Top 10 books on the ancient world

Annabel Lyon is a Vancouver fiction writer and teacher. Her books include Oxygen (stories), The Best Thing for You (novellas), All-Season Edie (juvenile novel), and The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults.

At the Guardian, she named her top ten books on the ancient world.

One book on the list:

I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)

Violent, dirty, shocking, funny, erudite, utterly compelling – Graves's account of the Julio-Claudian emperors of Rome has become a classic, immortalised in the great 1973 BBC series of the same name. The novel is supposedly the autobiography of the emperor Claudius, who survived to adulthood only by pretending to be an idiot. Graves himself is supposed to have claimed to dislike the books, and wrote them only out of financial need.

Read about the other entries on the list.

I, Claudius also appears on Lindsey Davis' top ten list of Roman books and John Mullan's list of ten of the best poisonings in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue