See Colleen, THAT'S how it should be done

Yesterday I finished Count Belisarius by Robert Graves. I hadn't read any of his books since I was at school and I have extremely dim recollections of the BBC miniseries of I, Claudius - I suspect Mum and Dad wavered between trying to send us to bed because there was a lot of murder and mayhem and letting us stay us because it was "educational". I certainly had the odd nightmare about Caligula for several months after that.

Anyway, Count Belisarius is the story of Belisarius, a general in the late Roman Empire who was most active in the time of the Emperor Justinian (who's famous for codifying Roman law and freight prices). The book was a longwinded collection of battles over a forty year career that went on a bit much about the fighting styles of the various oppenents and marching from here to here and building siege engines to take towns that ten years later would fall again. But you get that when it's a biography of a general I guess.

The rest of it was mixed up with a wonderful love story with his powerful wife Antonina, lively descriptions of imperial politics and, most challenging of all, the theological disputes of the time.

Graves tells the story from the point of view of a pagan Greek-educated slave of British origins. And this authorial voice is quite charming. It catches a lot of the tone of Plutarch's biographies by telling anecdotes from various stages of Belisarius's life to illustrate particular virtues or moral failings.

I know that there are really good sources for Belisarius's life (at one point the slave has much to say about how the official biography was vetted by the general's political enemies) but I don't have time to work out what's "true" and what Graves made up.

I actually don't think I need to. I felt like I was reading a real history of the period as told by a charming author. And I don't know that I'd enjoy the original sources any more than that.

This was so different to how I felt after ploughing through Colleen McCullough's unreadably dull Roman sagas. These beat you over the head with the weight of her "largest private library of Roman history" (on Norfolk island at least). She retold all of Tacitus's scurrilous gossip as truth and randomly made up a wife for Sulla just to add a bit of sex and drama to a pretty dramatic story. For someone who can write bodice rippers, it was amazing that she could make late Republican history so very BORING. Or at least more boring than the guys who were around at the time.

So thanks Robert. This almost makes up for The White Goddess.