Suetonius: The Gossip Who Wrote History
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote the Lives of the Twelve Caesars — biographies of Julius Caesar through Domitian — probably in the early second century AD, and the work has been read continuously ever since, generating controversy about its reliability that has not diminished its influence by the slightest degree. Suetonius was the secretary of the emperor Hadrian before being dismissed, apparently for inappropriate familiarity with the empress, and he had access to the imperial archives during his service. Whether he actually used the archives, and how judiciously, is a question classical scholars continue to disagree about.
The Lives are organized not chronologically but thematically, each biography covering its subject’s ancestry, physical appearance, public career, private habits, and death in a sequence that owes more to rhetorical convention than to historical narrative. This organization makes Suetonius a problematic source for political history — events are subordinated to characterization — and a uniquely valuable source for the texture of imperial personality as the Roman literary tradition received it. What Caligula wore, what food Claudius preferred, how Augustus organized his working day, what signs preceded Nero’s birth: Suetonius collected this material with an appetite for detail that no other ancient source matches.
The reliability question is unavoidable and unresolvable. Suetonius quotes documents that are not otherwise attested. He reports anecdotes that may derive from archival sources, from oral tradition, or from his own imagination, without distinguishing among them. His treatment of Caligula — four years of reign condensed into a portrait of progressive megalomaniacal insanity — is the primary source for the modern image of that emperor and is almost certainly a substantial distortion, since Caligula’s actual administrative record, insofar as it can be reconstructed, does not support the picture of complete dysfunction that Suetonius presents. His treatment of Tiberius is equally problematic. His treatment of Augustus is surprisingly favorable, reflecting the Augustan legend that had accumulated in the century between Augustus’s death and Suetonius’s writing.
What Suetonius understood, and what his critics frequently undervalue, is that the personality of the emperor mattered in ways that administrative records do not capture. A man who controls the most powerful state in the world, whose decisions are not subject to institutional check, whose private inclinations shape public policy: the character of such a man is not incidental to his historical significance. Suetonius’s focus on personality, appearance, habits, and private behavior was not merely prurient — though it was often that too — but reflected a genuine understanding that in an autocratic system, the autocrat’s character is a structural variable.
The famous anecdotes that popular culture associates with the emperors are almost all from Suetonius. Caligula’s horse, Incitatus, threatened with a consulship — Suetonius. Caligula wishing the Roman people had a single neck so he could cut it — Suetonius. Nero playing the lyre as Rome burned — Suetonius, though the lyre has become a fiddle in transmission. Augustus dying with the question of whether he had played his part well — Suetonius. These stories circulate in popular history because Suetonius put them there, and they circulate as fact because popular history does not always distinguish between Suetonius’s documented sources and his appetite for a good story.
His prose style is the plainest of the major Roman historians — clear, direct, organized around the accumulation of detail rather than the construction of narrative. This plainness makes him the most accessible of the classical historians to readers without Latin, which partly explains his persistent influence. Tacitus is more important, more penetrating, more artistically accomplished. Suetonius is more readable. The emperors you think you know came mostly from him.