The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete
1909
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete
1909
Translated by Alexander M.D. Thomson
Suetonius wrote this as Hadrian's private secretary with access to imperial archives no historian had seen before. The result is ancient Rome's most electrifying gossip: Augustus obsessing over his image, Tiberius rotting in debauchery on Capri, Caligula making his horse a consul, Nero singing while Rome burned. But the scandal masks something deeper. These are psychological portraits of power unwrapped from propaganda. Julius Caesar's charm, Vespasian's pragmatism, Titus's grief after his brother's death. Suetonius shows us emperors as fully human, which is to say monstrous and vulnerable in equal measure. Robert Graves's translation preserves the original's wry, immediate voice as if these accounts were written yesterday. This is where our cultural imagination of 'mad Roman emperors' comes from, and nothing since has matched its combination of access, anecdote, and brutal honesty.
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“Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.””
— Suetonius
“So much for the Emperor; the rest of this history must deal with the Monster.”
— Suetonius
“Some people are slow to do what they promise; are slow to promise what you have already done.””
— Suetonius
“Even as a young officer he was such a hard drinker that his name, Tiberius Claudius Nero, was displaced by the nickname ‘Biberius Caldius Mero’”
— Suetonius
“Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast." XXXIII.””
— Suetonius
“He answered some governors who had written to recommend an increase in the burden of provincial taxation, with: ‘A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay them.””
— Suetonius
“When the governor ordered him to travel around the district courts to administer justice and he arrived at Gades, he noticed the statue of Alexander the Great at the temple of Hercules and groaned as though disgusted with his own idleness”
— Suetonius
“[Galba] was killed beside the Lake of Curtius and was left lying just as he was, until a common soldier, returning from a distribution of grain, threw down his load and cut off the head. Then, since there was no hair by which to grasp it, he put it under his robe, but later thrust his thumb into the mouth and so carried it to Otho. He handed it over to his servants and camp followers, who set it on a lance and paraded it about the camp with jeers, crying out from time to time, "Galba, thou Cupid, exult in thy vigour!" From these it was bought by a freedman of Patrobius Neronianus for a hundred pieces of gold and thrown aside in the place where his patron had been executed by Galba's order. ...[Galba's] hands and feet were so distorted by gout that he could not endure a shoe for long, unroll a book, or even hold one. The flesh on his right side too had grown out and hung down to such an extent, that it could with difficulty be held in place by a bandage.He was more inclined to unnatural desire,a and in gratifying it preferred full-grown, strong men. They say that when Icelus, one of his old-time favourites, brought him news in Spain of Nero's death, he not only received him openly with the fondest kisses, but begged him to prepare himself without delay and took him aside.””
— Suetonius
