debate on educational theory and practice (the relative import- ance of the classics and modern studies, the value of the games tradition, of mixed and single-sex education, boarding-schools, compulsory religion) was intense in inter-war Britain, and Graves as the son of an educationalist had opinions of his own. His attitude towards the traditional education was, like Butler's, ambivalent. The tone of the chapter of The Long Week-end devoted to 'Education and Ethics' may be seen in the following passage:

[The liberal educationalist A.S.Neill] himself cherished a resentment against his own repressive Scottish education: he had come to abominate the Classics, suspecting anyone who had any liking for them ... He was a kindly and generous man and gave everyone at Summerhill equal rights . . . He counted as his greatest discovery the fact that children were born sincere, and remained so unless warped by conventional education. Some turned out sincerely good, a few stayed sincerely bad. Everything got broken.67

This is hardly an endorsement of liberal educational policy, and one is left with the impression that Neill's intellectual shortcomings were not

65 Claudius the God, 415 ff. (ch. 32). 66 Ibid. 417 (ch. 32). 67 The Long Week-end, ch. 13.

unconnected with his abomination for the classics, though it allows his personal qualities. He then rounds on Bertrand Russell, describing him as 'another man with a grudge against his education'-though this description is at least to some extent true of himself. But within the wider picture of this debate, we may point to one specific develop- ment.

Graves had matriculated to Oxford in 1919 with a scholarship to read 'Greats', that course in classical literature and philosophy ancient and modern which is one of the ornaments of Western culture. He later changed to reading English literature, and continued to live in the Oxford area until 1926. In 1923 a new course was introduced at Oxford, that in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE). This was conceived as a contemporary version of the classical course, and was accordingly known as 'Modern Greats'. The introduction of a new course, explicitly set on a par with the prestigious traditional Greats course, was not well received by all; one future novelist, then an undergraduate, described it as 'a new, disreputable school . . . for "publicists and politicians"'.68 Graves's views on Modern Greats are not known, but the relationship between Greats and Modern Greats is suspiciously similar to that between the traditional and new edu- cational options open to Britannicus; perhaps Graves too was unim- pressed by PPE.

There exists therefore a tension in the attitudes towards education in the Claudius novels. The discussion on the best sort of education within the novels is not innocent. As with many other themes and episodes in them, it is treated with half an eye on the present. The overlap with the contemporary world is not accidental; the anachron- ism is deliberate and serves to emphasize the tensions between the different approaches to education. For comparative purposes there are two other works of Graves which show a similar tension in attitude towards the study of antiquity. After the publication of the Claudius books Graves was invited to review a historical novel, Sulamith Ish-Kishar's Magnificent Hadrian, in the Observer.69 In this review he wittily demolished the work on the grounds that the author was both ill-informed ('[in] the bibliography of two hundred mixed titles ... three of the five ordinary Classical historians of the period did not appear') and over-imaginative; the review consists of excerpts from the novel rewritten 'soberly and honestly'. Clearly Graves believed there was a place for an imaginative reconstruction of the ancient

68 Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning (1964), ch. 8. See also the advice given to Charles by his right-thinking older cousin Jasper in Brideshead Revisited (1945), to the effect that Modern Greats was a school more disreputable than any save English.

69 Observer, 27 Oct. 1935; also summarized in The Long Week-end, 341-2. This also has some interesting notes on contemporary historical fiction.

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world, but preferred a straightforward, even prosy, factual account to an over-creative retelling. Similarly his delightfully malicious attack on Ezra Pound and his fans, Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound,70 is cast as a scene in a classroom between the schoolboy Pound and a pedantic, donnish, and none-too-bright master of the old school. The title suggests that the free and imaginative approach to the classics found in Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius is simply the inverse of the fussy literal-mindedness of Dr Syntax. However, the latter is distinctly the more sympathetic character.

Conclusions

The argument that Graves's Claudius novels contain such a degree of satirical comment is not, to the best of my knowledge, one that has been argued before, and does not immediately present itself to the reader. It may be objected that if there were satirical elements in the Claudius novels, they would have been noticed earlier, indeed when they were first published. There are, I suggest, several reasons why this need not be the case. In the first place, the humour seems largely to be a private joke of the author's. In his evocation of the Homeridae satirizing the contemporary rulers, it is evidently not 'public' satire, with the audience laughing at the princes; if it had been, the princes would soon have found out and put a stop to it. So it is with Graves's own writing; the fact that the satire is not immediately apparent does not prevent us from inferring its presence. The genre of the work too tends to discourage critical attention. Historical fiction is generally seen as escapist and second-rate literature, and not taken quite seriously. It is noteworthy that the Penguin texts of Samuel Butler consulted list him as a 'Classic' author, and accord him the full critical regalia of Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, whereas the same Press regards Graves as a 'Modern Classic' and do not offer any editorial assistance as to how to read the text. It is doubly ironic then that Graves should have selected this genre as the vehicle of his satire. This reading is, as I have said, tendentious. Any one of the instances alleged may be dismissed. However, it is based on a wider enquiry into Graves's antecedents and an application to his work of his own critical approaches.

But often the tone of the work, satirical or straightforward, cannot be identified, nor need it be. Like the Sassoon poem discussed above (p. 197), it is equally susceptible of either reading. Butler's descrip- tion of the 'Authoress of the Odyssey' at work is no less true of Robert

70 A response to a eulogy of Pound in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 Sept. 1953; printed in the Pelican 1960 edn. of The Crowning Privilege, 242-4.

218 THE VALUES OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION

Graves: 'At the same time I take it that the writer was one half laughing and one half serious, and sometimes have been hard put to it to know whether she was more in the one vein than the other.'71

71 The Authoress of the Odyssey, ch. 15.