The afterlives of ancient texts were precarious at best, and it’s not always clear why some were saved and others were not. The bulk of Latin histories and biographies written in the second and third centuries, for example, have all been lost. That we have Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars, therefore, and none of the dozen other works attributed to him is likely due to the fact that the Christians preserved it as a document of their own persecution and a monument to pagan depravity. One can easily imagine the excitement and disgust with which scribes copied it out, for to read Suetonius is to encounter the wide malignity of imperial rule, the grotesque deformities of power, the horror and boredom that come with the license to satisfy every whim and desire.
One could just as well get this from Tacitus, who was nearly contemporaneous and whose work covers the same era of Julio-Claudian and Flavian rule. But Suetonius is a biographer, not a narrative historian. In his work, we don’t find the broad sweep of things as we do in Tacitus, the grand stage of events and epochs. What we get instead is a close-up of human folly, warts and all. Suetonius is a sensationalist and his work has been regarded with suspicion for this very reason. In The Lives, we find all manner of sexual depravity, violence, gossip, and conspiracy. And though Suetonius clearly despises many of his subjects and shows their deviancy in full, he never declares, as Tacitus does, that “history’s highest function” is to “hold out the reprobation of posterity to evil words and deeds.”
To read the ancients is to encounter a different kind of history, in which the historian impugns his subjects’ character and expresses open contempt for them and their failings. There is an emphasis on individual foibles, on sexual irregularities, on perverse tendencies; and at all times, the historian’s gaze, which stands in for the light of history, is present as moral arbiter. How many modern historians, trained to maintain fairness and analytic distance, would dare to write this way now?
The Romans inherited their understanding of history from the Greeks. The first form of history was epic poetry. History as literature, therefore, assumed the same responsibilities: its purpose was moral instruction, and it was the historian’s job to move the minds of men through their emotions. The mark of a good historian was moral probity, political intelligence, an elegant style, and the ability to write with maximum dramatic effect. In the Latin-speaking world, narrative history began to appear in the late republic with Livy, and arguably reached its peak with Tacitus at the end of the first century. After that, it began to disappear and gave way to another genre, imperial biography, for which Suetonius remained the gold standard. We know, for example, that Jerome consulted Suetonius for his own Illustrious Lives, and Einhard used the biography of Augustus as a model for his Life of Charlemagne.
Suetonius has never been regarded as a great stylist. His spare Roman prose was somewhat embellished in Robert Graves’s 1957 translation. In his excellent new translation for Penguin, Tom Holland doesn’t try to out-Graves Graves, but captures the straightforward pace and feel of the original. The biggest differences are in passages where more idiomatic, euphemistic, or graphic turns of phrase are required. And unlike previous translations, Holland’s doesn’t continuously insert the name of his subjects, but follows Suetonius in referring to them simply as “he.”
Suetonius held several secretarial positions under the emperor Hadrian, managing state archives (a bibliothecis) and personal correspondence (ab epistulis). This gave him access to the imperial library, where he began his research for The Lives. Sometime around Hadrian’s trip to Britain in 122, Suetonius was sacked (possibly for fooling around with the emperor’s wife, Sabina) and his access to these materials was cut off. We don’t know how many lives he had completed by this point, but it’s clear that the later biographies, which are more compressed and contain fewer direct quotations, were more reliant on eyewitness testimony, anecdote, rumor, and memory. Suetonius doesn’t structure his lives chronologically, as a modern biographer would, but organizes his material thematically and topically, often jumping back and forth from one period to another. After recounting each emperor’s early life, Suetonius tells us about what kind of games the emperor put on, how he governed, his attitude toward the senate, and his sex life and eating habits. Suetonius often saves his description of the emperor’s personal appearance for last.
Nabokov advised his readers to “fondle the details,” and Suetonius is at his best when he does just that. We learn, for example, that Augustus was a bad speller and was so afraid of storms that he carried a seal skin (a kind of protective charm) with him everywhere he went. Caligula was so desperate for a triumph that he had his soldiers collect seashells from the English Channel so that he could claim to have conquered the ocean. Claudius had an awkward laugh and tried unsuccessfully to add three new letters to the alphabet. Domitian liked to stab flies with a stylus and wrote a book on hair care, despite being bald. We also learn that a man was charged with treason for taking a coin bearing the image of Augustus into the toilet, and that people pretended to be dead to get out of Nero’s interminable performances.
Suetonius’s sympathies are not hard to locate. He was clearly on the side of the senate, and, aside from Caesar and Augustus, his appraisal of virtually every emperor is low. The words that crop up in the lives perhaps more than any others are saevus and crudelis, both of which can be translated as “cruel.” A line in the life of Caligula, “Enough of the princeps—what now remains to be described is the monster,” captures the moral corruption that seems to have been inherent in the office. For it was monsters who ruled Rome for nearly a century after the death of Augustus. Under Tiberius, we’re told, “not a single day went by without an execution.” We read that, during his self-imposed exile on Capri, he trained young boys, whom he called his “minnows” to “slip between his thighs as he was swimming” and nibble at his legs. Caligula committed incest with every one of his sisters and would have people tortured during banquets. “There was no aspect of his character which he found more praiseworthy or appealing” Suetonius writes, than his “shamelessness” (adiatrepsia). And Nero? Don’t ask.
We know that all was not well in Rome during Suetonius’s early life. He’d been born right at the end of Nero’s reign and was a young man for most of Domitian’s. Huge swathes of the city had been destroyed during the fire of 64 AD. There had been a year of civil war in 69. Vesuvius had erupted in 79, destroying two significant cities in Italy, and almost immediately after that there had been a plague under Titus. And yet we also know that this period is known as the pax, an era of supposedly uninterrupted peace and prosperity. Suetonius appears not to have shared the perennial Roman anxiety about decline; at least, he gives no indication of it in the biographies. Nor does he seem to have had the hatred of empire that we see in Tacitus, who despised his country’s imperial adventures and saw them as a source of moral degeneration at home. Still, the deleterious effects that Rome’s material prosperity had on its moral health are apparent in the life of every emperor.
It was not a foregone conclusion that Rome’s imperium would hold together, even after Augustus’s triumph at Actium. To read Suetonius is to wonder how the empire managed not to collapse under mutiny, intrigue, expenditure, revolt, utter carelessness, and a spate of depraved emperors. The Lives of the Caesars shows how precarious the office of the princeps truly was in the first century. Of the twelve, six were murdered, and two others may have been poisoned. Four were deified, and three underwent some form of damnatio memoriae, their memory scrubbed from history. In reading Suetonius, we’re forced to ask a question sadly relevant for our own time: Are institutions resilient enough to withstand the sin and incompetence of their leaders?
Suetonius had been born too late to remember the republic, by then much romanticized. It had been a century since Actium, and the longevity of Augustus’s reign (forty years) and Tiberius’s (twenty-three years) meant that after the death of Caligula, when the senate considered restoring its own power, there was almost no living or institutional memory of how things had been before. The term “republic” is still used frequently throughout the biographies. After the death of Domitian, for example, Suetonius writes that “the republic was destined to enjoy happier and more prosperous times…and sure enough, thanks to the measured and moderate behaviour displayed by the principes who followed him, so it rapidly came to pass.” But we know that, much like some countries that call themselves republics today, Rome by then was a republic in name only.
What’s clear is that the understanding of the office of the princeps and its powers underwent a transformation over time. Even the term “Emperor,” which comes from imperator (a “general” or “commander” in the Roman army) had nothing like the connotation of ruler or sovereign as we think of it now. A clear parallel can be found in the presidency of the United States, an office that has grown far beyond the powers it was initially conceived to have and is now virtually unlimited, to the point where the other branches of government look increasingly unable to restrain it.
The real first emperor was arguably not Augustus, but Tiberius, who demonstrated that the office was not a one-off—that it would continue and that it would be dynastic. We’re told that Augustus briefly considered handing power back to the senate before his death but feared a takeover by lesser men. Tiberius, early in his reign, also considered restoring the republic, but disgusted by the sycophancy and servility of the senators, remarked that keeping the princeps was like “holding a wolf by the ears.” In any case, by then it was too late. One could argue that it was already too late by the time of Sulla. That a dictatorship in perpetuity would emerge seemed inevitable, and at a certain point too much was invested in maintaining the principate. Getting rid of it was a greater risk than keeping it: people had become fabulously wealthy in the provinces, freedmen and equestrians had risen to administrative positions, and the survival of the praetorian guard depended on its having an emperor to protect.
It is appropriate that we are getting a new translation of Suetonius now, when our own fraught political moment seems to demand it. Caesars are all very much on our minds, as they should be. The U.S. presidents are the closest thing to Caesars we have in the modern world, and more than a few have been worthy of Suetonian treatment, foremost among them the current occupant of the Oval Office. American readers may not have had much need for Suetonius in the past, but they certainly do now. The psychology of tyrants is no longer merely a matter of historical interest.
It has been said that Thucydides modeled his History of the Peloponnesian War on Athenian tragedy, and this strikes us as plausible because the narrative dimension of history so often appears to be tragic. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragedy, for example, because we know that the death of the tyrant is not the end but only a continuation of the cycle of violence and a deepening of the crisis, which will ultimately end in the triumph of Caesarism. We know that there will be no redemption, no restored order, because getting rid of Caesar does not solve the Caesar problem. If the death of Caesar was the tragic moment, then what were the centuries that followed him? The long decline? This is the question that hides in the white space of The Lives of the Caesars, though it is never directly addressed. If it haunts us as we read, it’s because we now face a similar question about the future of our own empire.
The Lives of the Caesars
Suetonius
Translated by Tom Holland
Penguin Classics
$35 | 432 pp.
