At Rome we lived in the big house which had belonged to my grandfather and which he had left in his will to my grandmother. It was on the Palatine Hill, close to Augustus’s palace and the temple of Apollo built by Augustus, where the library was. The Palatine Hill looked down on the Market Place. Under the steepest part of the cliff was the temple of the Twin Gods, Castor and Pollux. (This was the old temple, built of timber and sods, which sixteen years later Tiberius replaced, at his own expense, with a magnificent marble structure, the interior painted and gilded and furnished as sumptuously as a rich noblewoman’s boudoir . My grandmother Livia made him do this to please Augustus, I may say. Tiberius was not religious-minded and very stingy with money.) It was healthier on that hill than down in the hollow by the river; most of the houses there belonged to senators. I was a very sickly child – a very battleground of diseases, ‘ the doctors said – and perhaps only lived because the diseases could not agree as to which as to which should have the honour of carrying me off. To begin with, I was born prematurely, at only seven months, and then my fuster-nurse’s milk disagreed with me, so that my skin broke out in an ugly rash and then I had malaria, and measles, which left me slightly deaf on one ear, and erypselas, and colitis, and finally infantile paralysis, wich shortened my left so that I was condemned to a permanent limp.
From the book ‘I Claudius’, by Robert Graves
