Graves' work reflected back on the perception of Tacitus' work: Graves curbed the "slandering of Emperors" by portraying Claudius as a good-humoured emperor, at heart a "republican", resulting in the perception that if the "Claudius" part of Tacitus' annals had survived it probably wouldn't have been all slander towards the emperors of the 1st century. The more explicit defence of republicanism in Graves' work (that is: "much more" explicit than in Tacitus' work) also made any further direct defense of "black Tacitism" quite impossible (as far as Napoleon, by "not" advocating a "black Tacitism" line of thought hadn't already made such interpretation obsolete).