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I've had the box DVD set of "I, Claudius" for many years now, really enjoyed it then (most of it anyway) and still binge-watch it about once a year (did that in October this year, I think). I've never read those two novels (not much of a fiction fan, he said, to everyone's surprise) but years ago, before I had the DVDs, I checked them out of the Grand Rapids library, disk by disk. One day while I was switching disks (that's something Bill Clinton probably wishes he could do, wait, what?) the library employee intrusively noted that she liked the books better. I'd imagine that, even though it was a 13 hour miniseries, the script was drastically cut. Not sure if it's in the books originally, but not all of the characters found in the various 'noble' families in the series actually existed in Roman history, for example. The DVD uses some surviving footage of the abortive attempt at making it into a movie, which would have starred Charles Laughton as Claudius and Merle Oberon as Messalina, in the form of an early-1960s retrospective.

Truth be told, I read those books when I was 12 and only flipped through them, during the series, to check on how close the scripts were to the originals. I do remember thoroughly enjoying both volumes, when I read it the first time and I did like the series very much....with one caveat: i.e. the version that Americans got to see, was EDITED and CENSORED! The Brit viewers saw not just longer episodes, but unedited ones! An example of this was the scene when Caligula cuts his unborn baby out of his sister's womb and, naturally, she dies.

Graves' book, "HOMER'S DAUGHTER", takes great liberties with one part of the Odyssey, adding characters and worse, if you're a stickler, but I did enjoy that book too.

The thing is...these are novels/pure fiction, though based on much earlier fictionalized historical things and therefore needs to be taken for just that!

OTOH...having blacks or other non-whites portray actual historical people, even though it's all fiction, is OUTRAGEOUS and patently ridiculous! To claim otherwise, just makes a mockery of the whole thing and does a great disservice to the viewer!