First Off

Right off, the most memorable opening line in a novel? I would say "top of my head" but honestly I looked up a list. Familiar though, yes?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged..."

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else... "

"It was the best of times..."

"Call me Ishmael."

"Happy Families are all alike..."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..."

I've put them roughly in order by date from 1813 to 1922, that also roughly being THE great century of the novel. Great novels before and since, obviously. Still, another "truth universally acknowledged" (all but) would be that most would probably pick something from that period to put on a list of the best books -- evah. Well, most of the people I like would anyway. Bringing the memorable first lines forward as far as "I am an invisible man." or even this, from Waiting (1999) by Ha Jin, "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." -- and how can you not want to go on reading?! Isn't that the point?

My favorite opening line? 

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." That is of course from The Towers of Trebizond, by dear Rose Macaulay.*

I've another:

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change when, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled."

That is a masterpiece, that sentence. Funny right off. That first joke still lands. Good. It is also quite strange of itself, that sentence as it is made of unlikely and unequal parts -- might almost be said shuffle and limp -- and yet it is as artfully assembled as a Debussy Cello Sonata. For a sentence made as late as 1934, the length and structure is more Latin than modern, and it even ends with a "dis" on a verb. (Though we learn not long after that this is meant to have been written in Greek, this "autobiography.") So this first sentence not only tells us a great deal and suggests even more of our narrator's appearance and character, it actually does this in what is actually a pretty brief space. No easy trick. Harder in it's way than some universal declaration about love, or life. There's the hero's name, just like the sailor and or the little Irish fella, but with more information and interest, so more like the offer of the camel then. And just to return briefly to the original point, how can you not want to go on reading once you've met dear ol' Clau-Clau-Claudius?

I honestly don't know how many times I have read Robert Graves' I, Claudius: from the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina. So many times. That puts it on my very short list of books I've read -- shall we say -- more than twice? Three times? 

Here's that list for curiosity's sake, this time it is right off the top of my greying bald head, and again in something like chronological order:

The OZ books of L. Frank Baum, all of which I borrowed from an older neighbor and read and reread time without number. My special favorites being Ozma of Oz, The Lost Princess of Oz, and probably Tik-Tok of Oz, with my favorite character probably being Scraps, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, but realistically, they were nearly all of them the very dearest friends of my early and sometimes lonely childhood.

Interview With a Vampire, by Anne Rice, the original mass market paperback of which I read and reread literally to tatters because it was, well, gay vampires, right? That sort of thing was much harder to come by in Western Pennsylvania in 1977. I decided when the lady died in 2021 to never open another book by her so long as I live. I read her right up to the precipice of her deeply weird re-conversion to Catholicism or whatever the fuck that was, and I've been sore tempted down the years to reread her vampires and or her witches, but  -- no. Of all my youthful enthusiasms, Anne Rice and "wine-coolers" are the two I think best left as fond memories of an earlier time and self.

Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield I've read more than any other Dickens and I've read and reread a lot o' Dickens. I could read either right this minute and enjoy the experience this time just as much as the last. All but the definition of a favorite I should think.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and The Essays of Montaigne. I group these together as they together constitute the nearest I've come in my adult life to serious study. I've read multiple translations of the latter, and all the supplemental and subsidiary biographies, studies, letters, essays, and poems of the former. Along with the Letters of Edward Fitzgerald and those of William Cowper, I could I think subsist in a cell with just these and Dickens. I should be unhappy, but I could do it.

The Essays of Elia, et al, including the letters, of Charles Lamb.

Probably without saying? Shakespeare and the 16th Century poets, plus Auden, Shelley, "This-that-and-the-other..."

And Claudius. Why?

When a TikTok meme revealed last year that men supposedly think about the Roman Empire every damned day, I simply could not understand it. Was this a serious thing? What on earth was the sample size? Who were these men?!

Now, other than my sexual orientation, to use that increasingly quaint phrase, I do look to be very much the demo for this obsession, to wit: old, white, middle-class (if only by marriage,) presumably literate, and not a complete yahoo. (The only empire the Trumpers generally dream of is probably either a vague notion of Kingdom Come, generalized white nostalgia, and or some sort of victory parade in that Call of Duty game. The oldest ones -- and they are mostly older than dirt -- may still remember gladiator pictures fondly I suppose.) When this whole Rome obsession was first announced in the mainstream media, I confess I did pursue it across the internet to every article that wasn't behind a paywall. A friend even gave me access to something in the (shiver) Wall Street Journal -- the paper of record for all the Americans most responsible for golf and other fiscal and environmental chicanery. I figured if anyone would have a handle on what seemed likely to be dickishness, it would be the WSJ.

Disappointing. Everyone seemed to agree that thinking about the Roman Empire was not good, mostly in the same way that thinking about porn every day might not be a great thing unless presumably one were in the business of, and nobody nowadays was really in the business of the Roman Empire. Other than a few popular historians like Adrian Goldsworthy and Mary Beard, and perhaps an historical mystery writer or two, nobody really makes a life any more from the shards and ruins of the Roman Empire. So, what then? Nostalgia for patriarchy? Check. Fantasies of socially acceptable, even ritualized violence? You betcha. All but overt sexual license to exploit the powerless? Sure. I would argue that there is also the same barely acknowledged homoeroticism of men digging thickly muscled dudes in tight leather gear and loose and revealing drapery that informs everything from Marvel comics to pro wrestling. How's your head (lock)? No complaints.

Let me just state unequivocally that I personally do not think about the Roman Empire every day, nor every other day. Neither do I think all that often about Napoleon, Attila, The Zhou Dynasty, or President Garfield. I can't say this has never happened and might not again, by I am by no means defined by any of it. (There are things I never think of like woodworking, table-tennis, lawn-care, industrial trucking, young adult anything including Zendaya, and gluten.) Yes, I did in fact take Latin in high school, but only because the teacher was older than God and it was a comparatively easier grade than French or Spanish. And yes, I have read more Roman history than say, Chinese, but this is a symptom I should guess of my general Anglophilia 'cause those old imperialists just loved imagining themselves as Horatius at the Bridge rather than what their ancestors and mine probably were, which was filthy Saxons grubbing peat and oats to keep from freezing to death over our cold porridge and mead. Also? Any gay boy who grew up anywhere near Summer Bible Camp has spent a disproportionate, even impious amount of time admiring those natty Roman governors of Judea etc. in the picture Bibles. Pontius Pilate's sense of style frankly put all those humble shepherds and silly high-priests in silly high hats to shame. (The villains often have the better dress sense, have you noticed?)

I was prepared to deny the whole fatuous business but then, as a lark, I put up a big display at the bookstore where I work. I titled the thing, "Rome Wasn't Read in a Day." Got a cute chalkboard sign made. Put up a selection of books by and about and thought little more about it. That was September of last year. Here we are months later and I have not been able to take that table down. Other, even better displays have come and gone, Rome endures. Why? Because I sell something off that damned thing every damned day. Seriously. Think about that. Not true of the new nonfiction table. Not true of the Mother's Day table I have up. Rome. Every day. Just like TikTok tried to tell me. That is nuts, right?

Ita sit.**

I've sold every Roman historian but Gibbon, oddly enough. Sold Ovid and Horace and Caesar and Cicero. Sold fiction off that table too. Sold Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor mysteries, but also John Williams' Augustus, and Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and even dear old, utterly forgotten Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome. I loved all of those by the way, each in their own way and in their own time, though none so much as Claudius. 

And guess, other than Gibbon, what I hadn't sold off that Rome display?

That's right. Inexplicable. One of the best and most uniformly fun historical novels ever, one of the best novels of the 20th Century by more than one critical matrix and on more than one list of same, adapted into one of my favorite tv shows ever and the one most requested when the they asked the American public to pick one Masterpiece Theatre to rerun, and I could not sell Robert Graves' novel for amare nor pecunia. Why? I begin to think it may be for the same reason so many of these stiffs like dreaming about the Glory that was Rome. I may be overthinking this, but nearly everything about Graves (and Gibbon, come to that) is a pretty harsh burn on all that endears the Roman Empire to the fellas. Whatever good came from the Empire was no more obvious to most the people who actually had no choice but to live through it than it is to me, and not everyone benefited equally. That seems obvious, but remember, most of the men thinking about Rome are not thinking about being a Gaul, or a woman, or frankly, Claudius! Was it fun to be a Caesar? Sure. Heliogabalus probably had a blast. His dinner guests maybe not so much. Get the picture? Actually sitting through a Triumph sounds deadly dull to me, but I bet a lot of guys imagine their enemies paraded in chains before them and so on. Graves and Gibbon, admitting that the old Romans had their moments, actually spend most of their books talking about what useless, miserable, spineless, cucks and dirty, rotten bastards actually sat on Caesar's seat. 

Let me propose then that I, Claudius has, among its many virtues, the potential to correct at least some of the nostalgia that tempts these boys to dream of wearing caligae and swinging their short sharp gladius in front of perfectly indifferent, cautiously alarmed strangers in remotest Bithynia. 

 So now, goddamn it, it's my next selection for Brad's Big fat Book Club. We are going to read the fictional adventures of a Julio Claudian emperor, but not any of the ones those guys think are so cool. I'm betting we are going to like it for exactly the reasons they wouldn't. I'll do what I can to see that we do. Using the full titles should help, particularly the second book's which is wicked and delightful and suggests something of the irreverence with which the novelist treats that old whore that was ROME!

*If you don't know her, Rose Macaulay (1881 - 1958) was is in fact a direct descendent of the family of historians as well as being a treasure in her own right. She wrote a number of delightful and thoughtful novels, including Told by an Idiot (1923) as well as a wide variety of poetry and prose, including a brilliant nonfiction book on ruins, and much travel. Her letters to her priest/friend are worth reading even if one does not share their faith.

**"So be it" in Latin.