![]() ![]() ![]() The empress emerges from his book as a scheming and jealous busybody with an expensive wardrobe and acid tongue. The novelist Robert Graves drew on both their accounts when he wrote I, Claudius, his gripping novel about the family, told from the perspective of Livia's stuttering grandson, Emperor Claudius. Surely it was in his interest to draw on the material he had to hand rather than resort to mere fabrication. Or might their books contain elements of truth? Suetonius was head of the libraries in Rome and had access to the imperial archives. Was what this highly respected historian reported a fiction? He and his younger contemporary, Suetonius, were writing almost a century after Livia died, and other historians who described her were writing later still. Tacitus' account – and others like it – is so jaw-dropping that it's hard to know what to make of it. – The buried ship found on an English estate The first lady was even suspected of foul play when the emperor finally dropped dead in AD14 in his seventies. ![]() The ancient historian elaborated that Livia put her husband, Emperor Augustus, under her control, and banished or had killed every potential heir to the throne in order to promote her own son – Augustus's stepson – Tiberius, as his successor. That was Tacitus's damning assessment of Livia Drusilla, first empress of Rome. "Livia: a blight upon the nation as a mother, a blight upon the house of Caesar as a stepmother". ![]()
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