William Bouguereau The Two Sisters painting

William Bouguereau The Two Sisters paintingWilliam Bouguereau Two Sisters paintingWilliam Bouguereau The Wasp's Nest painting
Suetonius in his Twelve Caesars refers to Claudius's histories as written "ineptly" rather than "inelegantly". Yet it certain passages of the present work are not only ineptly written but somewhat inelegantly too-the sentences painfully constructed and the digressions awkwardly placed- this is not out of keeping with Claudius's literary style as exhibited in his Latin speech about the Aeduan franchise, fragments of which survive. The speech is, indeed, thickly strewn with inelegancies of this sort, but then it is probably a transcription of the official shorthand record of Claudius's exact words to the Senate-the speech of a tired man conscientiously extemporizing oratory from a paper of rough notes. I, Claudius is a conversational piece of writing as Greek, indeed, is a far more conversational language than Latin. Claudius's recently discovered Greek letter to the Alexandrians, which may however be partly the work of an imperial secretary, reads much more easily than the Aeduan speech.