Introduction

Modern readers with an interest in Roman history are apt to think of

Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars either as a major historical work, comparable to the histories of Tacitus, or as the ancient equivalent

of an exposé, lled with titillating titbits about the imperial families.

Both perceptions are understandable, although both are misleading.

The Twelve Caesars is neither history nor exposé, but instead biography, and rather unusual biography at that. In order to

appreciate it for what it is, it is helpful to know something about Suetonius’ background and to understand the distinctive format that

he employs in The Twelve Caesars.

1. SUETONIUS’ LIFE AND WORKS

Our information about the life and works of Suetonius is relatively

meagre, even though we have more and better sources for him than

for many ancient authors. Three of these are contemporary with Suetonius himself: a few personal comments in his own writings, several letters of the younger Pliny, and a fragmentary inscription

discovered in 1950 in the city of Hippo Regius, on the coast of what is now eastern Algeria. In addition, there are three brief notices about his career in later writers, as well as numerous references to

his writings.

Suetonius himself reveals something of his family background.

He reports that his grandfather knew the story that those close to

Caligula told about one of that emperor's more extravagant displays

( Calig. 19), which suggests that he had some connections with the court. He provides more speci c information about his father,

Suetonius Laetus: since he served as a military tribune in the army

of the emperor Otho in the spring of AD 69 ( Otho 10), he must have belonged to the equestrian order, the second tier of the Roman elite,

and had a public career.

Suetonius’ full name was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. Although

we do not know the year of his birth, he tells us that he was a young

man in the year AD 88 ( Nero 57), and it is generally thought that he was born around AD 70; one scholar has suggested that his

cognomen Tranquillus, ‘Peaceful’, would have been very appropriate

to a child born after the civil wars of AD 68–9. The place of his birth is uncertain. One possibility is Hippo Regius: the inscription found

there, an honori c dedication to Suetonius erected at public expense

in one of the main squares of the city, suggests that he may have

been a native of the city who achieved notable success in the wider

world. Wherever he was born, he was in Rome by the 90s, since he

records an incident from the reign of Domitian that he himself

witnessed ( Dom. 12). It was presumably in Rome that he embarked on the scholarly studies that became one of his chief occupations. It

was also surely in Rome that he acquired as his patron and

benefactor Gaius Plinius Secundus, conventionally known as Pliny the Younger. Pliny was one of the leading gures of his day, a noted

orator and writer who had a very successful public career, and who

is now known chie y through a surviving collection of his letters.

Suetonius makes his rst appearance in this collection in two letters

written around the year AD 97, when he was probably in his late twenties. From one of these ( Epistles 1.18), it appears that he was practising as an advocate, that is, a professional speaker who represented people in court cases; in the other ( Epistles 1.24), Pliny writes to a friend about a small property outside Rome that

Suetonius was hoping to buy as a country retreat.

Pliny continued to act as Suetonius’ benefactor for some fteen

years, as we can tell from the four further letters that refer to him.

From Pliny's letters we can deduce two things. First, Suetonius had

an interest in pursuing a public career. At some point in the period

AD 101–103 Pliny in fact obtained for him a position as military tribune, the same sort of position his father had held, with a legion

in Britain ( Epistles 3.8); unlike his father, however, Suetonius did not take up this post, but asked for it to be transferred to a cousin.

Whatever his reasons for making this request, Pliny was apparently

not o ended by it, and continued to act as his patron. Suetonius may in fact have been on Pliny's sta when Pliny served as governor

of the province of Pontus and Bithynia on a special appointment by

the emperor Trajan. It was from here that Pliny wrote to Trajan asking him to grant Suetonius the privileges granted to fathers of three children, a favour that Trajan granted ( Epistles 10.94–5; see further ‘Papian–Poppaean Law’ in the Glossary of Terms). This

exchange of letters dates to the second year of Pliny's governorship,

AD 110–11; since Pliny then disappears from the historical record, it

is usually assumed that he died shortly thereafter. Suetonius would

accordingly have needed to nd another patron if he wished to

continue advancing in his public career, and he seems to have found

one in Pliny's circle: C. Septicius Clarus, the dedicatee of the rst volume of Pliny's collected letters ( Epistles 1.1).

The second fact about Suetonius that emerges from Pliny's letters

is his interest in scholarly and literary pursuits. In one of the earliest letters to mention him, Pliny describes him as scholasticus,

‘scholarly’ ( Epistles 1.24. 4). Somewhat later, probably around AD

105 or 106, Pliny writes to encourage Suetonius to publish some work that he has completed but not yet made public ( Epistles 5.10).

A year or so after that, he writes to get Suetonius’ opinion about a

public reading of some of his own verse ( Epistles 9.34), and in his letter to Trajan he describes Suetonius as not only highly respectable

and honourable, but also as eruditissimus, ‘extremely learned’

( Epistles 10.94. 1). For Pliny, a public career and literary pursuits went hand in hand, as his letters attest. He was not alone in this: his uncle, Pliny the Elder, had combined a very successful career as an

equestrian o cial with extensive literary activity, of which

theyoungerPlinyproudlyprovidedadetailedcatalogue( Epistles

3.5).

The esteem for literary and scholarly pursuits that Pliny displays seems in fact to have been widespread among the men of his set, which included among others the historian Tacitus.

We have the fullest account of the scholarly side of Suetonius’

career from a work entitled Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia dating to the late tenth century ad. The entry on Suetonius (under

‘Tranquillus’, T 895 in the standard edition of Eve Adler), reads as

follows:

Tranquillus, called Suetonius, Roman grammaticus. He wrote On Greek Pastimes, one volume; On Roman Spectacles and Contests, two volumes; On the Roman Year, one volume; On Critical Marks in Books, one volume; On Cicero's Republic, one volume, in response to Didymus; On the Correct Names and Form of Clothes and Sandals and Other Things that People Wear; On Abusive Words or Insults and their Derivation; On Rome and its Customs and Usages, two volumes; Family Tree of the Caesars, which covers their lives and successions from Julius to Domitian, eight volumes; On Illustrious Roman Men.

Other sources preserve additional titles: On Notable Prostitutes, On Bodily Defects, On the Institution of O ces, On Kings, On Varied Topics and The Meadow ( Pratum or Prata, a miscellany). Almost all these works are lost, although they were much used by later scholars, to

whose references and citations we owe most of our information

about them.

What can we deduce from this material about Suetonius’

activities as a scholar? The Suda entry describes him as a grammaticus, a teacher of literature, one who specialized in the meaning and usage of particular words and the explication of

obscure names and references. This approach to literary studies had developed in the Greek world in the last few centuries BC, and by

the rst century BC had become established in Rome as well. It is unlikely, however, that Suetonius was a professional teacher, since

as an eques he would not have needed to earn a living in this way; he was no doubt instead what we would now call an independent

scholar. In describing Suetonius as a grammaticus, therefore, the Suda was merely indicating his eld of accomplishment.

The tradition of ‘grammatical’ scholarship was what underlay

and united Suetonius’ varied writings. Some of his works focused precisely on the meaning and usage of words, such as those on insults and clothes. Others were apparently antiquarian in nature, such as those on Greek games, Roman spectacles, the Roman year

and the institution of o ces. Lastly, some were biographical, such

as those on notable prostitutes, illustrious Roman men and, of course, the Caesars. Apart from The Twelve Caesars, only parts of the work on illustrious Roman men survive intact; for most of the rest

we have only scattered and brief citations. Of two works, however,

those on insults and on Greek games, we have brief summaries

produced in the Byzantine period. These are very helpful in giving

us some sense of what Suetonius’ lexicographical and antiquarian works were like. Suetonius composed both works in Greek, a useful

reminder of his close familiarity with the Greek literary and

intellectual tradition. That on insults, at least in its current form, consists of a historical preface followed by fourteen chapters that group the insults in various categories (terms for boasters, gossips,

dimwits and so forth; insults derived from the names of cities or numbers); within the chapters, each word is given a de nition and

an etymology, and illustrated by citations from various authors. The

overall impression is of a work that Pliny would no doubt have described as “extremely learned”, organized almost as a series of index cards.

The only writings of Suetonius to which we can assign even

approximate dates are his two major biographical works, On

Illustrious Men and The Twelve Caesars. The former probably appeared sometime between AD 107 and 118, and was a major work

comprising brief lives of probably well over 100 Latin men of letters. Its format was much like the one Suetonius used in his work

on insults: the biographies were grouped into separate sections according to the eld for which the subject was known (poets,

orators, historians, philosophers, grammatici and rhetors, teachers of rhetoric); each section consisted of a preface, discussing the origin,

history and nature of the genre in question, and then a series of entries on the individual writers in chronological order. A range of

evidence gives us a fairly good idea of its scope and nature: the section on grammatici and rhetors has survived largely intact; a few other lives preserved in various sources derive from it (certainly those of Terence, Horace, Lucan, Pliny the Elder and Crispus

Passienus; probably those of Virgil, Tibullus and Persius); and the Chronicle of St Jerome, who mined it for data, provides a reasonable guide to its remaining contents. These lives were on a much smaller

scale than those of the Caesars; the lives of grammatici and rhetors

rarely exceed 200 words, and the life of Terence, the longest of the surviving lives of poets, is barely more than a third as long as the

shortest of the lives of the Caesars. Even so, On Illustrious Men must when complete have been a major work of scholarship, and it

clearly served as an authoritative reference for centuries afterwards.

Although Suetonius’ scholarly productions may seem remote

from his public career, it would be a mistake to see these as sharply

distinct spheres of his life. As I noted above, the leading men of the

day often combined literary interests and scholarly pursuits with public careers. Even the soldierly Trajan valued this sort of learning, or so at least Pliny asserts in his encomium of that emperor: ‘How

you honour the teachers of rhetoric and the professors of

philosophy! Under you scholarly pursuits have regained their breath

and lifeblood and native country’ ( Panegyric 47.1). Although Pliny's praise may well re ect an ideal rather than reality, the ideal itself is signi cant: since elite Romans like Pliny placed a high value on literature and learning, it was important that the emperor be seen to

patronize these pursuits. It was in fact Trajan who probably

appointed Suetonius to the rst of his major o ces in the imperial

bureaucracy, as secretary ‘for studies’ ( a studiis) and ‘for libraries’ ( a bibliothecis). Although the duties of these two positions are not entirely certain, the latter presumably included oversight of the public libraries in Rome, while the former perhaps involved acting

as a sort of combined research assistant and cultural adviser to the

emperor. Certainly Suetonius, as we have seen, would have been eminently quali ed for all these roles.

Since it is only from the Hippo inscription that we know about these two posts, the chronology is not clear; it is possible that Suetonius held them not under Trajan, but early in the reign of Trajan's successor Hadrian. At any rate, it was certainly under Hadrian that Suetonius held his most important position, that of secretary in charge of the emperor's correspondence ( ab epistulis).

And it was in the same period that he embarked on his magnum opus, The Twelve Caesars (this is the title that has become conventional in English; a more literal translation of the Latin title, De vita Caesarum, is On the Life of the Caesars). Although its preface has perished, the sixth–century Byzantine writer John the Lydian ( On Magistracies 2.6) reports that Suetonius dedicated it to his new patron, C. Septicius Clarus, whom Hadrian appointed praetorian

prefect around the year AD 119 ( Augustan History, Hadrian 9.5).

Suetonius was thus at the peak of his public career as well as his scholarly achievement, working in close proximity to the emperor at

the very centre of power. But it was not to last for very long.

According to the Augustan History, which dates probably from the late fourth century ad, Hadrian ‘assigned successors to Septicius Clarus, the praetorian prefect, and Suetonius Tranquillus, the

minister for correspondence, and many others, because they had

without permission been conducting themselves before his wife

Sabina in a more familiar fashion than court etiquette required’

( Augustan History, Hadrian 11.3). What actually happened remains a mystery. Even the date is uncertain: the Augustan History mentions the dismissal immediately after Hadrian's visit to Britain, which can

be securely dated to AD 122, but its accuracy in details like this is by no means unimpeachable.

Thereafter, we have no further evidence for Suetonius, as either

a public o cial or a learned writer. At the end of his life of Titus he refers to Domitian's wife Domitia Longina in the past tense, as if she

were dead ( Tit. 10); since she seems to have been still alive at the end of the 120s, Suetonius may have continued to work on The Twelve Caesars for a number of years after his dismissal.

2. THE TWELVE CAESARS

An awareness of Suetonius’ life and career should make it clear that

his The Twelve Caesars is not simply the ancient equivalent of a scandal sheet. Suetonius was a serious scholar, who had already made his reputation with several major works. Serious scholars are

of course perfectly capable of writing scandalous exposés: the early

Byzantine writer Procopius, for example, a major historian and

government o cial of the sixth century ad, did exactly that in his

Secret History, a scurrilous account of the emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora. But a comparison with Procopius’ other writings,

notably the eightvolume History of the Wars of Justinian, makes it immediately obvious that Secret History was little more than a diversion. The Twelve Caesars, in contrast, was apparently by far the most substantial of Suetonius’ works: it lled eight volumes,

whereas On Illustrious Men extended perhaps to ve, and the others only to one or two.

Not only is The Twelve Caesars Suetonius’ longest work, but it also clearly involved extensive and careful research. For example, Suetonius argues that, contrary to received opinion, Augustus had a

favourable view of Tiberius, and quotes in support several extracts

from Augustus’ letters ( Tib. 21); he has a detailed discussion about the birthplace of the emperor Gaius, drawing on a letter of Augustus

as well as public records to refute the views of two earlier writers

( Calig. 8); he insists that ‘my own careful researches have turned up no evidence whatsoever’ to substantiate allegations about the low origins of Vespasian's family ( Vesp. 1). He certainly drew on a range of material, including various documentary sources: he made use of

the public records for information about the birthplaces of Tiberius

and Caligula ( Tib. 5, Calig. 8) and of The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, Augustus’ o cial account of his reign, for the number of Augustus’ spectacles ( Aug. 43). He also cites personal documents of the emperors, from which he often, contrary to the normal practice

of ancient historians, quotes passages verbatim. Among the most interesting are letters of Augustus, which he quotes extensively (for

example, Aug. 51, 64, 71, 76, 86; Tib. 21; Calig. 8; Claud. 4); he saw the originals, since he comments on Augustus’ handwriting and

spelling ( Aug. 87–8). In addition, he made use of Julius Caesar's will ( Jul. 83), Augustus’ autobiography and will ( Aug. 2,101), Tiberius’

autobiography and will ( Tib. 61,76), Claudius’ memoirs ( Claud. 41), Nero's poems in the original working manuscripts ( Nero 52) and Domitian's essay on the care of hair ( Dom. 18). He also drew on other primary sources like the letters of Mark Antony (for example,

Aug. 7, 16, 69) and, intriguingly, anonymous lampoons and popular songs, which he often records verbatim (for example, Aug. 70, Tib.

59, Calig. 6 and 8, Nero 39, Galba 6, Otho 3, Dom. 14). All in all, then, The Twelve Caesars gives every sign of being a careful and substantial piece of work by a serious and established scholar; to the

extent that Suetonius included gossip and scandal (and even a

cursory reading shows that much of what he included is not

scandalous at all), he presumably did so for some larger purpose.

But if it is not simply gossip, it is not formal history either. In the Graeco–Roman tradition, history was a recognized literary genre

with well established features: it was a dramatic prose narrative with a focus on military and political events and an elevated style.

In none of these respects does The Twelve Caesars t the bill.

Although most of the lives do contain a certain amount of narrative,

the arrangement is more often topical than chronological, and even

when it is chronological it rarely constitutes a dramatic narrative.

As for subject matter, Suetonius often alludes to major military and

political events, but omits a great deal that we would expect to nd

in a proper history. We would know little of Caesar's wars in Gaul,

for example, if we had only The Twelve Caesars, and would be completely unaware of major gures like Cn. Domitius Corbulo, the

greatest Roman general of the mid rst century ad, whose name

Suetonius never even mentions. When Suetonius is our only source

for a signi cant historical event, as he is, for example, for the Vinician conspiracy against Nero ( Nero 36), it becomes frustratingly obvious how little information he actually provides. Lastly,

Suetonius’ style of writing is a far cry from that of Latin historians like Livy and Tacitus: although generally e cient and at times quite

e ective, it by no means observes the normal conventions of literary

prose. The Twelve Caesars abounds in the sort of technical vocabulary and everyday expressions that Livy and Tacitus avoided;

Suetonius likewise does not hesitate to introduce Greek words and

phrases as needed (something regarded as inappropriate in formal

Latin: see Tib. 71), and at times is so keen to pack in data that his writing becomes overly compressed and di cult to understand.

Many of these features can be explained by the fact that

Suetonius wrote The Twelve Caesars as a work of scholarly biography, and not history at all. Suetonius rigorously excludes everything that does not directly pertain to the person on whom he

is focusing, and includes everything that does: hence the absence of

major historical events and gures, and hence the presence of so much personal and domestic detail. Yet the simple fact that he was

writing biography does not fully account for the distinctive format

that he employed. A person's life, after all, consists in large part of a chronological series of events, and an obvious way to recount that

life is by means of a dramatic narrative. The other great biographer

of antiquity, the Greek writer Plutarch, an older contemporary of Suetonius, did precisely that; as a result, although he too maintains

a tight focus on the individual, his biographies often read very much

like history. Suetonius, by contrast, seems deliberately to have made

his biographies as unlike history as possible.

All the lives share the same basic format: an initial chronological section recounting the emperor's birth and life up to his accession,

preceded by a section on ancestry and parentage; then an account of

his reign, organized topically; then another chronological section describing his death. Within this basic framework there is

considerable variation. Some lives contain a high proportion of narrative: that of Caesar, for example, who never really reigned at

all, and those of Galba, Otho and Vitellius, about whose short reigns

there was much less to say than about their rise and fall. There are

also several di erent arrangements of topics within the section on

the reign. In the life of Augustus, for example, Suetonius divides his

material into two main blocks dealing respectively with his public

and private life; the same basic pattern occurs in the life of Claudius, although there Suetonius includes in the section on

private life a lengthy discussion of Claudius’ vices and failings. In contrast, the arrangement in the central sections of the lives of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian is fundamentally di erent: in

the lives of these ‘bad’ emperors Suetonius rst deals with the positive or neutral aspects of their reigns, and then goes on to discuss at greater length the negative aspects. Following this

introduction I have provided analyses of the individual lives so that

readers can see at a glance Suetonius’ various principles of

organization.

But, in virtually all the lives, the topical sections tend to dominate. The longest life, that of Augustus, has very little real narrative at all. Suetonius reports the main events of Augustus’ life

up to his rst position of power in a single short paragraph ( Aug. 8), and then announces that ‘the story will be more readable and

understandable if, instead of keeping chronological order, I use a topical arrangement’ ( Aug. 9). As it happens, there is a sort of narrative in the next section, which deals with Augustus’ civil wars

in more or less chronological order. But Suetonius, by prefacing this

section with a preliminary summary, makes it explicit that the underlying principle of organization is in fact topical: ‘[Augustus]

fought ve civil wars, associated respectively with the geographical

names Mutina, Philippi, Perusia, Sicily and Actium’ ( Aug. 9). This sort of prospective summary is very common in The Twelve Caesars, although it is not always immediately obvious. For example, after describing Nero's tour of Greece and triumphant return to Italy, Suetonius says that ‘his insolence, lust, extravagance, greed and cruelty he at rst revealed only gradually and secretly’ ( Nero 26). To the unwary, this might appear simply as a general observation about

Nero's character; those familiar with Suetonius’ method, however, will suspect that such a list is in fact serving as a summary of what

is to come, and rightly so: in the thirteen chapters that follow, Suetonius goes on to provide examples of each vice, following the

precise order that he indicates in his initial comment.

Suetonius’ use of a topical arrangement is in certain respects not

only non–historical but even anti–historical, since it obliges him to

pull apart individual episodes and le their various component parts

under separate headings. We may take as an example one of the most famous events from the reign of Nero, the Great Fire of AD 64,

during which the emperor is proverbially said to have ‘ ddled’

(‘played the lyre’ would be more historically accurate). Suetonius duly includes this story, as an example of Nero's cruelty towards the

people of Rome ( Nero 38), and also records some events that, as we know from other sources, were linked to the re: Nero's persecution

of Christians, his new regulations on urban construction (both in Nero 16) and the construction of his massive Golden House ( Nero 31). But Suetonius’ presentation completely obscures the historical

connection between these events: he lists the rst two among Nero's

useful acts of public policy, with no mention of their relation to the

re, and discusses the Golden House in connection with his

extravagance; in the latter case, even though he notes that Nero began construction after his rst palace had burned down, he

completely fails to mention that it did so in the Great Fire. The latter fact was simply not relevant to his topic of extravagance, and

so is omitted.

Why did Suetonius choose this non–historical, even

antihistorical, format for his biographies, especially when the

example of Plutarch shows that a very di erent format was

possible? One in uential theory, rst propounded by the German

scholar Friedrich Leo ( Die griechisch–römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1901)), holds that Suetonius and Plutarch represent two fundamentally di erent

traditions of ancient biography: the quasi–historical sort employed

by Plutarch was developed by political philosophers to tell the lives

of statesmen, whereas the topical sort employed by Suetonius was

developed by grammatici to provide concise biographical information about poets and writers. Leo argued that Suetonius, who was himself a grammaticus, had rst used this format appropriately in On Illustrious Men, but had then automatically employed it in The Twelve Caesars as well, even though it was not at all suitable for the biographies of rulers.

Leo was certainly right to stress the links between The Twelve Caesars and the traditions of ‘grammatical’ scholarship. The topical arrangement of material in The Twelve Caesars is very similar to the format of Suetonius’ more strictly grammatical works like On Insults; much of the work can be analysed as a series of headings and subheadings, each illustrated by a number of examples. We may

illustrate this by two paragraphs from the section in the life of Julius Caesar that deals with his clemency ( Jul. 73–4). The rst begins with the statement that ‘when given the chance, he would always cheerfully come to terms with his bitterest enemies’, a virtual subheading that is duly illustrated by three examples (Gaius

Memmius, Gaius Calvus, Valerius Catullus); the e ect of a list is even stronger in the original Latin, in which each sentence begins

with the name of the person. The second paragraph opens with

another subheading (‘even when he did take action, it was his nature to show restraint’), followed this time by four examples, each

again beginning with a name (the pirates, Cornelius Phagites,

Philemon, Publius Clodius). The organization here is almost

identical to that which we nd in On Insults, and occurs throughout The Twelve Caesars: the reader is constantly being confronted with

what Andrew Wallace–Hadrill has called ‘the unremitting tidiness of the scholar's mind’ ( Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars (1983; reprinted Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), p. 201).

Nevertheless, Leo's general thesis about two distinct types of

ancient biography is now generally rejected. Many of the reasons have to do with the details of ancient literary history, but one is of

importance for any reader of Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars. This is the observation that, far from being unsuited to the biographies of

rulers and statesmen, the topical arrangement employed by

Suetonius was both traditional and widely familiar. We nd it, for

example, in the encomium, a speech in praise of a notable gure,

particularly a ruler or political leader. Thus the Greek writer Xenophon, in the encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus that he

wrote about 360 BC, divides his material into two main parts: rst, a

chronological narrative of Agesilaus’ accomplishments, and then an

account of his virtues arranged by category (piety, justice,

temperance and so forth). Whether or not this work constitutes an

actual biography, in organization it is clearly not far removed from,

say, Suetonius’ life of Julius Caesar.

The Romans, for their part, had a tradition of commemorating

the achievements of eminent men in a type of inscription known as

an elogium, a summary of accomplishments. One of the earliest extant elogia is the following, which dates to the third century BC:

‘Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, the child of his father Gnaeus, a

brave and wise man, whose appearance matched his abilities

perfectly, who was consul, censor and aedile among you; he took Taurasia and Cisauna in Samnium; he subdued all Lucania and took

hostages’ ( Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae no. 1). Later examples are more elaborate, such as this one honouring one of the emperor Tiberius’ most illustrious ancestors: ‘Appius Claudius Caecus, son of

Gaius, censor, twice consul, dictator, three times interrex, twice praetor, twice curule aedile, quaestor, three times military tribune.

He captured many forts from the Samnites; he routed the army of

the Sabines and Tuscans; he forbade peace from being concluded with King Pyrrhus. In his censorship he built the Appian Way and

constructed an aqueduct into Rome; he built the Temple of Bellona’

( Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae no. 54). The tradition of elogia was taken to its furthest extreme by Augustus, in the monumental

account of his achievements that he composed at the end of his life

and had erected outside his tomb (see Aug. 101). Despite its considerable length (it runs to some nine pages in modern editions),

the main categories that it employs are much the same as those of

earlier elogia: public o ces and honours (sections 4–14); benefactions to the Roman people, including distributions of money

(15–18), building projects (19–21) and public entertainments (22–

23); and military accomplishments (25–33). As a comparison with

the analyses of Suetonius’ lives will reveal, many of these categories

regularly feature in The Twelve Caesars.

Even Suetonius’ practice of discussing the emperors’ personal

qualities and private lives has its parallel in this tradition; the elogium of Scipio Barbatus, we may note, mentions not only his

bravery and wisdom, but also his imposing appearance. Similarly, Suetonius’ friend and benefactor Pliny the Younger, in the

encomium of the emperor Trajan that he delivered in AD 100, covers

not only the expected topics, such as Trajan's military achievements

( Panegyricus 12–19),

nancial generosity (25–9), public

entertainments (33), policy reforms (34–43) and building projects (51), but also his hospitality and behaviour at dinner (49. 4–8), his

pastimes of hunting and sailing (81), and the virtue and modesty of

his wife and sister (83–4). These aspects of the emperor's private life, Pliny insists, have signi cance for his public role: the way an

emperor lives his life serves as a model for others (46. 6), and the

way he spends his leisure time is the best guide to his true character

– ‘For who is so dissolute that he does not maintain some

appearance of sobriety in his public a airs? It is by the activities of our leisure time that we are betrayed. Is it not the case that many

previous emperors spent this part of their lives on gambling,

fornication and extravagance, thereby substituting the strain of pursuing vice for true relaxation?’ (82. 9).

If The Twelve Caesars is biography, then, it is biography of a very distinctive sort. Whereas Plutarch came close to writing history, Suetonius, building on the traditions of the Greek encomium and the

Latin elogium, was aiming at providing something very di erent: a sort of balance sheet, an analytical framework that would allow for

a clear assessment of each emperor's relative success or failure. We

should remember that, in his career as imperial secretary, Suetonius

would have had ample occasion to evaluate the successes and

failuresof emperors at rst hand, and this personal experience no doubt played a part in his choice of format for The Twelve Caesars.

Contrary to the arguments of Leo, it was a format particularly well

suited to accounts of Roman emperors. It was also, perhaps

coincidently, one particularly well suited to Suetonius’ distinctive talents as a grammaticus.

Although Suetonius wrote his lives as a series, they vary not only

in format but also in substance. We can identify three distinct groups. The lives of Caesar and Augustus are by far the longest and

most detailed. Suetonius uses numerous speci c examples to

illustrate his topics, supplies an abundance of names and

circumstantial details, and regularly cites his sources by name. It is

also in these lives that we most clearly observe him assessing his sources critically and forming his own judgements; as an example we may note his balanced discussion of the charges of vice brought

against Augustus, in which he draws on a variety of evidence both

pro and con ( Aug. 68–71). The next four lives, in contrast, Tiberius to Nero, are noticeably less rich. References to speci c sources are

fewer and largely limited to the Augustan period, and, although anecdotes are duly supplied to illustrate the various subtopics, precise details are often lacking. At times we can catch Suetonius apparently making a broad generalization on the basis of a single known incident (see for example his comment on virgins being

raped before being executed at Tib. 61). He also seems to rely more heavily on received opinion and be less concerned with forming an

independent judgement. The last six lives, Galba to Domitian, are

much shorter and at times almost perfunctory. This is perhaps to be expected in the case of the short–lived emperors of the year AD 69,

but it is surprising in the case of such a major gure as Vespasian; as for the life of Titus, it hardly counts as a biography at all. That of

Domitian provides something of a return to the standards of the middle lives, but is still far less vivid and detailed than we might expect, especially given that Suetonius is writing about the events of

his own lifetime; it is worth noting that he devotes only slightly more space to the fteen–year reign of Domitian than he does to the

seven–month reign of Galba.

This steady decline has provoked considerable discussion. One

hypothesis explains it in terms of Suetonius’ own career: Suetonius

wrote the rst two lives and did incidental research for the next four

while he was in charge of the emperor's correspondence and had access to the imperial archives; after his dismissal by Hadrian, he was cut o from this resource but carried on with his project as best

he could, even though he understandably lost some of his

enthusiasm for it. As attractive as this hypothesis is, it is probably

not correct. Close study of Suetonius’ sources shows that most of them would have been readily available in the public libraries of Rome. The documentary source most frequently exploited by

Suetonius, the correspondence of Augustus, must not have been

di cult to access, since Quintilian also cites it ( Institutio Oratoria 1.6. 19,1. 7. 22) and Pliny the Elder implies that documents in Augustus’ own hand were fairly commonplace ( Natural History

13.83). In fact it appears that Suetonius was simply more interested

in the life and times of Julius Caesar and Augustus. An examination of On Illustrious Men indicates that he included in that work numerous gures from the period of Caesar and Augustus,

signi cantly fewer from the early empire, and fewer still from the

Flavian period; for example, the section on poets had entries for very minor writers of the rst century BC such as Furius Bibaculus,

Corni cius and Quintius Atta, but apparently omitted even such

important Flavian poets as Statius, Silius Italicus and Martial. It is

therefore likely that the varying quality of the lives of the emperors

re ects not so much the availability of material as a bias in Suetonius’ scholarly interests.

How should we assess the overall value of The Twelve Caesars ?

Most historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who

were chie y interested in constructing a narrative of major political

and military events, tended to dismiss Suetonius’ work with scorn.

There is good reason for this. As I discussed above, his particular style of biography led him to ignore much that was relevant to these

topics; moreover, such details as he does provide are often

wrenched from their context and thus stripped of historical

signi cance. Apart from establishing the emperors’ dates of birth and death, on which he often lavished considerable care, he had little interest in precise chronology, so that his chronological indications are usually vague and sometimes downright misleading.

Obscurities and distortions like these, however, are simply the by–

products of Suetonius’ chosen approach to his topic. In terms of speci c data, Suetonius maintains a fairly high level of accuracy, at

least in so far as we can check them against other sources; actual mistakes are surprisingly few. Yet, even taken on its own terms, The Twelve Caesars is not always satisfactory. The problem is not so much that Suetonius can be wrong in his facts as that he can be very

partial in his assessments. For example, he presents Tiberius’ alleged

miserliness in the worst possible light ( Tib. 46–8), even though he incidentally reveals that his economy allowed him to avoid an

increase in taxes ( Tib. 32), something for which he sharply criticizes Caligula ( Calig. 40), Nero ( Nero 44) and even Vespasian ( Vesp. 16).

If Suetonius’ goal in The Twelve Caesars was to provide a balance sheet for weighing the good and bad qualities of each emperor, he

was not always as scrupulous as he might have been in ‘laying out

both sides of the ledger’ (Wallace–Hadrill, Suetonius, p. 170).

Nevertheless, The Twelve Caesars remains a uniquely valuable resource. Paradoxically, the very partiality of Suetonius’ accounts of

‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors is useful, because it allows us to see how

the received view of a given emperor was shaped by the agenda of

that emperor's successors. It is no accident that the two emperors whom Suetonius rates most highly (setting aside his adulatory

account of Titus) are Augustus and Vespasian, both founders of dynasties, whose prestige must have constantly been evoked by

their successors. Likewise, the legend of Germanicus the ideal

prince, as presented in the opening chapters of the life of Gaius, was

no doubt carefully tended by his son Gaius and younger brother Claudius, who both clearly capitalized on his popularity when they

became emperors (see for example Calig. 13 and Claud. 11). In

contrast, emperors exaggerated the failings of unpopular predecessors in order to make themselves look better: thus Gaius would have emphasized the miserliness and cruelty of Tiberius,

Claudius the extravagance and insanity of Gaius, Nero the stupidity

and subservience of Claudius. We can even speculate on the origins

of speci c stories. For example, given that Gaius’ grandmother

Antonia died only six weeks after he became emperor, it seems highly unlikely that he would have had time to hound her to her grave, as Suetonius suggests he did ( Calig. 23), even if he had been so inclined (in fact Suetonius himself notes that at his accession Gaius awarded her many lofty honours: Calig. 15). But Antonia was also the mother of Gaius’ successor Claudius, and represented

Claudius’ only blood tie to the family of Augustus. Claudius would

thus have wanted to dissociate her as far as possible from his loathed predecessor, and so would have been keen to circulate

stories of Gaius’ hostility towards her.

The Twelve Caesars is also uniquely valuable because it contains so much material of a sort not commonly found in other sources.

The very fact that Suetonius was not writing history meant that he

was not constrained by the normal conventions of ancient

historiography. In many respects The Twelve Caesars actually pre gures the historiography of today, especially in its verbatim quotations from documentary sources such as letters, popular songs

and anonymous lampoons. For the same reason, The Twelve Caesars

is a goldmine of information on topics that were ignored by the serious historians of the time: public games and spectacles, the

pastimes and domestic relations of the emperors, their sexual tastes and manner of dress. Suetonius’ willingness to include material of

this sort makes his work a crucial resource for present–day social and cultural historians.

It is also what accounts for the enduring popularity of his work.

Although, as I have argued, The Twelve Caesars was by no means the ancient equivalent of a behind–the–scenes celebrity exposé, there is

little question that its mixture of personal detail and outrageous scandal has had a steady appeal to readers interested in the private

lives of princes – an appeal that we can trace down to our own day.

3. THE INFLUENCE OF SUETONIUS

Although Suetonius’ contemporary Tacitus may in the long run have

acquired a loftier reputation, in the short run it was Suetonius who

proved more in uential. Indeed, after Tacitus we nd no further serious historians writing in Latin until the solitary gure of Ammianus Marcellinus at the end of the fourth century ad.

Historiography of the traditional sort was instead displaced by imperial biography, for which Suetonius provided the great model.

In the early third century AD, at the same time as the Greek writer

Dio Cassius was at work on his massive history of Rome, a man named Marius Maximus produced what was in e ect a sequel to

Suetonius’ work: the lives of twelve more Caesars, from Domitian's

immediate successor Nerva (AD 96–8) down to M. Aurelius

Antoninus, better known as Elagabalus (AD 218–22). This work itself

has not survived, but references to it suggest that Maximus followed

the Suetonian model fairly closely: in the use of a topical arrangement, the quotation of documents, and, of course, the

inclusion of gossipy personal details. Ammianus had a dismissive attitude towards Marius Maximus and those who read his work: the

degenerate nobles of his day, he complains (28. 4. 14), ‘hate learning like poison, and can be bothered to read only Juvenal and

Marius Maximus’–two writers whom he links, we must suppose,

because of their propensity for the lurid and sensational.

One of Ammianus’ contemporaries, however, apparently took a

more tolerant view. This was the unknown author of the curious work known as the Augustan History, a collection of imperial biographies extending from Hadrian to Carinus and Numerian (ad

117–284). Although the individual biographies are presented as the

products of various writers working in the late third and early fourth centuries ad, the collection as a whole is now regarded as the

work of a single author active at the very end of the fourth century.

His purpose in concocting this work, however, has been much

debated, with some scholars suggesting that it was little more than

an elaborate literary prank. Like both Suetonius and Marius

Maximus, the author included scandal and gossip, and like them he

often quoted generously from documents; unlike Suetonius,

however, he seems to have invented the documents that he quoted.

Also unlike Suetonius, he organized the material in his biographies

chronologically, with only occasional and inconsistent use of a topical arrangement. But he nevertheless certainly presented himself

as working within the Suetonian tradition. ‘As for me,’ he says,

writing under the name Flavius Vopiscus, ‘it has been my purpose in treating of the life and times of emperors not to imitate the likes of

Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Trogus and other such eloquent writers, but Marius Maximus, Suetonius Tranquillus… and the rest, who have

handed down to history this sort of material not so much with eloquence as with honesty’ ( Augustan History, Probus 2.7).

At the same time, some people continued to appreciate

Suetonius’ achievements from a more scholarly viewpoint. St

Jerome mined On Illustrious Men for data to include in his Chronicle, a timeline of events from the creation of the world down to his own

day; it is from Jerome's Chronicle, as I noted above, that we get most of our information about the lost portions of Suetonius’ work.

Jerome also took it as the model for his own treatise On Illustrious Men; in the preface, he says that his friend Dexter had urged him to

‘follow Tranquillus’ and do for Christian men of letters what the earlier scholar had done for pagans. Yet it was not long after this

that the works of Suetonius, along with those of many other

classical Greek and Roman authors, began to disappear; the last western writer to quote from them is Isidore of Seville, in the early

seventh century.

Apart from part of the section on grammatici and rhetors from On Illustrious Men, only The Twelve Caesars survived into the Middle Ages, and even it did not survive intact: the only manuscript available by the time of Charlemagne had lost its rst few pages, which contained the preface and the beginning of the life of Julius

Caesar. Although that manuscript itself no longer survives, it was the source of all later copies, which consequently also lack the opening sections of the work. The earliest extant manuscript dates

to the early ninth century, a time when The Twelve Caesars enjoyed a certain vogue. The most striking evidence for this is the Life of Charlemagne by Einhard, which is clearly modelled on Suetonius’ life of Augustus. After the Carolingian period evidence for The Twelve Caesars again becomes scarce: from the tenth century nothing survives, from the eleventh only three manuscripts, from the twelfth

only two. But with the advent of humanism interest in Suetonius increased exponentially. The Twelve Caesars was one of Petrarch's favourite books; he owned two copies, one of which he

commissioned himself, while his younger contemporary Boccaccio

made extensive extracts in his own hand. By the fteenth century, a

copy of Suetonius had come to be regarded as an essential

component of any learned man's library, to the point that over 100

manuscripts survive from this period.

By this time the popularity of The Twelve Caesars had begun to

spread beyond the circles of those able to read the Latin original.

The earliest translation into a vernacular language is a French version dating to 1381, and the rst English translation appeared in

1606, the work of the great Elizabethan translator Philemon

Holland. In the twentieth century the person most responsible for ongoing interest in Suetonius was the English poet and novelist Robert Graves, whose best–selling novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935) drew extensively on The Twelve Caesars.

Some twenty years later, when Graves was approaching the height of his career, he returned to Suetonius: his translation of The Twelve Caesars, rst published by Penguin Classics in 1957, has become by far the most familiar and widely available English translation.

4. READING SUETONIUS

Despite the great interest that The Twelve Caesars has held for readers over the centuries, it is not necessarily an easy work to read: Suetonius assumes a great deal of knowledge on the part of his readers. In part this was simply because he was writing for his contemporaries, who could be expected to be familiar with all the

details of everyday life in Rome that so often crop up in his text. But the same thing was true of Tacitus, for example, and Tacitus’ works

by and large present fewer di culties for modern readers. The

di erence is that Tacitus was explicitly writing history, and so presents complete narratives that provide most of the necessary background information. Suetonius, in contrast, who was writing

biography rather than history, and moreover biography of a

particular sort, takes it for granted that the reader already knows all the events and people to which he alludes, and so gets on with the

business of slotting the data into the appropriate categories without

bringing in unnecessary explanations. As a result, the casual reader

with little or no knowledge of Roman history and culture can

quickly become ba ed by the steady barrage of unfamiliar names

and unexplained references.

Graves was well aware of this problem, and tried to circumvent it by recourse to two tactics. First, he replaced a number of Roman

terms with whathe regarded as suitable contemporary equivalents.

Thus the Roman toga became a ‘gown’, all senatorialbusiness was transacted in ‘the House’, the people ( populus or plebs ) became “the commons”, military tribunes became ‘colonels’, sums of money were

expressed in terms of ‘gold pieces’ (deliberately meant to evoke the

old British ‘sovereigns’), and so forth. Secondly, whenever the Suetonian original included a reference that Graves felt required more detailed explanation, he simply introduced additional

information into his translation. For example, where Suetonius says

merely that Thermus awarded Caesar the civic crown, Graves

translated, ‘Thermus awarded him the civic crown of oak–leaves…

for saving a fellow–soldier's life’ ( Jul. 2); and where Suetonius mentions the rumour that Publius Clodius disguised himself as a woman and seduced Julius Caesar's wife at a public religious

ceremony, Graves noted that this was ‘the Feast of the Good

Goddess, from which all men are excluded’ ( Jul. 6). Through these two devices, the substitution of contemporary terms for ancient ones

and the incorporation of supplementary information, Graves

dispensed with introductory essays and notes, and sought instead to

provide the modern reader with the same sort of unmediated

experience of the text that Suetonius’ original readers would have

had.

In my revision of the translation, I have deliberately undone

much of what Graves did along these lines. My reasons are twofold:

both practical and methodological. The practical reason is that the contemporary equivalents that Graves used for translating Roman

terms are no longer contemporary. He had originally developed

these for his Claudius novels of the 1930s, and they tend in fact to

re ect the world of the latenineteenth–and early–twentieth–century

British empire; some of them, I imagine, must have seemed rather

old–fashioned to many readers even in 1957. Certainly for most readers today, ‘colonels’ and ‘gold pieces’ are every bit as remote as

‘military tribunes’ and ‘sesterces’, and a reference to Caesar's ‘gown’

is more likely to require explanation than one to his ‘toga’. It would

of course be possible to retain Graves's strategy in updated form by

devising equivalents taken from the early twenty– rst century, but

here the methodological reason comes into play. The world of the

Roman empire was simply not the same as our own world, and to

translate The Twelve Caesars as if it were is to give a very misleading impression of what Suetonius was saying. Moreover, I suspect that

for many people one of the things that makes the Roman world so

interesting is the very fact that it was indeed very di erent from our

own. It thus seems useful, in order not to gloss over that di erence,

to allow the original terms and references to remain in the

translation and, when needed, to provide explanations and

clari cations elsewhere.

In my revision, therefore, I have tried to alter the spirit of Graves's approach while retaining the texture of his translation. That

is, I have avoided merely pedantic changes that would dampen its

lively quality, for which it has been widely and deservedly praised. I

have instead limited changes to four categories, listed here in decreasing order of frequency: (1) streamlining and updating the punctuation and spelling; (2) substituting the original Latin terms for Graves's equivalents; (3) removing from the translation

explanatory material not found in the original text; (4) modifying the translation in the few places where it seemed to me seriously misleading about substantive issues. These changes, I hope, will render Graves's now classic translation both more accessible and more useful to current and future generations of readers.

To compensate for the removal of Graves's updated terminology

and inserted explanations, I have supplied a range of supplementary

material, and have here followed the lead of Michael Grant, my predecessor in revising Graves's translation. The Glossary of Terms

provides brief de nitions of most of the Roman customs and

institutions mentioned in the text, including short discussions of Roman names and time–reckoning. The lossary of Place Names in

Rome, which is keyed to the map of central Rome, identi es the various buildings and areas mentioned in the text; the remaining maps of Italy and the Roman empire have a separate Key to Maps

that will allow readers to locate cities, provinces and peoples. I have provided four family trees (three for the Julio–Claudians and one for

the Flavians) in order to clarify relationships that Suetonius

mentions only in passing or not at all. In the Notes, I have provided

supplementary information on a range of issues not covered

elsewhere, although I have made no attempt to cover every detail.

In particular, I have identi ed the sources of all Suetonius’