In his translations of three major works from the Roman world, collected in a single volume for the first time, Robert Graves brings the myths, legends and history of the classical world to life. His translations influenced a generation of readers and writers when they were first published in the 1950s. As Robert Cummings demonstrates in his introduction, Graves sometimes overrides the demands of accuracy; his interpretations of and responses to his material are at times idiosyncratic but, ‘Whatever complaints are lodged against Graves’s translations, he remains, after fifty years, eminently readable.’ Graves himself recognised the translator’s problem: ‘how much is owedto the letter, and how much to the spirit’. It is the novelist’s narrative virtuosity, his flair for catching a character’s individual voice, and above all his endless curiosity about the world, that make these translations as compelling as they were to their original audience; they also mirror Graves’s interest in myth in The White Goddess and his imaginative recreations of the classical world in I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

The Golden Ass is an essential work in European literature, a magical, sometimes bawdy adventure, to which Graves responds with exuberant delight. In contrast, Lucan’s Pharsalia, an account of the civil war between Julius Casear and Pompey, raises for Graves issues of the writer’s moral responsibility, the rejection of rhetoric, that in his own time, he writes, had sent poets ‘marching through the Waste Land’ after the Great War. The Twelve Caesars exemplifies the writer’s responsibility to the truthful record in its vivid accounts of the corruptions of arbitrary power.

Contents

Editor’s Introduction by Robert Cummings    

APULEIUS
THE GOLDEN ASS
Introduction by Robert Graves    
Apuleius’s Address to the Reader    
Chapter I    The Story of Aristomenes    
Chapter II    At Milo’s House    
Chapter III    The Story of Thelyphron    
Chapter IV    The Festival of Laughter    
Chapter V    Lucius is Transformed    
Chapter VI    The Bandits’ Cave    
Chapter VII    Cupid and Psyche (I)    
Chapter VIII    Cupid and Psyche (II)    
Chapter IX    Cupid and Psyche (III)    
Chapter X    Defeat of the Bandits    
Chapter XI    At the Stud-Farm    
Chapter XII    With the Eunuch Priests    
Chapter XIII    At the Mill-House    
Chapter XIV    With the Market-Gardener and the Centurion    
Chapter XV    At the Councillor’s House    
Chapter XVI    Under the Trainer    
Chapter XVII    The Goddess Isis Intervenes    
Chapter XVIII    The Ass is Transformed    
Chapter XIX    At the Bar    
Appendix    Lucian’s Ass    

LUCAN
PHARSALIA:
DRAMATIC EPISODES OF THE CIVIL WARS
Introduction by Robert Graves    
Book I    
Book II    
Book III    
Book IV    
Book V    
Book VI    
Book VII    
Book VIII    
Book IX    
Book X    

SUETONIUS
THE TWELVE CAESARS
Foreword by Robert Graves    
Chapter I    Julius Caesar, afterwards deified    
Chapter II    Augustus, afterwards deified    
Chapter III    Tiberius    
Chapter IV    Gaius Caligula    
Chapter V    Claudius, afterwards deified    
Chapter VI    Nero    
Chapter VII    Galba    
Chapter VIII    Otho    
Chapter IX    Vitellius    
Chapter X    Vespasian, afterwards deified    
Chapter XI    Titus, afterwards deified    
Chapter XII    Domitian    
Pedigrees of the Julian and Flavian Houses