President Trump’s assertion of his “genius,” athwart recent reporting that his inner circle describes him in somewhat different terms — “moron,” “idiot,” “like a child” — along with concerns about his mental health, awakened a dormant memory of a scene in the 1970s TV adaptation of Robert Graves’s classic novel of ancient Rome, “I, Claudius.”
The Emperor Caligula, played to deranged and very scary perfection by John Hurt, tells his uncle Claudius: “I’m simply undergoing a change. It’s the most momentous transformation that any human being has ever achieved.”
Uncle Claudius’s frozen face is right out of Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell can this be?” He knows that this “change” portends no joy in Caesarville. But his life at the palace has made him nothing if not an artful survivor. Feigning delighted shock and awe, he tells his nephew: “I was blind not to see it instantly. You’re no longer human! May I be the first to worship you, as a g-g-g-god?”
Caligula replies with a weary air of menacing ennui, “It took you a long time to perceive that I’m no longer human.”
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