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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Augustus’s ambitious third wife, Livia, mother of his eventual successor, Tiberius, comes across as coolly pragmatic and no more excessively conniving than most of the people around her: a far more persuasive character than the Grand Guignol poisoner of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
I have read this book before and am very glad this one has at least one strong woman in it rather than a stereotypical harridan. I should add that his daughter, Julia, was hardly a wilting flower, but "one of the novel’s subtlest and most arresting characters� intelligent, ironic, rebellious, worldly, philosophical." It was Julia's real-life fate that inspired Williams to write this novel.
Tamela and 2 other people liked this
A possible criticism of the earlier novels is that the author occasionally works so hard to make the writing “beautiful� that it sometimes works against believability; in particular, Andrews in Butcher’s Crossing often expresses himself in a high style at odds with his callow youth. The ventriloquism imposed by Augustus’s epistolary form saves Williams from this vice. It is his most rigorous work.
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