Word: messalina
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...first Roman novel as a scholarly potboiler. Called /, Claudius and giving a sympathetic account of the emperor whom Gibbon considered only a shade better than Nero, it became a bestseller. In Claudius the God, which followed, Graves pictured Claudius as the one Roman who believed that his wife, Messalina, was an honest woman, preserved the flavor of an old chronicle in a lively, modern story...
CLAUDIUS THE GOD AND HIS WIFE MESSALINA-Robert Graves-Smith & Haas...
...hard at it, turned many a laugh on his critics by his homely shrewdness, gradually built up a solid popularity with the Roman populace. His greatest personal triumph was his successful campaign against Britain, when his bookish tactics went like clockwork. In all his tribulations his adored young wife Messalina was his greatest comfort. Claudius was the last person in Rome to find out the truth about her: that she was a nymphomaniacal adulteress, a treacherous schemer, a cold-blooded poisoner. This discovery made Claudius nearly willing...
Though he still had his stout Republican purpose he saw that Rome was not yet ripe for it. To outsiders it looked as if Messalina's betrayal had turned him to the way of all Emperors: he married Agrippina, the wickedest woman in Rome, let her groom her son Nero for the throne, was apparently content to sit back and let the downward rush of history take its course. But there was method in his cynicism. Hoping that Rome would eventually tire of tyranny if it became too outrageous, he played King Log to the Roman frog-pond...
...tried and convicted while Paris papers ran page after page of feature articles, compared her to every famed murderess from Messalina to Beatrice Cenci. Though crowds' rioted against her outside the jail, though fellow prisoners spat hatefully at her, grey-haired President Lebrun was so moved by a last-minute plea for mercy from the mother whom she had tried to kill, that he commuted Violette Nozières' sentence last week to life imprisonment...