I, Claudius was the most widely read and commercially successful book Robert Graves had written to that point. Although his autobiography Good-Bye to All That and his growing reputation as a war poet had placed him on the literary map, it was not until I, Claudius that he was able to make a reasonable living from his writing.

Within a few months of its publication, the book had been reprinted four times in Great Britain and the United States. Although Graves considered the book to be a potboiler that he wrote only for the money, it went on to win the James Tait Black and Hawthornden Prizes of 1935. Writing in The Nation & Atheneum, the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote that the book was “amazingly full of color and imagination.” In 1935, Alexander Korda purchased the film rights to I, Claudius with the intention of making a movie starring Charles Laughton. The movie, eventually to be directed by one of Hollywood’s finest directors, Josef von Sternberg, was never completed.

Posterity was very kind to Graves. In 1976, the British Broadcasting System produced a television series based on I, Claudius and its successor, Claudius the God, starring Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart and John Hurt. The series was one of the most successful mini-series ever produced, and following its broadcast in the United States, the book, which has been selling a couple thousand copies a year, was reprinted by Vintage for its Vintage Classics series and became an international bestseller. The book’s crowning achievement came in 1998 when the Modern Library listed it as the fourteenth best novel of the twentieth century.