any education in classical literature – usually, however, only after the study of Caesar, Livy, Cicero, etc., while Tacitus' style requires a greater understanding of the Latin language, and is perceived as less "classical" than the authors of the Augustan age. A remarkable feat was accomplished by Robert Graves: the major gap of text of the Annals that had gone lost regarded the end of Tiberius' reign, the whole of Caligula's reign, and the major part of Claudius' reign (the remaining part of Tacitus' manuscript only took up again at this Emperor's death, for the transition to the reign of Nero). Robert Graves' novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935) filled the gap perfectly: all the missing parts of the Annals, up to the latter part of the reign of Claudius himself, were covered by a coherent story. Of course part of it can be considered "mockumentary" in the Augustan History tradition (for example how Claudius really felt about republicanism, heavily elaborated by Graves sometimes based on "reconstructed" historical documents, will probably never be really established). Graves borrowed much from Tacitus' style: apart from the "directness" of an Emperor pictured to write down his memoirs for private use (linked to the "lost testament of Claudius" mentioned in Tacitus' Annals), the treatment is also on a year-by-year basis, with digressions not unlike Tacitus' "moralising" digressions, so that in the introduction of the second of these two volumes Graves saw fit to defend himself as follows: Some reviewers of I, Claudius, the prefatory volume to Claudius the God, suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus's Annals and Suetonius's Twelve Caesars, run them together, and expanded the result with my own "vigorous fancy." This was not so; nor is it the case here. Among the Classical writers who have been borrowed from in the composition of Claudius the God are Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius, Pliny, Varro, Valerius Maximus, Orosius, Frontinus, Strabo, Caesar, Columella, Plutarch, Josephus, Diodorus Siculus, Photius, Xiphilinus, Zonaras, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal, Philo, Celsus, the authors of the Acts of the Apostles and of the pseudo-gospels of Nicodemus and St. James, and Claudius himself in his surviving letters and speeches. Graves' work reflected back on the perception of Tacitus' work: Graves curbed the "slandering of Emperors" by portraying Claudius as a good-humoured emperor, at heart a republican, resulting in the perception that if the "Claudius" part of