"I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 BC, Murdered and Deified AD 54" by Robert Graves

No, this isn't a new release or even a recently published edition. The Modern Traveler has found herself with a little time on her hands (and not traveling to Rome, unfortunately) and so she picked up this book. There's a reason this book is a classic. Robert Graves, somehow, someway, made it seem possible to really truly know the heart of the emperor Claudius. It boggles the mind to conceive of the amount of research that Graves must have done to write the things he wrote. And what an imagination! What a joy it would have been to meet him. His translations and novels are so perfect-he is absolutely one of the great Classical scholars of our time. And I, Claudius is the pinnacle of his work.