'I let it be a dull book, recording merely such uncontroversial facts as, for example, that so-and-so married so-and-so, the daughter of such-and-such who had this or that number of public honours to his credit, but not mentioning the political reasons for the marriage nor the behind-the-scene bargaining between the families. Or I would write that so-and-so died suddenly, after eating a dish of African figs, but say nothing of poison, or to whose advantage the death proved to be, unless they were supported by a verdict of the Criminal Courts.
I told no lies, but neither did I tell the truth in the sense that I mean to tell it here. ... it is myself writing as I feel, and as the history proceeds the reader will be more ready to believe that I am hiding nothing – so much being to my discredit.
This is a confidential history. But who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity. I do not mean my great-grandchildren, or my great-great-grandchildren: I mean an extremely remote posterity. Yet my hope is that you, my eventual readers of a hundred generations ahead, or more, will feel yourselves directly spoken to, as if by a contemporary: as often Herodotus and Thucydides, long dead, seem to speak to me.'
Quotation from: I Claudius by Robert Graves
