25 thoughts on “I, Claudius, I Love Your Bitchiness

  1. There must be something in the air … An Historian Goes to the Movies is also doing Claudius right now. That blog is focused on the history, rather than the costume. Makes a lovely package deal with Frock Flicks. :-)
    https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/

  2. Loved this series! The acting and dialog are so perfect! I will never understand why people let the studio-bound nature of the sets get in the way of appreciating the scripts and the actors! I can’t think of any other series set in this time period that does such a great job on the wardrobe. Maybe ‘Rome’ did.

    1. Remember that Graves wrote I, Claudius and Claudius the God as autobiographies told in Claudius’ own voice. Of course, Graves/Claudius would take liberties with the actual facts as well as see things from a very skewed perspective.

  3. I absolutely adored I-I-I Claudius (said with Claudius’ stammer.
    It, IMHO, is what every miniseries should be. I adore Head Bitch Livia. She let’s nothing stand in her way of making her eldest son, Tiberius, Emperor after Augustus, even killing Tiberius’ favourite brother, Drusus, her own son.

  4. I remember watching this as a child on PBS and my mother sending me out of the room then scolding me for watching a “dirty movie”. We got the to scene where Julia was having an orgy so I never actually finished the series. Now I need to try and find it to rewatch.

    1. Julia’s orgy was nothing compared to the topless dancers entertaining at court and Livilla’s rather graphic adventures with Sejanus.

  5. I was noticing how nicely the hair matches surviving sculpture. The prostitute Scylla has an amazing ‘do in episode 11 that seems taken right out a sculpture.

      1. Yes, it does a nice job of looking good on the actresses without sacrificing historicity.

        Also they did a good job of casting actors who look a decent amount like the characters they portray (apart from Blessed and Jacobi). That’s really rare.

  6. Sign me up for a re-visit to Rome! I only watched it one time through all those years ago, but it stuck with me, it was that good.

  7. I first watched I Claudius as a teenager and yes there were times when I was forbidden to watch thanks to the ABC making a big deal about cutting a particular scene otherwise Mum wouldn’t have cared. The excellent script and acting make it one of those classics which don’t date despite the studio locked sets. I think the only time I really noticed was when they were (supposedly) in the Colosseum watching the games. Political intrigue and skullduggery is inherently an indoor thing. The claustrophobic sets reflected the incarceration of the characters by the all pervading “evil”.
    Though he drew upon original sources I think Robert Graves gives the story his own personal slant which I suspect is fairly misogynist. I am always torn between thinking “Yay strong woman” and “all the women are bitchy” when watching. In reality I suspect the entire family were psychopaths and mad to varying degrees because that is what it took to grab and hold onto power in Rome at the time. From what I have read Claudius was not the saintly figure is is depicted as either.

    1. I feel like all the characters are equally despicable, female & male (except for Claudius, as the narrator, & everyone within the story hates him, so the audience feels pity for him). This mitigates a straight-up misogynist view of the women — they’re not singled out as horrible. And Livia, who commits the most crimes, is clearly the smartest & most capable person of them all, with the most sparkling dialog. So sure, she’s evil, but she’s incredibly good at what she does. Compare to Caligula who’s crazy in a kind of sloppy, less calculating, more emotional fashion — and he doesn’t get what he wants in the end.

    2. As I recall, there were a few female characters who were not “bitchy”, at least in the books: Antonia, Claudius’ mother, is a model of moral integrity; her only fault was in disliking her own son. Agrippina, Claudius’ sister-in-law, is a decent woman fighting for her sons’ survival. Octavia, Augustus’ sister, was also a good person, who, Claudius notes, took in the orphaned children of Antony (her husband) & Cleopatra (the woman for whom Antony left her). Claudius notes that Augustus’ daughter Julia, despite her scandalous sexual affairs, was always kind to him. Of the non-family characters, the young girl who befriends and is engaged to the boy Claudius is a nice and intelligent person (and is unfortunately murdered); the freedwoman who is Claudius’ mistress before he marries Messalina is a kind soul (and gets murdered). In the books, Claudius himself comments that there are good and bad Claudians; ‘sweet and sour apples’; and when they’re bad, they’re very bad.

  8. I remember watching this on Masterpiece many years ago, so I bought the DVDs last summer. Hot stuff! And pretty good costuming for such a tiny budget.

    However, I still call it “I, Clavdivs”!

    1. We call it that as well! Also, when Blackadder II first aired, we loved recognizing the opening titles as a take on the snake from the Claudius/Clavdivs opening.

      1. Our cat was fascinated by the snake slithering across the tiles but as soon as the face appeared would turn away as though thinking, “ugh humans”. It was a good opening and high tech for the time. Loved the music too.

  9. If you listen to the History of Rome podcast (which you totally should, it’s fascinating), he talks quite a lot about I Claudius and the theories on who was really in charge, and how historians argue about just how evil she really was.
    Or course, Roman history seems to be full of women who are full of…… alternate style of ethics, as I’m re-listening to it with my son right now and we just listened to the bit of the Severan dynasty and that has a crazy mother-in-law/grandmother that messes up several generations of kids.

    1. Oh yeah, the series is based on history, but that history is full of slander & propaganda, then Robert Graves gave it his own POV. Plus, he wrote the books in the 1930s, & more historical analysis of the era has come out since then.

  10. Love this series so much so mad props for covering it! When I was in my Roman Art&Architecture Studies at university, the head professor would always show snippets of this in classes–I loved knowing it was that good.

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