Sex, tragic, premature death, adultery, frenetic plotting for the throne, exile, obsession with status and security, lust for money… If you think Charles Spencer’s new dissection of the Royal Family is pretty gory, try watching I, Claudius. 

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50 years ago, on September 20, 1976, the first of 12 episodes were aired in the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934). They’re all on BBC iPlayer now. The Windsors have got nothing on the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the first Imperial dynasty of the Roman Empire. The first five emperors – Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero – are made for TV. A mixture of genius, monstrosity, vanity, shyness and delusional madness, the emperors were perfect copy for Robert Graves – and he made a fortune out of the book and its successor, Claudius the God (1935). 

The genius of Graves – and Jack Pulman, who adapted the book for TV – was to make the emperors chat and think in ordinary English. Graves’s inspirations were Suetonius and Tacitus. As a classics scholar at Charterhouse and St John’s, Oxford, it helped that he could read Latin in the original. But Suetonius and Tacitus are pretty........

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