ABSTRACT
The literature of Claudius' reign has been thought superficial and mundane, and the historical, or antiquarian, work of the Princeps himself pedestrian. In Seneca accession speech, Nero Drusus paints a fair picture of his future principate, naturally singling out what had recently caused most outrage to the listening senators; a yet fairer prospect on view in contemporary literature, both political prose such as Seneca's De Clementia and court poetry such as the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus. The elder Pliny, an equestrian official and servant of Claudius, had been impelled to compose his work on Rome-German wars by the apparition of Claudius' father Nero Drusus. For Dio, writing his large-scale History of Rome at the end of the second century, the reign of Claudius was only an episode. But the sympathetic novels of Robert Graves provided Claudius with an apologia, and the public works attracted more attention in the years of Mussolini's Italy and Roosevelt's New Deal.
