Books: The Golden Fleece

HERCULES, MY SHIPMATE—Robert Graves—Creative Age Press ($3).

What the Golden Fleece really was—a cloak tossed to earth by Zeus when he was drunk, or a sheepskin book of alchemic secrets, or the gilded epidermis of a young human sacrifice named Mr. Ram—nobody knows. But Robert Graves is quite sure that, whatever the Golden Fleece was, the voyage of Jason and his Argonauts really happened. His story of "how it really happened" shows the legendary cruise as one of the bawdiest, bloodiest, most boisterous expeditions of all time.

In I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the...