It had never occurred to me how much popular understanding of the early Roman emperors might have been influenced by Robert Graves’s sexual peccadilloes. Graves was the author of the bestselling I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (1934), a fictionalised autobiography of Emperor Claudius, which was made into a renowned BBC television series in 1976. There can’t be many people who haven’t encountered it. I saw it first at school, where it was a trusty fallback for classics masters who were too hungover to teach on Saturday mornings. ‘Very informative, gives you a real insight into the Julio-Claudian imperial household,’ one croaked while fumbling with the video recorder, before leaving us to goggle at the mixture of parricide, conspiracies, orgies and incest. 

As Joan Smith observes in this new book, Graves was often more imaginative than informative, especially where the women of the imperial family were concerned. Many passages in his work that painted them in a negative light – for example, Empress Livia (Augustus’s wife) arranging the murder of her own son Drusus, or Augustus’s daughter Julia the Elder being driven wild thanks to a ‘love philtre’ administered by Livia – are pure inventions. They sprang, she argues, from Graves’s misogyny, which was caused by a combination of First World War PTSD and the complications of his love life. Graves’s angst at the postwar emancipation of women, together with the strains of his tempestuous ménage à quatre (which culminated in him and his lover Laura Riding jumping from the window of their top-floor flat in Hammersmith in April 1929), led him to depict the female characters of I, Claudius and Claudius the God as amoral and manipulative debauchees. 

As we try to get to the truth about Rome’s imperial women, says Smith, we have to contend with the misogyny of ancient historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius and influential modern writers such as Graves. It is not only contemporary documentaries and films that apply a double standard