SOURCE: Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. “The Man and the Style,” “The Scholar and Society,” and “The Scholarly Biographer.” In Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars, pp. 1-72 New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.

[In the following excerpt from his book-length study of Suetonius, Wallace-Hadrill discusses authorial choices made by Suetonius that account for his literary style, examines educational practices and scholarship in Suetonius's time, and summarizes what is known of Suetonius's lost work, The Lives of Illustrious Men.]

THE MAN AND THE STYLE

Suetonius' De vita Caesarum appeared within a decade or so of the accession of the emperor Hadrian in ad 117. No exact publication date can be fixed. The preface bore a dedication to one of Hadrian's current praetorian prefects, Septicius Clarus, and the author must still at the time have held office in the imperial secretariat as ab epistulis. Both officials were to lose their posts in an incident dated (though not on unimpeachable authority) to 122. But the eight volumes that contained the collection may well have appeared serially over the decade. Nor can we tell when composition commenced; and it should be remembered that the prevalent fashion of literary recitations may have allowed the Roman public a foretaste of the Caesars before publication.¹

Given the time of writing, there was a certain temerity in the enterprise. The work embraced the lives of twelve Caesars; from Julius, as precursor and eponym of the first imperial dynasty, to the last of the Flavii, Domitian. There decency required a halt; for though two further Caesars had reigned and died in the meantime, the formal ties of continuity between Nerva, Trajan and the reigning emperor were so strong that convention would have insisted on panegyrical treatment; and these lives were to be no panegyric. The temerity lay in touching again so soon on a topic recently covered by a classic of historiography. Tacitus' Histories, spanning the period of the last six lives, from Galba to Domitian, had appeared in the first decade of the century. His Annals of the reigns from Tiberius to Nero were even fresher: perhaps completed before Trajan's death in ad 117, possibly not even then. Publication of the Annals and Caesars may even have overlapped. Suetonius was undoubtedly looking over his shoulder at Tacitus. Tacitus, whose status as the leading literary star of the age was long since established, hardly paid him the same compliment. Suetonius, the younger man, knew that he stood in the shadow of a giant. He has tended to remain there since.²

The first two lives, however, of Julius and Augustus, stood well clear of the shadow, since Tacitus had provocatively opened the Annals with Augustus' death. It may have been the success of these two lives that encouraged Suetonius to follow up with the remaining ten. More important, lives were not the same as history. Suetonius was able to minimise the overlap. Even if Tacitus towers above, he stands on foundations of his own. So much would hardly have been possible had he not brought with him a very different intellectual background from that of the historian, former consul and orator. Before looking at the character of the Caesars, it is helpful to consider briefly this background.

THE BIOGRAPHER'S LIFE

There are few ancient authors of whom it is possible to construct more than the sketchiest of biographies. Suetonius is relatively well served. A number of sources cast light on different aspects of his life, while new discoveries have thrown up new controversies over the details of his career. But rather than attempt a premature synthesis or extend the controversy, it may be useful to look at the different sources separately like pieces of a jigsaw, reflecting on why they provide the different information they do. It will be easier then to fit the pieces together, and to relate the man to what he wrote.³

Suetonius lays the basis with autobiographical notes scattered through his writings. Since the period he writes about comes to an end with the death of Domitian, it is only his family background and his early days of which he tells us anything. The family's contacts with the Caesars stretched back three generations. The grandfather had an indirect contact with the court of Caligula: he could report on the authority of sources in the palace an explanation of one of the emperor's follies, the bridge over the bay of Baiae (19.3). That does not mean that the grandfather was himself a courtier; but it suggests that as a young man he was in Rome, on the periphery at least of court circles. Perhaps he was able to make other use of his contacts: for his son, the biographer's father, was relatively well placed. Suetonius Laetus served in ad 69 as an equestrian military tribune in the camp of the unfortunate Otho and witnessed his emperor's courageous end after the defeat of Bedriacum (10.1). His legion (XIII Gemina) transferred its loyalties to the victorious Flavian cause; he may have gone with them. It would be no surprise to discover that Laetus served the Flavians as procurator. Whether his son was born before or after the battle of Bedriacum is unclear. His name, Tranquillus, might point to an era of peace after war, but it may have been family tradition (Peaceful son of Joyful). Tranquillus could describe himself as adolescent by ad 88 when rumours of a false Nero in Parthia reached Rome (Ner. 57.2). Rome is clearly where he was; for in the reign of Domitian he witnessed there an anti-semitic incident at court (12.2). There too he attended lectures on grammar and rhetoric; he recalls a certain Princeps teaching both in the same day (Gramm. 4.9). No doubt he also sat at the feet of more famous men than Princeps: Valerius Probus was the foremost grammarian of the day, and Quintilian held the new chair of rhetoric.⁴

Suetonius never refers to himself as an adult, for the period he writes of ends with the death of Domitian and his approaching manhood. But the picture is filled out by the correspondence of a friend, the younger Pliny. These letters present an invaluable picture of Roman society at the turn of the second century: of the studiously polished cultural veneer of the intelligentsia, of the self-proclaimed reawakening of letters under Trajan after the repressive atmosphere under Domitian, and of the web of patronage and recommendation by which men rose in public life. They show Suetonius rising with Pliny's aid and encouragement both in literary circles and in public life.

His literary début is hesitant. Like most of Pliny's young protégés, he will have thought initially of a career at the bar, and Pliny refers to him as his ‘tent-mate’, contubernalis, a military metaphor commonly applied to the relationship between a master and his pupil.⁵ We meet him first in the late 90s, begging postponement of a court case after a bad dream (his surviving works give the impression that he would never have made a good orator). Not long after, Pliny helped to buy a small estate, where this scholarly character (scholasticus) could reflect in peace among the vines in the garden. At last in ad 105 he was on the brink of his first major publication, and Pliny prodded him gently to take the plunge. The start of his public career was also uncertain. Pliny secured him the favour of a military tribunate; but Suetonius changed his mind and passed it to a relation. It is unlikely that he took any commission subsequently; for his purposes the mere offer of a tribunate may have been honour enough. It looks as if he joined Pliny's staff when the latter was governor of Bithynia at the end of the decade. There Pliny secured for him a final favour from Trajan, the legal advantages of fatherhood to compensate for his sterile marriage. Pliny speaks of growing admiration on closer acquaintance; we sense that he had had his doubts at first about a young man so diffident and unsure of himself in spite of all his scholarship.⁶

Pliny's letters show how literary studies and a public career intertwined for Suetonius, as for many others in Trajanic Rome.⁷ But now the evidence falls into two artificially separated spheres. His public career received unexpected documentation from an honorific public inscription discovered in Algeria, in the ancient town of Hippo Regius where later Augustine became bishop. It is often local men risen to fame who are so honoured by provincial town councils. If Suetonius did come from Hippo, he was the first of a long line of men of literary distinction who came from North Africa in the second century: Fronto the orator, Sulpicius Apollinaris the grammarian, Apuleius the philosopher and novelist, and Tertullian the Christian apologist. But even if Suetonius was African, no trace of his origins remains in his writings. He passed a good part at least of his formative years in Rome, and Rome remained the centre of his universe. From the inscription we hear of some of his public distinctions: membership of the jury panels under Trajan, some honorific priesthoods, and then (after a substantial gap in the text), the crown of his career, three prestigious posts in the imperial service, a studiis, a bibliothecis, ab epistulis. He held the last and most important under Hadrian, the others probably under Trajan.⁸

Inscriptions only divulge formalities, not the background of patronage and intrigue that in practice made a career. But the life of Hadrian, probably drawing on the earlier biographer Marius Maximus who admired Suetonius and took his Caesars as a model, reveals tantalising information: both the ab epistulis Suetonius and the praetorian prefect Septicius Clarus fell from Hadrian's favour together and were dismissed. The charge was greater familiarity with the empress Sabina than court etiquette allowed.

It is hard to assess this somewhat lurid information. Was there a serious rift between emperor and biographer? What bearing does the incident have on our interpretation of the Caesars? The source appears to date it to Hadrian's British tour of ad 122; and if, as seems plausible, the publication of the Caesars stretches through the decade, disgrace will have come mid-flow. Should we look for traces of fundamental disagreements? Perhaps, but this sensationalist source should not tempt us into overestimating the significance of the episode. Marius Maximus made much of Hadrian's petty jealousies, and catalogued former literary favourites whose careers were blighted by the emperor's rancour. They include Favorinus the sophist, Apollodorus the architect and a certain Valerius Eudaemon. There is a strong suspicion that Marius blew up such incidents out of proportion. Emperors were constantly replacing officials, who had no fixed term.⁹

The secure point is that Suetonius fell with Septicius, and therefore is likely to have risen with him. Septicius belonged to Pliny's circle of mandarin literati. He was the dedicatee of the first book of Pliny's letters as well as of Suetonius' Caesars and supplies a missing link between Pliny's death and Suetonius' court appointment. The network of Pliny's patronage of literary men extended into the new reign. Even the disgrace did not destroy it: Septicius' nephew Erucius Clarus, whose learning impressed Pliny, was to be City Prefect under Hadrian's successor.¹⁰

There survives one biographical sketch of Suetonius, and it shows him in a very different light from the Hippo inscription and the life of Hadrian. The Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, includes him among its potted biographies of important authors. Suetonius is known to the encyclopedia (as to most ancient scholars) as Tranquillus. He is seen not as a public figure, but as a philologos, a scholar, author of a long list of erudite works among which the Caesars is almost lost from sight. The length of the list suggests a lifetime in libraries, stretching from well before Pliny's chiding letter in the first decade of the century to his fall from grace in the third, and possibly well after.¹¹

The sources, fragmentary by accident of survival, give a disjointed picture of Suetonius' life. The council of Hippo regards him as a public figure with a string of titles, the Suda shows him as an author, with a string of titles of a different sort, while Marius Maximus sees in him a specimen of Hadrian's vindictiveness. Of himself he reveals no more than the young man growing up in Rome. The danger is that we too may fragment his personality, forgetting the scholar in the official, and missing both in the Caesars. Only Pliny's letters begin to relate his public and literary life, and they stop short at the Palace door. It is the relationship between these aspects and the problem of locating the author and his work in the correct social and intellectual setting that will be one of the concerns of this book.

When Suetonius put his hand to imperial biography he must have been in his late forties or early fifties. He was established as a scholar and as a public figure. Already in about 110 when Trajan granted him the privileges of fatherhood he was presumably a well-known author: Martial had been granted the same distinction in recognition of poetic merit. His first post in the imperial secretariat may have come in the middle of the same decade shortly after Pliny's governorship in Bithynia: the appointment was at least in part recognition of literary worth. His reputation as biographer was already made before he started the Caesars. The Illustrious men, sketches of notable Roman authors, proved a classic, much drawn on by succeeding generations, and his promotion to ab epistulis by Hadrian may have celebrated the recent appearance of this work.¹²

The author of the Caesars is far from the hesitant beginner revealed by Pliny's letters. His reputation is won. Moreover, his cast of mind, his habits of thought, his method and style are already formed and mature. They could not but affect the way he approached his new subject—the lives of great men who were not authors.

BETWEEN LIVES AND HISTORY

History or not history? The problem faces every biographer in varying degree. Biography occupies an ambivalent position on the outskirts of proper historical writing. As the role played by the individual in his society varies, so does the historical component in his life. The spectrum ranges from men who are no more than unimportant specimens of social life to those who wield a formative influence. The problem is at its most acute when an individual plays a dominant role in the historical narrative of the period. Then history is most likely to take the form of biography and biography of history. It is therefore when Plutarch came up against the colossal figure of Alexander that he voiced his awareness of the dilemma. ‘We are writing biographies, not histories … A battle with ten thousand dead may tell us less of a man's character than a brief anecdote.’ It is when history most threatens to swamp biography that the biographer feels most intensely the need to assert his independence. Plutarch's Lives are shot through with this ambivalence, which is not satisfied by any simple distinction between chronological and typological passages. Plutarch asserts the primacy of his interest in ēthos, the inner moral core of personality. Yet the Aristotelian doctrine which he followed held that character was only revealed in praxeis, actions. In consequence his Lives contain a high proportion of historical narrative. In the groups of lives especially that criss-cross a single period, such as the late republic, he both conjures up a historical picture of the time, yet is scrupulous in pursuing the theme of the individual concerned.¹³

For Suetonius the dilemma was as acute as it could be. The nature of the early principate was such that even historians found it difficult to avoid writing a series of imperial biographies. Tacitus made a show of imposing the year-by-year annalistic format that derived from republican historiography: yet, as his book divisions reveal, the lives and deaths of Caesars articulated the structure. Cassius Dio was more open: he habitually prefaces a new reign with a discussion of the ruler's personality. For the period after Dio we have to rely largely on the series of imperial biographies that acted as a continuation of Suetonius; and although at some points these lives profess a contrast between lives and history, the ambivalence of their status is summed up in the technically incorrect name by which they are known—Augustan History.¹⁴

Suetonius' reaction to the dilemma was vigorous. Rather than let biography become history, he would write not-history. His Caesars can be defined as much by the options he avoids as by those he embraces. To view it as a sort of alternative history, let alone a misfired history, is a temptation that must be resisted at all costs. There is no reason to suppose that he thought imperial history ought to be more biographical: history for him was what Tacitus wrote. He had no reason not to admire it. Written by one who understood public life as it was traditionally defined, devastating in its exposé of the springs of human action and stylistically a self-conscious masterpiece, it could hardly be rivalled on its own terms. Suetonius was too modest or honest to challenge Tacitus. But there was still room for a supplement. As a man of learning and a servant of Caesars, he had something to add. Historian and biographer complement each other; there is no need to make a choice.¹⁵

Negatively Suetonius wrote not-history; positively he wrote scholarship. We should not regard this as a sort of blunder. Friedrich Leo, whose classic study of the ancient biographical tradition first established the scholarly character of the Caesars, apparently felt that Suetonius had perpetrated a misclassification; he assumed that the biography of a historical figure ought to be historical, and that history ought to be narrative. This is a strange value-judgment, attributing an absolute value to the ancient conception of history and ignoring the claims of ancient biography to be independent of history. Suetonius' avoidance of what, by ancient standards, counted as historical techniques is not just a casual byproduct of his employment of scholarly techniques. It is of the essence. Suetonius establishes the independence of his genre by distancing himself from history the further, the more his subject-matter brought him up against historical material. His Caesars were to be in technique a mirror-image of history. Three criteria defined history for the ancients: structure, subject-matter and style. In each we find the scholar where the historian might have been.

STRUCTURE

In form Roman historiography was both chronological and narrative. The labels are not identical. The Pontifical Annals, the yearly calendar of the priests in which magistracies, triumphs, corn shortages, portents were listed day by day, were evidently chronological. These the earlier Roman historians imitated, appropriately enough since the annual cycle reflected the political structure of republican life. But Cicero, like others before him, found such listing jejune, stylistically and intellectually lacking nourishment. Historians therefore turned to the Greeks for a model of narrative history and learnt to tell a tale in a tradition which stretched back to the Iliad, and which satisfied stylistically by dramatic story-telling, and intellectually by setting events in an explanatory chain of cause-and-effect.¹⁶

Biography had (and has) its own framework. It is chronological, though the chronology is not dictated by the calendar, but by the rhythm of human biology, reproduction, birth, growth and death. Few accounts of a life, ancient or modern, from a newspaper obituary notice to a full biography, fail to draw on this simple framework of parentage, birth, early years, career, death. Biological rhythm is refined by social rhythm. The life of a Roman aristocrat, whether described by a member of his gens in the customary funeral address, or by a Plutarch or Suetonius, passed through a necessary progression of stages, such as the assumption of the toga virilis at the turning-point to manhood, the first military campaign and the progression up the ladder of office or cursus honorum. Chronological like history, inasmuch as it involves a succession of events, the subject-matter distinguishes this pattern as ‘biographical’, and it can be recognised as such in the body of a history.¹⁷

Beyond that, rules are few and possibilities many. The chronological frame can be expanded in various ways, both descriptive and narrative. Description of character, habits and physical appearance is almost inevitable. So are some passages of narrative. The death narrative, for instance, is a familiar feature of biography and by Suetonius' day there had spawned the fashionable sub-genre of ‘Deaths of Famous Men’. Moreover the more involved a man was in exciting incidents, the more susceptible his life to narrative treatment. Potentially both chronological and narrative, ancient biography could draw near to ancient historiography.¹⁸

Suetonius could not reject entirely either chronology or narrative. His Caesars are chronological in following the biological and social rhythms; and they contain fine passages of biographical narrative, notably the death narrative of Nero. But he could and did reject the narrative that lay in the province of the historian. The danger was at its greatest in the discussion of a Caesar's reign: and where there was no biographical element in the chronology, he decided to abandon chronology completely. Even here, however, he could preserve chronological elements. Tiberius' reign fell into different phases as his personal behaviour changed, and his life preserves these phases. So much was ‘biographical’. The rule is best expressed as an avoidance of historical narrative, whether within the reign or outside it.

Take the campaigns of Julius Caesar. Caesar made his name as a general; his campaigns, especially the conquest in Gaul, should be central to any biography. Plutarch gives a very adequate section to the narrative (Caesar 18-27). But Suetonius dismisses the Gallic wars in one brief paragraph, reducing a decade of campaigning to a numerical summary of successes and reverses. The general's own Commentaries survived, already a school classic, and Suetonius knew that they rendered emulation superfluous (Jul. 56.3). Instead he offered something of his own, an analysis of Caesar's generalship. He looks at his personal energy (57), his mixture of caution and daring (58), his attitude to omens traditionally observed in warfare (59), his strategy in deciding when to engage in battle (60), his personal participation in battle, the figure he cut and the example he set (61-4); his handling of the troops, in training them for action (65), promoting confidence (66), exercising discipline (67.1) and winning their loyalty (67.2). The reader is now in a position to understand the devotion and effectiveness of the Caesarian army (68), and the general's position of (almost) unchallenged authority (69-70). The biographer of poets does not shy from the fact that Caesar was a general, though he emphasises that he was also considerable as an author (55-6). The analysis suggests not only careful reading of the Commentaries, but an impressive understanding of what the command of armies involved. The analytical technique is that of a hellenistic scholar and literary biographer: but it was not from hellenistic literary biography that he borrowed these categories of analysis.¹⁹

The rejection of narrative was a policy he made explicit: ‘having summarised Augustus' life, I shall go through the individual details not chronologically, but by aspect, in order to demonstrate them and evaluate them more distinctly’ (9). Neque per tempora sed per species: ‘by rubric’ as this is traditionally glossed. ‘Rubric’ is a suitable word to apply to Suetonius because so often the first few words of a chapter act as a heading. It would be well if modern editors picked such words out in bold type, if not actually in red. But ‘rubric’ describes the end-product, not the method. Suetonius' characteristic process is analysis; the dissolution of narrative into fragments, and their reconstitution under heads of analysis.

The processes of dissolution and reconstitution may be illustrated. First, dissolution. The conspiracy of Varro Murena and Fannius Caepio against Augustus was an important historical incident—some modern historians believe it to have been a turning point in the reign. Cassius Dio indicates its importance by a narrative of the episode. Suetonius suppresses all narrative, but he draws on the incident for four separate points: he records the conspirators' names in a list of other conspirators against Augustus (19.1); he notes as an illustration of Augustus' refusal to abuse prerogative that he only once intervened in court to save a guilty man—Castricius who betrayed the Murena conspiracy to him (56.4); he talks about the difficulties Augustus had with his friends—Maecenas let him down by telling his wife Terentia that the plot had been discovered (66.3); finally he records that among Tiberius' first public duties was the successful prosecution of Murena's accomplice Caepio (Tib. 8).²⁰

If Suetonius had intended his method as a substitute for history, he should have explained a little more about the circumstances of the conspiracy. But he simply assumes knowledge of it in the reader. We are expected to take as read that Murena and Terentia were close relatives, that Maecenas' betrayal resulted in the flight of the conspirators, and that Augustus had to conduct their trial in absence. This process can be frustrating for us when the historical narrative which Suetonius assumed is lost. And in the process of compressing a tale to illustrate one particular point, he could distort, oversimplify, even fall into error by excluding what was irrelevant.²¹

There are compensating advantages, however, in the process of reconstitution. Narrative histories were Suetonius' basic, but not his only, source material. Throughout, his account is enlivened by anecdote and small detail, of a type hardly suitable to the grandeur of history. He uses this supplementary material to cast further light on problems raised by the historical accounts. Indeed, he is more valuable the further he gets from standard historical material, his treatment of which tends to be cavalier. The discussion of Vespasian's financial dealings will serve as an illustration (16-19). Suetonius moves from a phenomenon well attested in the historians, Vespasian's constant anxiety to raise funds, and he enumerates briefly some of his methods—increased taxation, commercial transactions, sale of office and connivance at maladministration—though he is frustratingly unspecific (16.1-2). This raises the problem whether the emperor was naturally stingy (as anecdotal evidence suggests) or in the grip of a fiscal crisis, as indicated by historical evidence (16.3). Suetonius resolves the problem thus. Natural stinginess is unlikely because of Vespasian's generosity in making grants, particularly in support of the arts—which is substantiated by a mass of specific detail (17-19.1)—although his popular reputation for stinginess persisted, and this is illustrated by two anecdotes (19.2).

The methodology of the ancient scholar is easily recognisable here. A problem (quaestio, zētēma) is set up, and an assortment of evidence is adduced on either side. The information is unlikely to derive from the standard histories (that Terpnus and Diodorus the lyre-players were given 200,000 sesterces each is an improbable item for a historian). The scholar's interests are also evident in the weight attached in Vespasian's favour to the support of the arts. But as a result of the attention to small, ‘unhistorical’ details we gain interesting information: an insight into the workings of imperial liberality, the scale and distribution of grants to professors, poets, craftsmen, inventors and musicians; and a vivid and surprising picture of an imperial funeral, at which a leading actor takes the dead emperor's part and raises laughter by mimicry of his failings.

Analysis is not Suetonius' only method. Inevitably there are also passages of narrative in the Caesars. But even here Suetonius does not narrate after the fashion of a historian, enlivening the tale with tension and drama. Take his account of Nero's murder of Britannicus (33.2-3). At first sight it is straightforward narrative; but set beside Tacitus it is little more than a catalogue of colourful items. Suetonius omits the scene-setting that gives Tacitus' narrative its atmosphere—the anxious circle of dinner-guests who witness the poisoning and by their reactions betray their own understanding of palace life. Suetonius homes in only on the detail that directly illuminates Nero's behaviour. The contrast is between a stage on which several characters play out a drama and a close-up focus on a single man.²²

Extraction of the relevant detail is Suetonius' characteristic method. Sometimes we get the impression of a large card-index system at work, reducing the sources to an endless series of one sentence items that can be reshuffled and redeployed at will. It would be interesting to know more about the technology behind the writing of the Caesars. We should pause before assuming that Suetonius actually had at his disposal anything so useful as a card-index. There is no evidence that antiquity had developed such systems. Scroll-form was normal for books; even library catalogues and the official records of imperial transactions were, to our knowledge, kept in scrolls rather than files. The philologist had to rely on a prodigious memory and much verbatim learning of texts in order to recall the passages where a given word occurred; naturally it also helped to be able to lean on those who had already done the donkey-work. The chances are that Suetonius worked from sources in scroll-form without the prop of an index and had to rely on memory to an extent no modern research student could expect to have to do. If there are imprecisions, errors and omissions in his material, this is a factor to be borne in mind.²³

SUBJECT MATTER

The thematic content of ancient historiography, revolving round the two poles of war and politics, was well defined. History was about the state, the polis, and its conflicts, external and internal: its relations with external powers in peace and war and its internal power relations in the arena of public, political life. Biography had a different subject—the life, personality and achievements of an individual. Suetonius goes out of his way to avoid making his subject-matter historical. This can be shown both negatively and positively.²⁴

Negatively, Suetonius reduces the element of war and politics to a minimum. His treatment of Julius' Gallic war is in fact typical of his treatment of foreign wars. The enormous military achievements of Augustus' reign are reduced to a list of peoples conquered, successes won, reversals sustained (21-3). There is of course no narrative; but there is an interesting analysis of Augustus' attitude to military discipline, recruitment, decorations, and his views on strategy (24-5). Augustus was more significant as a supreme commander than as a general in the field (20); but Suetonius affords the same treatment to Tiberius, an active campaigner. The circumstances of Tiberius' German assignments under Augustus are perfunctorily summarised (Tib. 16-17); detailed discussion focusses on his style of life in camp and his strict discipline (18-19). In fact it is not war and battles but military institutions that concern Suetonius. Behind his treatment is not only an avoidance of narrative but a strict conception of what is relevant to biography. The total omission of Corbulo from the Nero is clearly justified by the irrelevance of Armenian campaigns to Nero as an individual. So much is confirmed by the constant exception to the rule that there should be no military narrative: civil wars which are important for the rise or fall from power are narrated chronologically for Julius (34-6), for Augustus (9-18) and for all those involved in the strife of ad 68-69. But even here, it is not a historian's narrative. No battle is described (the forte of the historian) and the emphasis is on the anecdotal detail that reveals the individual.

Suetonius' attitude to politics is even more revealing. The settlements of 27 and 23 bc, so central to the constitutional history of Augustus, are also of great potential interest to the biographer. But Suetonius' paragraph on the topic is woefully inadequate, to the point of being misleading: Augustus twice thought of restoring the republic, but changed his mind (28.1). Indeed political life under autocracy, when so much goes on behind closed doors, is not easy to document; but at least there was the occasional eruption of resistance. Yet the Pisonian conspiracy against Nero is only cited in passing to provide anecdotal evidence of cruelty (36); and the conspiracy of Murena and Caepio against Augustus is, as has been seen, simply listed with others (19.1). At the end of this bare list, there is a sudden plunge into specific detail—about a forger called Lucius Audasius, a half-caste Parthian, Asinius Epicadus, a slave by name of Telephus who was aide-memoire to a certain woman, and finally a half-witted camp-follower in Illyria who made at Augustus one night with a cleaver (19.2). These details are of no historical consequence. Why else did Suetonius give them, and say nothing of Murena, except that, unlike Murena, they were absent from the standard history books?

Even if a biographer should choose to treat a public figure in a manner more or less ‘historical’, there is a range of subjects he would need to consider in addition to the public aspect. These may conveniently be summarised as ‘private’ life: family, friends, personal characteristics, habits and inclinations, education and beliefs are topics the modern biographer too would take for granted as his province. Suetonius makes the distinction himself. Thus after discussing Augustus as a public figure, he proposes ‘to go on to his more intimate family life, to his ways and fortunes at home and in private’ (61.1). The point is that both public and private aspects were the proper material of biography; in fact, as will be seen later, Suetonius does not always keep them distinct. But in private as well as public aspects, he sets the maximum distance between himself and historiography.

By separating out the private aspects and gathering them together, Suetonius underlines their non-historical nature. Plutarch is again a useful contrast. Suetonius' Julius has a section of some thirty chapters (45-75) on personal details; these have no counterpart in Plutarch. Some of Suetonius' ‘private’ topics have strong and obvious connections with public life, but in treating them as private he plays down the public component. The imperial family is a clear example. An emperor's relations with members of his family had potential political significance: thus the relations of Augustus with his descendants, or of Claudius with his wives, are central features of the historiographical accounts of their reigns. But we search in vain in Suetonius for the colourful stories of the disgrace of the Julias or the fall of Messalina: they are only alluded to. And though he describes Nero's murder of Agrippina in its full grotesque detail, he gives no hint that the causes were political: Nero appears simply to have found his mother's nagging irritating (34.1).

In treating private life as a separate section Suetonius was no doubt extending the method he had used in his literary lives. It does not follow that he is treating emperors ‘as if’ they were authors, under the wrong category so to speak. The abundance of the material he was able to assemble about the literary interests of Caesars, in addition to their eating and drinking, sexual behaviour and religious beliefs, shows that he was not asking inapposite questions. To dismiss this material as gossip unworthy of mention in a life of a major historical figure is to fall into the trap of swallowing the prejudices of ancient historiography. A biographer has a plain duty to depict his subject, especially when he is an autocrat, as an ordinary human, existing in the dimension of social as well as political life. Unless we allow the emperor to take off his state robes, we cannot see him as contemporaries did.²⁵

Suetonius does not delve into the private side to the neglect of the public. Naturally he is well aware of the public dimension of his subjects' lives and its importance. The topics he chose to expand on were not those of traditional historiography; but neither were they those of literary biography, which had, and could have, no appropriate categories. In place of high politics and great events, which he shuns, he gives details of the everyday and business side of imperial administration: supervision of the senate, of the jury panels, of the citizen-roll; reforms and corrections of military and civil institutions; the administration of justice; maintenance of public order and care for the city, its corn-supply, its fire-brigades, its police force; public expenditure on distribution to plebs or troops, on buildings, on games. These are topics the modern historian so takes for granted as ‘historical’ that he forgets how disdainfully ancient historians pushed them aside. So far from being the residuum remaining after ‘high politics’ had been sifted out of annalistic writing, they formed a positive contribution, which was made possible only because the author set his work apart from the historian's, both in structure and in content.²⁶

STYLE

The stylistic gulf between the Caesars and history is no less marked. Ancient historiography had a grand subject, and convention demanded for it a style of suitable grandeur. It eschewed the vulgar and the trite; it set itself apart from everyday prose by the use of poeticisms, archaisms, and syntax either elliptically abrupt or polished with elaborate artistry. Homer was the precursor of the historians; historiography remained in debt to epic for elevation of tone and pathos of narration. Rhetoric too made fundamental contributions: not to tempt the historian to deceive (that pitfall was obvious, and was only too often pointed out) but to persuade and impress. The ancient historian sought to sweep his reader with him, and to dazzle him into admiration; not just (as he claimed) to tell a plain unvarnished story, but to enlist his sympathies, to impose (without arguing) his interpretation, and to excite emulation of his heroes and disgust for his villains.²⁷

Suetonius is innocent of all these devices. He is mundane: has no poetry, no pathos, no persuasion, no epigram. Stylistically he has no pretensions. No writer who sees himself as an artist, one of the elect, could tolerate the pervasive rubric; the repetitiveness of the headings, the monotony of the items that follow, the predictable ending ‘such he did; and such he did; and such he did’. Suetonius is not sloppy or casual; he is clear and concise, but unadorned. His sentences seek to inform, with a minimum of extraneous detail. Ablative absolutes, present participles, subordinate clauses fill in the essential background, while the main verb conveys what the emperor said or did. The style is neither conversational nor elevated. It is the businesslike style of the ancient scholar.²⁸

Three particular features point to the scholar rather than the historian: the inclusion of technical vocabulary, the admission of a foreign language (Greek) and the verbatim citation of documents. Technical vocabulary undermines an elevated style and is avoided by historians: Suetonius uses the vocabulary proper for his mundane subject. So Nero was an addict of the techniques of Greek lyre-playing; Suetonius uses the correct terms for a player (citharoedus), the method of clearing the voice (clyster), the types of applause (bombi, imbrices, testae) and the artist's dress (sythesina). He correctly employs legal, secretarial and bureaucratic technicalities. Often he is the first or only author who does so. Such words aim at precision, not at fine style.²⁹

The intrusion of a Greek word into a Latin text was also felt to be offensive to fine style. Suetonius notes that Tiberius actually made the senate remove the Greek emblema from the wording of a decree (71). On another occasion the grammarian Pomponius Marcellus reminded Tiberius that he had no power to ‘grant citizenship’ to a foreign word (Gramm. 22). Suetonius himself felt no scruples: a high proportion of his technical terms are Greek words transliterated; he cites single words and phrases of Greek where they represent ipsissima verba; he cites letters of Augustus which, like those of Cicero, frequently seek the mot juste in Greek; and his text is peppered with citations of Greek verse, whether from Homer and tragedy or from popular pasquinades. Some of these Greek quotations may just derive from Latin historical sources. But the total indifference with which he includes Greek in his text is inconceivable in a historian: it is the mark of a scholar, who himself had written in Greek.³⁰

Suetonius' willingness to cite documents is perhaps the most exciting and valuable product of his non-historical approach. Ancient historians sometimes made use of documentary material. Tacitus (almost certainly) owes his accounts of senatorial debates, and particularly of imperial orations, partly to first-hand consultation of the senatorial minutes. But no more than any other historian was Tacitus prepared to cite his sources verbatim. We can still see how he remodelled an oration of Claudius rather than allow him speak in his own words. The fictional speech rather than the authentic document was the hallmark of the ancient historian. Those who cited documents were not historians but scholars: whether Aristotle in his series of Constitutions, Craterus who collected Athenian decrees or Varro illustrating the diction of old censorial or consular records. Suetonius had made verbatim citations as a matter of practice in his literary lives and other scholarly works. He continued to do so in the Caesars: imperial edicts, inscriptions, invectives, snatches of verse chanted in triumphs or the theatre, wills, and above all, the letters of Augustus, a priceless contribution. These, together with anecdotal sayings, took the place of the historian's set-piece speeches.³¹

Suetonius' lack of stylistic pretension enabled him to preserve these precious fragments. It has also led to the verdict that he was ‘no true artist’. A school of critics has recently leapt to his defence, anxious to prove that he is more than an amasser of facts, ‘tipping out for his readers’, as Benedetto Croce put it, ‘his cornucopia of information’. The new school has demonstrated the not inconsiderable degree of control and skill with which he can organise his material.³² But we must not be swept away and miss the point. Suetonius belonged to a culture in which art-prose (the ‘Kunstprosa’ of Eduard Norden's classic study) was a category apart: canons of propriety, figures of speech and rhythmic clausulae deliberately sought to raise it above the banal, conversational or technical. On all the tests, Suetonius does not seek to identify his writing with this category. The usual tricks which historians employed to produce variety and excitement—historic presents and infinitives, syntactical variations, rapid parataxis and variety of tempo, inversion of word order—are absent from his style.³³

Suetonius' natural affinities are with the abundant technical literature of the early empire—Vitruvius on architecture, Frontinus on aqueducts, Celsus on medicine, the jurists, physiognomists, agronomists, metricians and grammarians. His greatest predecessor in the scholarly-antiquarian tradition, Varro, was known for his neglect of style. It did not diminish his stature. The elder Pliny was not a ‘good’ writer either, even if the Natural histories contain a sprinkling of purple passages. Literary critics do not normally pay attention to such technical literature. Considered against such a background of ‘artless’ prose, the positive virtues of Suetonius' writing might be more apparent: his clear organisation, his succinct expression, and above all his eye for vivid detail. But whatever the verdict, neither his virtues nor his vices are those of the historian.³⁴

THE AUTHOR AND HIS PUBLIC

The Caesars, then, present historical material in a manner that the Roman would identify as non-historical. But to whom was the author addressing himself? It is impossible to determine who actually did read any given author, and no doubt works reached circles both wider and narrower than the writer hoped. But authors do betray something of their expectations. Historians saw themselves very largely as addressing men involved in public life. The theme of the practical utility of history was a common one: history was a tale of public life told by those with experience and understanding of it in order to improve the understanding of the reader. For the Romans, the utilitarian purpose was also a moral one. The past was a storehouse of exempla, and, by studying these, future generations would have models of what to follow and what to avoid. Tacitus felt that the record of Tiberius' reign, however grim and cloying, could benefit those living under autocracy. Philosophy on its own was inadequate as a guide to life. He could point with relief to a senator like Manius Lepidus who found a recipe for survival under tyranny without compromising his self-respect. And because history had a practical and moral purpose, the historian adopted a didactic tone. The mordant epigrams of Tacitus drew attention to the lessons to be learnt from history. On a practical level the historian explained how things did work; on a moral level he commented on how people ought to behave.³⁵

Suetonius' preface is lost. There, apart from addressing Septicius Clarus as ‘prefect of the praetorian cohorts’ he probably gave some indication of his purpose in writing. But even without this, we can infer something from the way he presents his material. His tone is anything but didactic. One of its most remarkable features is the rarity with which he intervenes to comment on his material. He does not speak in propria persona, except to comment on truth or falsehood. He offers no epigrams or sententiae. He does not even generally use value-laden adjectives to guide the reader towards approval or disapproval. Value-judgments must often be implicit in the items he relates; yet he seeks to keep himself and his opinions in low profile. Again he quite deliberately avoids stepping into the historian's shoes.³⁶

Tacitus' ideal reader is evidently a senator. Suetonius' is not; but nor is he the ‘man-in-the-street’. It is particularly unjust to cast Suetonius as the author of a chronique scandaleuse, an exposé of the seamier side of palace life, which catered for that taste for ‘the things behind the scenes which attract the ears and eyes of the curious because they are kept secret’, as a late Roman potted history puts it. Scandal undoubtedly occupies a place in the Caesars, as for that matter it does in the historiographical tradition. But its place is a minor one. The author hardly waded through mounds of dull administrative detail as an excuse for tittle-tattle. At worst we may admit that he knew the value of the anecdotal in spicing up the dry and factual.³⁷

Again, we might be inclined to see a ‘mirror of princes’ in the Caesars, a model laid before Hadrian of the behaviour a good prince should follow or eschew. The analytic presentation enables the reader to form a judgment of the performance of a series of rulers. Thus a picture emerges both of an ideal and of its opposite. But the ideal is not the conclusion so much as the presupposition of the Caesars. Suetonius does not seek to instruct a Caesar how to behave; rather he analyses how Caesars did behave against a background of assumptions about imperial behaviour. Hadrian could well have read the Caesars out of interest, but not to be taught lessons.³⁸

Another suggestion is that he wrote for an equestrian bureaucracy alienated from the traditional senatorial élite. The equestrian Septicius was distinguished by the dedication as an ideal reader. Yet, as will be seen, there is nothing in the Caesars at which a senator should take offence. Even if it contains much to interest the equestrian official, it is not such as to exclude the senator.³⁹

The error is to make of the Caesars an alternative type of history to the Annals, written differently because for a different type of person. It is not history at all. It is biography, written by a scholar in the hellenistic tradition, composed neither to instruct nor to titillate but to inform. The neutral, non-committal presentation is that expected of a scholar: even details of sexual life are recorded without condemnation and without relish.

The scholar cannot write for everyone, and there are perhaps two interests in particular which Suetonius assumed in his reader: interest in the world of culture and literature, and interest in the world of imperial administration. They are interests that met in the scholarly ab epistulis. The combination was hardly rare at the court of Hadrian, a ruler noted both for his dedication to the administrative grind and for his fascination with hellenistic culture. But to form a clearer conception of the world to which Suetonius belonged and for which he wrote, we need to examine the place of scholarship in Roman society at large and at the imperial court in particular.

THE SCHOLAR AND SOCIETY

The sources create an accidental gulf between Suetonius the public figure—in his glory in the Hippo dedication, in disgrace in the life of Hadrian—and Tranquillus the scholar described by the Suda with his dismayingly long list of titles. Of the two, it is the scholar who is the less familiar figure. Only after the scholar and scholarship have been placed in their social context can we begin to make sense of the author and assess his output and the readership for which he wrote.

STUDIA IN PLINY

The younger Pliny recommended Suetonius to Trajan as probissimum honestissimum eruditissimum virum—‘a perfect gentleman and an excellent scholar’. The phrase is neatly tailored for this gentleman scholar, or so it might seem until an eye is cast over the language of Pliny's other recommendations. Almost exactly the same string of superlatives (probissimum gravissimum eruditissimum) is applied to Sextus Erucius whose advancement in the senate Pliny backs (2.9.3). Sextus was the nephew of Septicius Clarus, and had an impressive enough career ahead: doubtless he was well-read, but there is no sign that he was an author as distinguished as Suetonius. Erudition and uprightness similarly recommend the young senator Asinius Bassus (4.15.7). Then there is a whole series of recommendations for preferment to equestrian military ranks, often the tribunate, and again and again Pliny points to their literary attainments: ‘a great talent … erudite in pleading cases’; ‘he loves learning’; ‘I make use of his criticisms for my own writings’; ‘his father was a great lover of learning’. In fact there are only three of Pliny's recommendations in which no mention of literary attainments is made, against a dozen in which it is.⁴⁰

That is a fair reflection of the society evoked by Pliny's letters as a whole. Throughout Pliny is desperately concerned to foster studia, literary studies, and to secure promotion for studiosi, lovers of learning. Odd though it may seem to choose a soldier for his book-learning, military rank, like senatorial rank, was seen primarily as a token of public esteem. The poet Martial had been decorated by Domitian with the military tribunate: Pliny regrets the passing in his day of this old custom of rewarding poets for their praise with honours or money (3.21.3). But at other moments he is more optimistic. Studies flourish as never before under Nerva (1.10.1). Later the prestige of studies is maintained—because a young patrician endured discomfort to listen to Pliny speaking (4.16); though when the law-courts start to be businesslike in expediting the pleading of cases, he complains that studies have fallen into contempt and neglect (6.2.5). He has especial praise for the imperial procurator Titinius Capito: ‘he fosters studies, loves cherishes and seeks advancement for studiosi’ (8.12.1).

Of course there were also tough military men in Rome who neither understood nor cared about books. Trajan might have been among them, though Pliny vigorously denies it (Pan.47). But nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine a natural gulf between the intelligentsia and the military men and administrators. A series of vignettes is enough to dissolve that dichotomy. The general Vestricius Spurinna, veteran of the civil war of ad 69, is sketched in retirement: from dawn to dusk he is seldom without a book in his hand, or talking literature with his friends, or even composing Greek and Latin lyrics (3.1). Greek verses are also composed by another elder statesman, Arrius Antoninus, grandfather of the future emperor Pius (4.3). Pliny flatters him by turning his epigrams into Latin (4.18; 5.15). There is nothing amiss in writing light verse: Pliny can defend his own hendecasyllables by a host of worthy precedents, including Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Nerva, as well as Verginius Rufus who refused the throne (5.3.5). Pomponius Bassus is a model of how a man who has achieved the highest honours and commanded armies should behave in retirement, engaging in learned disputes and reading avidly (4.23). But it is not necessary to wait until retirement for the opportunity for reading: Mamilianus, despite all his complaints of the pressure of military life, finds time for Pliny's epigrams, and qualifies for the accolade of a scholar, viri eruditissimi gravissimi (9.25.2). Pliny expects learning of a great man: the young aristocrat Calpurnius Piso proves himself worthy of his forebears by writing a poem on the constellations (5.17). He is also delighted to discover it in a lesser one. How the eruditi conceal their learning! He had visited Terentius Junior, a former officer and procurator, on his country estate, expecting the talk to be of agriculture, and found his host learnedly turning the conversation to Greek and Latin literature (7.25).⁴¹

Literary accomplishment may have been little more than skin-deep in some of these characters whom Pliny praises. But there are two who demonstrate that it was possible to combine dedicated service of the emperor with an impressive literary output, and so provide useful comparison with Suetonius. The most impressive is the elder Pliny, procurator to the Flavians, and yet a man of encyclopedic learning and prolific output. His nephew describes his daily routine, which must have borne some resemblance to that of Suetonius. He reported for duty to Vespasian before sunrise and after the day's work returned home to give every moment to his books. A day's work can rarely have occupied more than the morning. He read as he ate, as he stripped for the bath, even as he travelled to and fro (3.5). The elder Pliny's writing shows a combination of two ingredients which also characterises Suetonius: hellenistic scholarship on the one hand (most of the numerous books he drew on for the Natural histories were works of hellenistic learning) and, on the other, interest in Roman public life. He wrote at almost equal length on scientific subjects and on contemporary history. The Natural histories are crammed with historical anecdotes as well as scientific learning; and we may perhaps surmise that the Histories had their sprinkling of scientific or technical detail. Suetonius' works too divide between the scholarly and the historical; but in each, interest in the other shines through.

The second figure who bears comparison with Suetonius is Titinius Capito. Secretary ab epistulis to a succession of emperors from Domitian to Trajan, Capito was acclaimed by Pliny as a leading light in the renaissance of letters (8.12). Like Suetonius, he was not only secretary, but also biographer. He wrote verses on famous men, and also a work on Deaths of famous men. Martyrology was a fashionable genre. He caught the wave of the literary ‘republicanism’ that followed the murder of Domitian, just as he caught the public eye by his erection of a statue of Nero's victim Silanus in the forum and by his cult of Brutus, Cassius and Cato. He does not sound so learned a scholar as either the elder Pliny or Suetonius; but he amply illustrates enthusiasm for literature in an imperial official.⁴²

The younger Pliny's picture of Roman society may well be one-sided. He had, after all, a vested interest in the advertisement and advancement of his own literary friends and protégés. But the assumption, which he expects to be shared by his addressees, is that literary accomplishments were the mark of a proper gentleman and constituted per se a claim for public respect and the conferment of positions of honour. This assumption can be put in perspective if we examine Pliny's concept of studia. The word is virtually untranslatable, at least into English; though it is itself an equivalent to the Greek paideia. It covers in the first place a literary education, the ‘liberal studies’ that were the making of a gentleman, and secondly the literary interests that were the continuing mark of one who had acquired the right education. For the orator Pliny, studia are often rhetorical accomplishments; but, as we have seen, they are also manifested in writing light verse or biography, in reading of any sort. The prestige of learning was a reflection of the prestige of the dominant literary education of the time. It is against the background of this educational system that Suetonius' scholarship must be considered.⁴³

SUETONIUS AND THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION

Suetonius is described in the Suda as a Roman grammarian. Technically a grammaticus was a professor of literature, usually one who taught for a living. With the property qualification of an eques Romanus, Suetonius had no need of such an income, and there is no evidence that he ever had pupils. But he wrote as such professors wrote. Pliny dubbed him a scholasticus, a product of the schools; John the Lydian calls him a philologus, a lover of learning. All these terms are imprecise; but all are Greek, and the intellectual context to which he belongs is that of Alexandrian scholarship.⁴⁴

The best guide to his intellectual background is a work which survives from his own pen: the slim but valuable essay On grammarians and rhetors. This consists of a series of lives, or rather brief biographical sketches, first of the most notable Roman professors of grammaticē (‘grammar’ is a misleading translation), and then of the professors of rhetoric; the manuscript unfortunately breaks off halfway through the second series. The essay has been read with a certain impatience by modern literary historians. Although it preserves valuable pieces of information, for instance about Valerius Cato who taught a generation of poets contemporary with Catullus, it offers no overall framework for literary history. Anybody hoping to find an account of the contribution of each professor to the development of Roman thought and writing will be disappointed. But this is to ask the wrong questions of the essay. Suetonius does have a clear theme, which he states in the two prefaces: the rise in prestige and social standing of the professions of grammaticē and rhetoric and of their practitioners. What he describes is a remarkable transformation in social attitudes, from the suspicion and rejection of Greek-style education in the early first century bc to the lionisation of professors a century later. It is this transformation that helps to explain Suetonius' own scholarly career.⁴⁵

Two prefaces, one to the lives of grammarians and the other to the lives of rhetoricians, sketch the general lines of development. The primitive and bellicose Romans of old had no use for grammaticē. Though indeed there were sporadic signs of interest in culture earlier, Suetonius dates the beginnings of interest in the discipline to the mid second century bc when Crates, head of the library at Pergamum, broke his leg in the course of an embassy to Rome and offered lectures on his subject during his recuperation. Thereafter its reputation gradually increased until there were twenty schools flourishing simultaneously at Rome. Grammar became a commodity for which staggering prices were paid, and the fashion spread out from Rome to her provinces (Gramm. 1-3). The change of attitudes to rhetoric was even more startling. The official attitude at first was of sharp disapproval, and as late as 92 bc the censors issued a famous edict banning teachers of Latin rhetoric from the city. Yet half a century later the triumvirs Antony and Octavian were practising the schoolboy exercise of declamation in the midst of civil war; and thereafter rhetorical education became so much in vogue that it was possible, Suetonius claims, for a professor to advance from obscurity to the highest rank in the state (25.1-7).

Suetonius then documents his theme of the rise of repute of the arts by detailing the social status and origins of the successive professors. This interest in social status may have been a traditional one. At any rate, it was Cornelius Nepos, one of his sources, who observed that the former door-keeper Voltacilius Pilutus was the first freedman who dared to write history, until then the preserve of the high-born (27). Furthermore an approximate contemporary of Suetonius, the ex-slave Hermippus from Berytus (Beirut) wrote a work which may be regarded as a sort of Greek companion piece to the Grammarians and rhetors. This was a collection of biographies of slaves who had won distinction in education (paideia) and is likely to be the source of the numerous notices about such Greek grammarians preserved in the Suda encyclopedia.

What Suetonius nowhere attempts is an explanation of the phenomena he documents. It is startling that as late as 92 bc, when the aristocracy was already so familiar with hellenistic culture, the appearance of teachers of Latin rhetoric on the Greek model caused such a reaction. One of the two censors responsible for the edict was the leading orator of his day, L. Licinius Crassus. Cicero reports that his objection was that these new schools taught young men impudentia, insubordination. The threat was of social mobility. According to the edict, ‘our ancestors established what they wanted their children to learn and what schools they should attend’. In fact, aristocratic education took place largely in the family. From his father a boy learnt the bonae artes, the appropriate skills for a public figure of war, law and government as well as letters and public speaking. The adolescent learnt by imitating his father and his father's peers in the forum, in the senate, on the battlefield. The system was well suited to preserving the dominance of the aristocracy.

The danger inherent in the new schools of rhetoric was that they were public, open to anyone who could afford to pay the lecturer. Given the importance of public speaking in Roman political life, the acquisition of the art of rhetoric could be a potent instrument for promotion. Once the schools of rhetoric had been firmly established in the early days of the empire, it was well known that men rose to the top through rhetoric. Tacitus pointed to the example of two new men from Italian towns, Vibius Crispus and Eprius Marcellus, who rose to great power under Vespasian thanks to their rhetorical skills: ‘the humbleness of their origin and the meanness of their financial circumstances only shows them to better effect as egregious instances of the practical utility of rhetorical training’ (Dialogus 8.3).⁴⁶

Grammaticē was less dangerous than rhetoric. Grammarians taught the classics of literature and their interpretation: knowledge of literature was not so obvious a route to social promotion as rhetoric. Consequently, on Suetonius' showing, grammarians became established in Rome some time before rhetoricians, from the beginning of the first century bc. Yet they must have played a significant role in undermining old traditions of education in the family and in spreading the Greek style. The data assembled by Suetonius and Hermippus point to an enormous influx of teachers in the first century bc, predominantly from the Greek east. Paradoxically, the aristocracy encouraged the transformation it feared through its own competitive spirit. The pattern that emerges is of the powerful families competing to acquire scholars as tutors for their sons.⁴⁷

The best source of scholars was of course the Greek east, and as Roman armies ravaged the East in the wake of the traumatic massacre of Romans by Mithridates of Pontus in 88 bc, the victorious generals returned with enslaved teachers among their precious booty. Cornelius Epicadus was the freedman of Sulla, presumably brought back from war; he taught Sulla's son and completed his master's unfinished memoirs (Gramm. 12). Sulla's lieutenant Lentulus bagged a grammarian trained by Crates, Alexander ‘Polyhistor’, who proved a writer of distinction on geography (Suda, s.v. Alexandros). When Sulla stormed Athens in 86 bc, the first man over the walls was a centurion called Ateius. He had his reward. His Athenian slave, later a freedman, L. Ateius Philologus, taught the Ateii, and the centurion's grandson Ateius Capito, one of the famous jurists of Augustus' reign, had high praise for this versatile teacher (10). In 70 bc, Amisos on the Pontus fell. One of the two most distinguished professors there was Tyrannion, a pupil of Dionysius Thrax, who wrote the first definitive systematic grammar. The general, Lucullus, is said to have been rather shocked when his lieutenant Murena took the opportunity to acquire the professor as a slave. Freed, in Rome, Tyrannion became an authority on the building up of private libraries (Suda, s.v. Tyrannion). Of a later vintage was Timagenes, brought home captive from Egypt by Gabinius in 65, bought by the son of the dictator Sulla, under whom he rose, according to rumour, from cook to litter-bearer to teacher of rhetoric (Suda, s.v. Timagenes). The greatest of the eastern conquerors was Pompey; appropriately he had the largest number of professors in his train. But by now gentler methods were possible. On Rhodes Pompey attended the lectures of Aristodemus of Nysa, son of an academic, himself equally adept at grammar and rhetoric. Aristodemus had a brother, Sostratus, also a grammaticus, and Pompey induced his son, named after the uncle Aristodemus, to return to Rome to teach the young Pompeys Greek (Suda, s.v. Aristodemus). Nicias from Cos was another grammarian who enjoyed Pompey's patronage (Gramm. 14).⁴⁸

The importation of Greek professors was necessary if the aristocracy wished to learn Greek literature and techniques. But it generally required a native Latin speaker to teach Latin; and one point which Suetonius' biographies illustrate is the parallel movement in the first century bc by which Latin-speaking slaves were trained up as teachers. Suitable material was provided by the towns of Italy: Crassicius came from Tarentum (18), Melissus from Spoletum (21), and Pompey's freedman Lenaeus is said to have run away back home (15) perhaps to Aurunca. Others came from Gaul (Cisalpine Gaul, presumably), like Antonius Gnipho, a foundling educated and then manumitted by his master (7). Spain was the likely origin of Augustus' freedman Hyginus (29). Slaves of eastern origin indeed could learn Latin if caught young enough. Staberius Eros was a Thracian bought as a boy from the slaver's stand (13). Epirota was home-born on Atticus' estate at Tusculum, but to judge from his name his parentage was Greek (16).

The readiness of aristocratic families to exploit the new availability of talented private tutors did most to undermine the traditional aristocratic system of education. Grammarians who started as private tutors might set up on their own: so Gnipho whose public lectures were attended in the mid-60s by Cicero (Gramm. 7). Staberius Eros offered free tuition for those unfortunates who had been deprived of rights and properties by Sulla's proscription of their fathers (13). Nor were all professors bound by servitude and manumission to particular patrons. Orbilius was a freeborn citizen from Beneventum who set up practice in Rome in 63 bc and there maintained a precarious existence on the proceeds (9). Similarly Valerius Cato was free, but left penniless by civil war. Although lionised as a teacher by a generation of young poets, he remained impoverished; this Roman Crates, as one pupil quipped, could clear up all questions grammatical but could not clear his own name of debt (11).

This influx of teachers resulted in a transformation of attitudes. By the end of the first century the Greek style of education in grammaticē and rhetoric had become the norm. Indeed it became so fashionable that the schoolboy exercise of declamation turned into a sort of public performance by the professionals to which the public flocked, as is documented for us at length by the enthusiast Seneca the Elder.⁴⁹ There was also a marked shift in official attitudes to education. Caesar as dictator granted citizenship to all professors and doctors at Rome (Jul. 42.1). Augustus similarly recognised professors and doctors as a privileged and protected group: they were exempted from an expulsion of foreigners during a famine (Aug. 42.3). Augustus also honoured a leading scholar of the day, Verrius Flaccus, by appointing him tutor to his grandsons at the handsome salary of 100,000 sesterces, a level of pay adequate for an equestrian procurator (Gramm. 17). His foundation of public libraries created further posts of honour for scholars. One such librarian whose name Suetonius records was the equestrian Pompeius Macer, son of Pompey's favourite, Theophanes of Mytilene; Pompeius served Augustus in other roles as procurator. But two other librarians were grammarians from his own household, Julius Hyginus and C. Melissus (Gramm. 20 and 21). That a freedman could be employed in the same post as an equestrian is a token of the respect in which scholarship was now held.⁵⁰

But the clearest official acknowledgment under the empire of the importance of education lay in the grant to teachers of grammar and rhetoric (as also to doctors) of immunity from local taxes and duties. The latest evidence suggests that their immunity goes back to the triumviral period when rhetorical education was already in high fashion at Rome. A later inscription shows Vespasian reaffirming the privileged status of teachers and doctors; Hadrian further extended the privileges, which were regularised in the form met in the legal codes by Antoninus Pius, who established a quota of tax-free grammarians and rhetors for each community. Emperors further promoted education by establishing official chairs. Vespasian led the way at Rome by creating chairs of Greek and Latin rhetoric, at the same salary of 100,000 sesterces that Augustus had paid Verrius Flaccus (Vesp. 18). Later emperors created other chairs in the provinces. Yet another privilege, established at an unknown date, opened for professors a special process for the recovery of unpaid fees.⁵¹

One vital factor in this dramatic reversal of Roman attitudes to education was the role which it could play in the empire. Education rapidly emerged as a prime instrument of Romanisation, invaluable for converting local aristocracies to a Rome-centred culture.⁵² It is amazing how quickly, after the tentative and unplanned emergence of a Roman literary education imported from the Greeks, this education was then exported to the provinces, as Suetonius himself notes (Gramm. 3.6). Spain led the way. Already in the early first century bc Sertorius is reported to have given the sons of the local nobility education in Latin. In the mid first century bc a Greek grammarian, Asclepiades of Myrleia, is recorded as active in Turdetania, the relatively advanced south-western tip of Spain. By the mid first century ad the region was producing the best Latin prose-writers and poets. Gaul was not far behind. In ad 23 the rebel Sacrovir was able to take hostage a class-room full of the sons of the Aeduan nobility at Autun. Three of Suetonius' post-Augustan rhetors came from Gaul, Statius Ursulus from Toulouse, Clodius Quirinalis from Arles, and Julius Gabinianus. Spain's products were even more distinguished: Quintilian, who was brought by Galba to Rome in ad 68, and Julius Tiro who rose through the senatorial career to the praetorship.⁵³

The other western provinces followed suit; by the end of the first century ad Juvenal could couple Africa with Gaul as one of the main sources of orators (7.147ff.). In Antonine Rome in the mid second century the leading orator, Fronto, came from Cirta, and the leading grammarian, Sulpicius Apollinaris, from Carthage. If Hippo really was Suetonius' home-town, he would be of their company. Even Britain had its taste of education. Juvenal joked that ultima Thule at the ends of the earth was trying to hire a rhetorician. An inscription reveals that a Greek grammarian, Demetrius, was teaching in York in the 80s. Demetrius emerges from an essay of Plutarch as an academic of some distinction. Presumably he was there through the encouragement of Agricola, whom Tacitus describes as setting up schools for the sons of the local nobles. Tacitus comments acidly on the practical value of the policy: ‘The innocent call it civilisation, when in truth it is an aspect of enslavement.’⁵⁴

At the beginning of the first century bc literary education had aroused suspicion: it seemed to pose a threat to the established social order. Two centuries later it was deeply entrenched in a changed social order. For an élite drawn from a wide geographical range, literary attainment served as the mark of Romanness and gentle birth. It offered a passport to respectability. And in such a society, professors enjoyed corresponding prestige.

GRAMMATICē IN THE SECOND CENTURY AD

Competition, fashion and practical advantage thus all conspired to elevate the prestige of grammarians, rhetoricians and the studies they promoted. The rhetoricians took the first pickings, as befitted the practical, political value of their art. It was a rhetorician, Quintilian, not a grammarian, who was honoured with the rank of consul. The most fashionable literary movement of the second century ad, termed by its historian Philostratus the ‘Second Sophistic’, was a rhetorical one. The élite both Greek and Roman streamed to the lecture halls to hear the ‘sophists’ perform their model declamations, and emperors held them in high honour.⁵⁵

The abundant self-advertisement of this movement has tended to distract attention from grammaticē in the same period. Grammarians were paid less well than rhetors, and enjoyed less status. But it is an unjustifiable assumption that because the republican grammarians whom Suetonius records were mostly freedmen, those of the imperial period will have been freedmen also. Suetonius only records two post-Augustan grammarians. One, Remmius Palaemon, was an ex-slave, who made a fortune from teaching and from a shrewd investment in a vineyard (23). The other, Valerius Probus, was a freeborn citizen from the veteran colony of Beirut (24). It is likely enough that, at least by the second century, many were freeborn provincials like Probus. Nor were they without distinction: the names of three grammarians are preserved from Italy who were honoured with membership of their local councils. Another, Helvius Pertinax, pupil and for a time successor of Sulpicius Apollinaris, was to rise to emperor.⁵⁶

More telling is the evidence that interest in grammatical questions was carried past the schoolroom and was alive among the educated at large. This can be seen best in the Attic nights of Aulus Gellius, who was younger than Suetonius by a generation. As a young man in the reign of Antoninus Pius he took his education from the grammarians, rhetors and philosophers of Rome (later he went to Athens for the final polish). Not unlike the young Boswell in London, he cultivated the most brilliant figures of the intellectual scene, and took notes of some of the conversations he heard (though with less honesty and accuracy than Boswell). His Johnson was Favorinus of Arles, once a friend of Hadrian's, technically a philosopher, but showman enough as a speaker to qualify as the only westerner among Philostratus' sophists. Other luminaries were the grammarian Sulpicius Apollinaris and Cornelius Fronto the Latin orator, tutor of Marcus Aurelius. Gellius' own interests (he himself always remained an amateur) were those of the grammarian: above all the meanings and usages of words, particularly in old and little-read texts, and secondly antiquarian lore about matters social, legal and religious. It is therefore on the whole only the grammatical parts of conversations that are filtered through his hotch-potch of anecdotes and learned notes, the Attic nights. But selective though they are, they illustrate vividly the interest in matters grammatical among the intelligentsia.⁵⁷

A characteristic scene is set in the forecourt of the imperial palace (4.1). A crowd is awaiting the emperor's levée; it includes a group of scholars, to whom a grammarian is holding forth in a dull and pompous manner on the gender of a word. Favorinus is provoked into showing him up; and a request for the meaning of a word reveals that he is capable neither of a proper philosophical definition nor understands its literary usage. The grammarian should know better, for the word occurs in a disputed passage of Virgil familiar to every schoolboy. In another episode set in the Palace the orator Fronto argues with Sulpicius Apollinaris and an unnamed grammarian, who distinguishes himself by an apt off-the-cuff quotation (19.13). Most frequently Gellius is found in the little crowd of followers behind the great Favorinus. He strolls in the Forum of Trajan waiting for his friend the consul to finish judging a case; the conversation, as often, involves the discomfiture of an anonymous grammarian on a grammatical point (13.25); or he strolls in the baths of Titus where one of the company, who must be a man of considerable years, recalls sitting at the feet of Valerius Probus, the outstanding grammarian of the Flavianic age (3.1). Usually Favorinus likes to show up the professionals; but there is a strange reversal when they meet the grammarian Domitius ‘the Madman’ in the street. When asked about the meaning of a word, Domitius launches into a tirade on the futility of philosophers: if Favorinus really wants to know, he will send a book on the topic; but what a tragedy that philosophers interest themselves in footling lexicographical questions, when the grammarian is interested in Life and Manners (18.7). Domitius' rebukes were only partly unjust. Favorinus (like Fronto) was obsessed with words. At his dinner table there were regular readings of literary works. These included Gavius Bassus' On the origin of verbs and substantives, and Favorinus was alert enough to controvert false etymologies (3.19).

Throughout one receives the impression of a Roman intelligentsia fascinated by learned questions; by no means are their interests confined to the schoolroom and lecture hall. Not only philosophers, rhetoricians, poets and anonymous bystanders but the great men of the state breathed this air. Favorinus' friend the consul is not likely to have escaped the battle of wits and learning; the city prefect Erucius Clarus, nephew of Septicius Clarus, took an obscure point of priestly law to Apollinaris (7.6.12). But above all, we should consider those learned conversations in the ante-rooms of the palace: did they cease when the doors were opened and the learned admitted to the imperial presence? We shall see later (ch.4 [in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars]) that they did not.

Here then is the society to which Suetonius belongs: one in which a literary education has come to assume a cardinal role, and in which many carried away from their schooldays a taste for the professors' game. Well enough off, as an eques Romanus, to be able to dispense with the unpredictable income of a professional, he immersed himself in the techniques and writings of the learned. Perhaps, like men whom Gellius knew, he had drawn inspiration in the reign of Domitian from Valerius Probus, who as he relates did not so much take pupils as regale a small circle of followers from his deep store of learning.

Against this background, can we come to any closer understanding of his scholarly output as a whole? We are hampered here by the meagreness of the fragments of his corpus—it is always salutary to remember how small a proportion of this the Caesars formed. Tranquillus, as they call him, is much cited by later scholars: by commentators on Virgil and Horace, compilers of word-lists, or authors of monographs on similar topics like Roman games or the calendar. But such fragments are no more than enticing glimpses: they give no idea of a work as a whole, nor of the purpose and drive behind it. Indeed, there is little agreement as to how much ‘Tranquillus’ survives. The two German collectors of his fragments, Carl Roth and Augustus Reifferscheid, produced within two years of each other in the mid nineteenth century collections of his ‘Remains’ of startlingly different proportions: Roth's filled forty-five scant sides, Reifferscheid's three hundred and sixty. There had been no new discoveries in the intervening years; that came a few years later in the shape of a Byzantine epitome of the essays On words of insult and On Greek games, written in Greek and easily the best preserved of the non-biographical works.⁵⁸ The contrast lay in the principles of fragment collecting. Roth austerely restricted himself to the sentences where a view was explicitly attributed to the author. Reifferscheid worked on the principle that such direct citations form the tip of an iceberg where a later author dealing with the same subject has based himself on one authority, but only names him for disputed points; and thus he printed out in full works like Macrobius On the Roman year. Reifferscheid has been justly criticised as suffering from ‘elephantiasis’. In particular there is little to be said for his assumption that a hypothetical encyclopedic work of Suetonius called Pratum or Prata lies beneath the Etymologies of Isidore, bishop of Seville in the seventh century. A leading authority on Isidore compares his work to a Romanesque church: there may be fragments of classical columns embedded in the structure, but the building as a whole belongs distinctively to the seventh century.⁵⁹ Yet both collections have their uses: Roth's for showing at a glance what is certainly Suetonian, Reifferscheid for gaining a more general impression of what Latin grammarians were interested in and how they handled their subjects. Scholarship is by nature tralaticious, each writer taking over and passing on the accumulated learning of the last, and Suetonius must be seen within the framework of a tradition running over eight centuries from Aelius Stilo and Varro to Isidore and beyond.

More damaging than the uncertainty about what is Suetonian is the lack of an authoritative study of this Latin tradition of scholarship. A study is needed not only collecting the facts of who wrote what, but relating these scholars to the changing world in which they wrote, from the disintegrating republic that made Varro so anxious to recapture ancestral traditions, to the Christian and increasingly barbarous world in which a Servius fought to preserve the pagan literary heritage. For lack of such a work, no more than a few hints can be offered here.⁶⁰

First, a negative point. No edition or commentary on a text features among Suetonius' writings. Edition and commentary were the original form and backbone of Alexandrian scholarship; the establishment and elucidation of the classics—Homer, comedy, tragedy and lyric—were the first care of authors like Aristophanes, Zenodotus and Aristarchus. Latin scholars followed suit, commenting on Ennius and the early dramatists at first, and on Virgil and Horace from very shortly after their appearance. This activity is linked with the basic exercise of Greek and Roman education: the reading of the literary classics, and their elucidation through a word by word question and answer exchange between master and pupil. The scholar's commentary differs only in sophistication, not in method, from the schoolboy's. The problem (zētēsis, quaestio) is put, an answer (lusis, solutio) suggested, whether lexical, mythological, historical or whatever is appropriate. Suetonius, free from the practice of teaching, spared himself the grammarian's standard fare. Nor did he write on grammar in our sense, the ars grammatica, which, once systematised by Dionysius ‘the Thracian’ of Rhodes, maintained its tyranny over the schoolchild unchallenged until the present generation.

The next point is about his methodology. Though no commentator, Suetonius could not escape the scholarly methods that were the product of commentary. Because the problem-and-answer process centred on individual words (or names), the discussion of words is the central and obsessive topic of ancient scholarship. Almost all the works that now survive, when they are not commentaries (‘scholia’), are lexica, either of words only, or like a Larousse including proper names (the Suda is one such). We may broadly divide Suetonius' works into three categories; lexicographical (on ‘words for things’), antiquarian (essays on institutions), and biographical.⁶¹ In all three the method of commentary on a word is apparent. On words of insult is the best surviving example of the first: insulting names are assembled, divided into types (according to the sort of person being insulted: lecherous men, women, fools, old men, etc.); and for each word there is an entry, explaining its meaning and citing the passages of literature where it occurs. ‘Kēlon. One inclined to sex. Metaphorically from a rutting donkey. So Archilochus, “I flowed over like the kēlon of the donkey of Priene”.’ (The entry is probably much abbreviated.) At the start of the essay is a short preface dealing with the history of the topic (‘goes back to Homer …’) and analysing the types of word-formation involved in coining an insult.

The method, to be expected in anything lexicographical, is also apparent in his other types of work. An essay on customs or institutions, as the surviving On Greek games, lends itself to subdivision and quotation of examples. There are board games, party games and children's games. ‘Dicing: the oldest game, invented by Palamedes (see Sophocles' Palamedes) … A throw scoring one used to be called a “die”: this explains the problematic line of Aristophanes, “Achilles threw two dice and a four” …’ The same procedure could be applied to Roman customs, official posts and the like. No different is the biographical method. The Grammarians and rhetors are the only literary lives that survive as a group. Just as in the Words of insult we find an introduction (when grammar or rhetoric was introduced and how it progressed, what it consisted of) and then a series of entries; only here the words commented on are proper names. Ample quotations illustrate the facts of the lives. We may note too that ‘illustrious people’ are divided into categories (grammarians, rhetors, poets, historians …) like games or insults.

The Caesars is the same thing on a large scale. The introduction is lost. But we have a series of lives, all the available specimens (up to a point) of a particular phenomenon, ‘Caesars’. Even within the lives the construction is often around rubrics, topic after topic, though since this is consecutive prose, the reader is normally spared the abruptness of a one word heading at the top of a paragraph. But always the old method shows through: Suetonius' thought runs not in consecutive narrative like a historian's, nor in developing argument like a philosopher's, but in word-heading and commentary with instances. The virtues possible within the limitations of this method are clarity of division, and learning and accuracy in commentary on the rubric. These are the author's distinctive virtues.

Thirdly, Suetonius is not isolated from his contemporaries, especially in Greek scholarship. His essays on Insults and Greek games were written in Greek. He is evidently using the methods of contemporary Greek scholarship; and we may be confident that most of the learning derives from the Greek tradition. In the passage cited above on dicing he would have been able to refer to the commentary on Aristophanes' Frogs by Didymus Chalcenterus (‘Brassguts’), the formidable polymath of the Augustan age. Perhaps, however, he already found the information processed in the lexicon of Pamphilus, another Alexandrian of slightly later date.⁶² We possess no external evidence on the order of composition of his various works, but it might be a fair guess that he learnt his trade, so to speak, on Greek words, and gradually progressed to the accumulated learning evident in the Caesars.⁶³ To illustrate the fact that his choice of subjects is by no means peculiar, we may take as an example the writings of one Greek scholar. Telephus of Pergamum was a generation younger than Suetonius; having established a reputation, he was summoned to Rome by Antoninus Pius to be tutor to Verus. His writings include the lexicographical (On names and types of clothes and other garments, almost identical in title to Suetonius' Names and types of clothes); the antiquarian (On Athenian courts, On Athenian ways and manners, On official posts) and the biographical (Lives of dramatists, and On the kings of Pergamum). It is a pity that no fragments survive to allow closer examination of the parallel.⁶⁴

Suetonius, then, was not a pure scholar, editing and commenting for school use, but he harnessed the methods of the grammarian to questions of contemporary interest. He has been dismissed in the past as a collector of curiosities; and indeed his disparate list of titles gives the impression of an omnivorous and unselective pursuit of odd information.⁶⁵ Yet if there is a thread that holds his work together, it is surely an interest in what one might, with Domitius the Madman in Gellius' anecdote, call ‘Life and Manners’. This is best apparent in his antiquarian works, those on games, Greek and Roman, or on Roman customs. But it is also discernible to a lesser extent in the lexicographical compilations. These are not pure linguistic studies, like Verrius Flaccus On correct usage, so much as monographs on various aspects of life seen through their vocabulary. Words for clothing will have involved discussion of archaic Roman customs—a fragment survives on priestly caps. Physical defects, apparently a medical subject, might have touched on the old Roman fascination for physical oddities reflected in their mercilessly frank cognomina. Investigation of words of insult meant ransacking sources like old comedy and invective, rich in details of ordinary life. These monographs are too poorly attested to allow certainty; but the interest in life is manifest in the biographical works. The lives of authors, as we shall see, are not so much about literature as about the public standing of the authors. The Caesars too are written by one with an eye to the daily life of emperors and their impact on the daily life of others. The viewpoint is distinctively that of the antiquarian, not the historian.⁶⁶

But the clearest sign of the way that Suetonius' interests hang together is the enormous extent to which he draws on previous works in the Caesars. These were the culmination of former interests as well as a new departure. The Illustrious men prepared much of the ground for writing biographies of emperors; we will see that many of the interests of the biographer of literary personalities shine through in the Caesars (ch.3). Of his other scholarly works, none was so frequently cited or drawn on in antiquity as that On games. This book, comprising one volume on the Greeks and two on the Romans, must count as a major achievement, and if we are to lay stakes on which publication Pliny was awaiting in ad 105, this should be a favourite. Correspondingly, discussion of games and shows bulks large in the Caesars: details of the performances put on by each emperor in their full variety, gladiatorial, equestrian, theatrical, athletic, the names of gladiators, tragedians and pantomimes all betray the scholar's expertise. One stray fragment offers an illustration. Commenting on the description of the ‘Troy game’ (lusus Troiae) in the Aeneid, Servius notes that ‘the game commonly called pyrrhic is named Troia, and Suetonius Tranquillus explains its origin in the book on boys' games'. Servius has garbled his Suetonius here, as elsewhere; the Troy game was not called pyrrhic, and the two are distinct. But it is not unlikely that Suetonius sought the origin of the lusus Troiae in the pyrrhic. The Troy game was an exception in that it involved aristocratic young Romans performing on horseback in public; the pyrrhic was a type of dance popular in Asia Minor, but it too was performed by young men of high birth. Suetonius will have seized on the Asian link offered by the name of Troy. In the Caesars both performances of the Troy games (under six Caesars) and of pyrrhic dances are carefully noted, and the author shows himself interested in the issue of whether it is proper for young aristocrats to perform in public.⁶⁷

In addition to public games there were private ones. Suetonius describes how Augustus relaxed by fishing, a popular imperial pursuit, or by playing knucklebones or ‘nuts’ with dwarf children (83). He has also much to say about the Greek game of dicing, traditionally regarded as depraved at Rome, but popular in this period. A precious series of quotations from Augustus' letters gives a vivid picture of the innocent amusement offered in the imperial household by the gaming table (71). Claudius shared this passion, had a special travelling board made for his carriage and wrote a book on the art of dicing (33.2). Perhaps Suetonius, who certainly discussed dicing in detail in his own book on Greek games, had used Claudius' essay. But not all dicing was innocent: Caligula played for profit and cheated heavily (41.2), Nero played for extravagant stakes of 400,000 sesterces per point (30.3).

Because the evidence for the essays On games is relatively good, we can go quite far in establishing links with the Caesars. It is likely enough that if the other antiquarian works were better attested the same could be done for them. At least it is possible to demonstrate that the Caesars draws on the Institution of offices (ch.4) and on the Roman year, and it will be argued that much of the antiquarian interest of the Caesars, in military, religious and civil institutions, goes back to such essays as that On Rome and its customs (ch.6). The links are not limited to the biographical and antiquarian works; in fact there are hardly any attested Suetonian titles which do not suggest some connection with the Caesars. The Physical defects does much to explain the precise information on the physical ailments and debilities of each Caesar. Suetonius may also have drawn on it for the same purpose in his literary lives; at least he could describe how the orator Messala Corvinus died from an ulcer on his spina sacra, a technical term which, as Fronto (who suffered from a similar affliction) tells us, Suetonius himself coined. The interest in Names for clothes is apparent in the Caesars, whether in the description of Nero's adoption of the Greek lyre-player's uniform (51), or of Domitian's regalia at his new festival (4.4), or even in the observation that Augustus wore slightly raised heels (73). Its antiquarian dimension is reflected in the report of Augustus' indignant enforcement of the wearing of the toga by citizens; the toga was the traditional sign of the Romans, ‘lords of the world and people of the toga’ (40.5). Hadrian was to reinforce this enactment in the author's own day, according to his biographer (22.2). Another topic on which Suetonius wrote (where is unclear) was that of signs and ciphers. He duly reports on the ciphers of Julius and Augustus. Finally, even the Lives of the courtesans (a subject familiar also to a series of distinguished hellenistic scholars) may conceivably be detected behind the information that Caligula had a notorious affaire with a prostitute called Pyrallis (36.1) or behind the knowledge of Domitian's sexual diversions (22).⁶⁸

Disparate and petty the subjects of Suetonius' researches may indeed appear. Yet even on the fragmentary evidence that survives, a degree of internal consistency emerges. There is a perceptible continuity of interest from the lexicographical and antiquarian works through the literary lives to the Caesars. If we would isolate a single unifying factor, it is an interest not in pure scholarship, linguistics, textual or literary criticism, but in life. What the epigrams of Martial, the letters of Pliny and the satires of Juvenal do in their various ways to illuminate the society and culture of the early empire, the scholarship of Suetonius likewise does. If the merit of the Caesars lies in the picture evoked of imperial society and culture, it was the author's scholarly curiosity that laid the foundations for his achievement.

THE SCHOLARLY BIOGRAPHER

Suetonius came to the Caesars already an experienced biographer. The Lives of illustrious men was a classic in its own right; but it also in many respects laid the basis for the Caesars, determining the author's method and approach. It was, we may well feel, a strange background for a biographer of emperors. To Suetonius, as to his many Greek and Roman predecessors, ‘the illustrious’ meant primarily notable authors. He named the most important of his predecessors in his preface: Hermippus, who wrote ‘lives of distinguished literary figures’; Antigonus, biographer of philosophers; Satyrus, part of whose life of Euripides has been discovered on papyrus; and Aristoxenus, an authority on music as well as a literary biographer. His Roman predecessors are named as Varro, Santra, Nepos and Hyginus. It is true that Nepos included generals in his series of famous men (it is primarily the section on Greek generals that happens to survive), and Hyginus at least wrote on Scipio Africanus. Still, on the whole it was authors of whom they wrote, and Varro restricted himself to poets.⁶⁹

LITERARY LIVES

Many have regretted the loss of Suetonius' Illustrious men, and with good reason. Much scholarly energy has been expended on attempts to ‘reconstruct’ the lives, above all the lives of the poets. Some of the most important can be partly salvaged, for it is clear that some of the biographies of poets prefaced to the ancient commentaries derive substantially from Suetonius' collection. This is certain for the life of Terence, beyond reasonable doubt for Horace, probable for Lucan, and highly likely for Virgil, though controversy still surrounds his various lives. All four make interesting reading, and they offer numerous points of contact with the Caesars. But in order to put the Caesars in their proper perspective, the study and ‘reconstruction’ of individual lives is not nearly so important as an attempt to grasp the scope of the series as a whole. This problem has suffered relative neglect. Yet enough can be said to cast light on the intellectual horizons of the author and explain some notable features of the Caesars.⁷⁰

Two main sources combine to give us a fairly reliable idea of the scope of the Illustrious men. Of prime importance, of course, is the surviving section on grammarians and rhetors, though critics have scarcely been able to veil their disgust that it is the dull academics not the poets who have been preserved. The second source is the learned Church father Jerome. It was ‘Tranquillus’ on whom he modelled his own series of lives of Christian authors. More important, he turned to the Illustrious men in order to supplement Eusebius' chronological tables which sought to align the major historical and literary events of the Jewish and Greek peoples. Suetonius was Jerome's only source for Latin literary data, at least until Jerome could draw on his own knowledge for the figures of the fourth century. Jerome made heavy use of Suetonius: some ninety or so entries give data about seventy or more authors (doubt about marginal figures means that the numbers are only approximate). As a result, we have something like a content list of Suetonius' lives.

Unfortunately Jerome did his job in a hurry. Apart from committing chronological howlers, he missed out many of Suetonius' authors, and we may guess that the original total was well over a hundred. An idea of the extent of his omissions is given by the comparison of his data on grammarians and rhetors with the original. He mentions only five of the twenty grammarians, cutting out everyone before Verrius Flaccus; he does better by the rhetors, naming ten, but dropping six. Perhaps his manuscript of the grammarians was mutilated; even so, it is obvious that he was selective. Scholars therefore have felt at liberty to assume that names missing from Jerome were included in Suetonius.⁷¹

Which then were the authors who featured? To judge from the labels Jerome attaches to names, they fell into several main categories: the poets in their many varieties, epic, lyric, tragic, satiric and so on; the orators, historians, philosophers; and of course the grammarians and rhetors. These in fact are the categories Juvenal enumerates in his satire on literary patronage (7). Patrons are so mean, he complains, that unless the emperor intervenes, literary men are reduced to poverty, whether poets, historians, orators, rhetors or grammarians (he omits philosophers). Juvenal may well have written the satire in the wake of the publication of the Illustrious men. At any rate, Suetonius evidently arranged his authors in their separate categories.⁷²

The natural assumption is that within these categories Suetonius enumerated all the authors of consequence down to his own lifetime. It is agreed that there was a cut-off point. The dreadful muddle Jerome makes between the two Plinys, uncle and nephew, indicates clearly that there can have been no Suetonian life of the younger Pliny, his own patron. It has variously been supposed that this was because Pliny was still alive when the Illustrious men came out, or because Suetonius adopted the same terminus as in the Caesars, the death of Domitian. Yet a closer look at the names on Jerome's list shows that there is no reason to suppose that Suetonius' lives were complete even as far as the death of Domitian. On the contrary, a marked pattern emerges, of concentration on the age of Cicero and Augustus, with waning interest in the Julio-Claudian period, and almost complete neglect of the Flavians. It is worth looking at the list in some detail, for there are many surprises. We must remember, of course, that Jerome offers only a selection; but if his selection is at all representative, there are some very odd points that demand explanation.⁷³

Take the poets first. The list opens as it should with a galaxy of poets of the middle republic: the epic poets Ennius, Livius and Naevius, the comedians Plautus, Caecilius, Terence and Turpilius, the tragedians Pacuvius and Accius, and the satirist Lucilius. Here Suetonius could draw happily on the collections by Varro and Nepos. But once in the first century bc, the density of names increases greatly. Most of the big names are here: Lucretius, Catullus, Gallus, Horace, Virgil, Varus, Ovid. The obvious absentees are Propertius and Tibullus: Jerome must have nodded. But more impressive is the profusion of names of minor, some very minor, figures: Furius Bibaculus, Varro of Atax, Cornificius, Varius and Tucca (Virgil's executors), Aemilius Macer, all outshone by their more talented contemporaries; the mime writers Laberius, Publilius the Syrian and Philistio; the authors of local Italian-style drama, Quintius Atta and Pomponius of Bononia; and even those negligible brothers Bavius and Maevius, whose only claim to fame was that Virgil pilloried them in the Eclogues. Then, after the age of Augustus, the fall-off is startling: only Persius and Lucan, both of Nero's reign. There is total silence not only as to the lesser Julio-Claudian poets (Manilius, Phaedrus, Calpurnius for instance) but also about all the poets of the Flavianic period, Statius, Silius Italicus, Valerius Flaccus and Martial, let alone those who do not survive but were well thought of by contemporaries, Serranus, Saleius Bassus or Maternus. Is this Jerome's selection? If so, why exclude Martial and include Bavius?⁷⁴

The list of orators is even more limited. It starts with Cicero and ends with the accuser Domitius Afer who died in ad 59. The cluster of names around the very late republic is striking: Calidius, taught by the same Greek rhetor, Apollodorus of Pergamum, as Augustus; the younger Curio; Atratinus, rival to Cicero's pupil Caelius (Jerome has missed the latter); the Furnii, father and son, who fought on opposite sides at Actium; Asinius Pollio, Munatius Plancus and Messala Corvinus, notable figures of the reign of Augustus; Q. Haterius, Asinius Gallus, Cassius Severus and Votienus Montanus who survived Augustus to meet their ends under Tiberius; then only Passienus Crispus, the stepfather of Nero who died under Caligula, before After. Suetonius only had to read Cicero's Brutus (which he certainly knew) to see that Cicero was the culmination of a long Roman tradition, and to find the names of dozens of orators before him. Nor did eloquence die with After, and Tacitus' Dialogus could have provided the names of many notable figures, including the sinister pair Vibius Crispus and Eprius Marcellus. Then there were famous orators in the reign of Domitian, of whom Pliny's letters supply details, like his own rival Aquilius Regulus, to say nothing of Tacitus and Pliny themselves.⁷⁵

The orators, at least on Jerome's showing, were thus restricted to a brief period centring on the reign of Augustus. The other prose writers fall within the same general limits, but they are not even completely represented within their limits. The historians are a very odd selection. Sallust and Livy, the classics of the later republic and the Augustan age, are there, but apart from them are only four names: Nepos the biographer, Fenestella the Augustan antiquarian, Asconius Pedianus, the learned commentator on Cicero who died under Vespasian; and we may add from other sources the elder Pliny, historian, scientist and philologist. Here we miss not only the republican annalists who preceded Sallust, from Cato and Calpurnius Piso to Licinius Macer and Valerius Antias, but even the main historians of the early empire, Servilius Nonianus, Aufidius Bassus, Fabius Rusticus, Cluvius Rufus and others. The philosophers too make a queer bunch: Seneca is there, a famed orator as well as a philosopher. But instead of the philosophers whom Quintilian (10.1.123-5) thought worth mentioning, the Sextii and their pupil Cornelius Celsus, the Stoic Plautus and the Epicurean Catius, Jerome mentions only two names, and of men we would hardly associate with philosophy: the antiquarian Varro, and his learned contemporary, the savant and divine Nigidius Figulus.⁷⁶

Nor is this all. The confusion over the historians and philosophers is added to by the presence of a medley of displaced persons who appear to fit into no category at all. Pylades the Augustan pantomime star can at least be accounted for: he will have been mentioned along with Roscius in the prefatory remarks on the Roman stage. But what of Tiro, Cicero's freedman, who invented the first Roman shorthand system, Artorius, the doctor of Augustus who died not long after Actium, Servius Sulpicius the jurist, or Servilius Isauricus who like Sulpicius was honoured with a public funeral, but is not credited with writing of any genre? It is surely too much to suppose on this slender basis that Suetonius also wrote a series of lives of doctors and jurists—where are the others?—and many scholars prefer to forget this embarrassing evidence.⁷⁷

The lazy solution to all these difficulties is to play down the value of Jerome's evidence. Jerome was hasty, muddled and quirkish, but of course Suetonius was thorough and without prejudices, and we must imagine him wading efficiently through the main poets, orators, historians and philosophers down to Domitian's death. What gives the lie to this solution is the internal evidence within Suetonius. The names in Jerome's list, for all the oddities of their distribution, do in fact correspond remarkably well with the kind of authors in whom Suetonius manifests interest elsewhere. The list constitutes precious evidence of the sorts of authors Suetonius did and did not read, was or was not interested in.

In the first place, the chronological distribution makes perfectly good sense. Jerome, who was trying to fill out his chronological list for the whole Roman period, had no interest in creating an artificial cluster of information round the lives of Cicero and Augustus. But for Suetonius, writing at the start of the second century ad, the closer he got to the present, the more things were a matter of common knowledge. Many of his contemporaries will have known Statius or Martial better than he. Their biographies required interviews with friends, not book-learning, and it was research in the libraries that was his forte. Nor was the middle republic such an attractive period for research. Varro and Nepos, probably also Santra and Hyginus, had gone over this ground very thoroughly. It was the age of Cicero and Augustus, when his four predecessors were themselves alive, that offered the best opportunities for breaking new ground.

This pattern is borne out by the surviving lives of grammarians. Suetonius believes that philological studies reached Rome in the mid second century; yet he deals with the earliest scholars very rapidly in the preface. Lampadio, Vargunteius, Aelius Stilo and others of the second century merit no full biographical notices (2.4-3.3). The list of famous professors starts with the first century; eleven belong to the lifetime of Cicero, who is frequently named or cited; six to that of Augustus; two to the Julio-Claudian period; and one to the Flavians. The early empire must certainly have produced more professors of distinction than are here named. The balance with rhetors is a little different: four are Ciceronian; five or six were active in Augustus' lifetime; four flourished under the Julio-Claudians, and three under the Flavians. Here at least the first century ad is better served, necessarily so since it was in this period that declamation was at the height of fashion. But at least we can see here that Jerome has no bias against the post-Augustan period: he has entries for three Julio-Claudian rhetors, and two Flavian ones.

So it looks as if the massive concentration of detail, much of it minute, on the Ciceronian and Augustan period does reflect Suetonius' area of expertise. Though he does not completely neglect the second century bc or the post-Augustan age, he does not show the same inclination to dig out recondite material. He simply was not so well read in these periods.

We can go further. The literary lives hang together as a group, and not only in the sense that they are conceived of as a coherent series rather than as a collection of individual lives (this is particularly clear with the grammarians). They are also a group in that the authors relate to each other and are used as sources for each other. Grammarians and rhetors, after all, were the teachers of poets and orators. Grammarians wrote commentaries on earlier poets, and could be used as sources for their lives; while poets who were pupils of grammarians provided information for their teachers' lives. Suetonius is generous in citing his authorities (it was part of scholarly style), and again and again the authorities he cites are themselves authors whose biographies he wrote.

The orators are a good example of this. At least half the orators who appear in Jerome's list are mentioned by name in the lives of the grammarians and rhetors. Cicero of course is both named and quoted frequently. Pollio is quoted as criticising Sallust for using Ateius Philologus to collect archaisms for him (10). A letter of Messala Corvinus is quoted speaking dismissively of Valerius Cato (4). Asinius Gallus wrote an epigram about Pomponius (22). Plancus took Albucius Silus under his wing (30.2). Famous trials are mentioned involving Curio (25.4), Atratinus (26) and Cassius Severus (22). The orators also appear in the Caesars. Messala was responsible for a complimentary decree in favour of Augustus which Suetonius quotes (58); Cassius Severus libelled the ancestor of Vitellius (2.1); Haterius had a sharp exchange in the senate with Tiberius (29); and Passienus Crispus left his money to his stepson Nero (6.3). Thus it is just the orators named by Jerome with whom Suetonius elsewhere displays acquaintance. Conversely he rarely shows acquaintance with the orators Jerome does not mention, Cicero's predecessors and Afer's successors. There are no citations from the elder Cato or the Gracchi.⁷⁸

The same observation can be applied to Suetonius' ‘historians’. Nepos, Fenestella and Asconius sound to us an odd group. Yet it was these learned antiquarians who were most useful to the author of the Illustrious men, and not the annalists who concentrated on military and political events. Nepos and Fenestella are cited in the life of Terence: Fenestella had shown that some of Nepos' assertions were chronologically impossible. Asconius is twice cited in the life of Virgil: he had written an essay against Virgil's critics. All three must have featured together in the life of Cicero. Gellius in the Attic nights (15.28) reports a dispute over the age of Cicero when he made his defence of Roscius. Nepos, though a personal friend of Cicero's, committed a howler, asserting that he defended Roscius at 23; Fenestella controverted Nepos, changing the age to 26; it took Asconius to hit on the correct age of 27. Jerome duly reports from Suetonius that Cicero defended Roscius at 27. Gellius, ever a magpie, must have lifted the controversy direct from the Suetonian life.

Suetonius' close familiarity with learned authors like these three, as well as Varro, the elder Pliny, Santra and Hyginus, manifests itself again and again. Why suppose that he wrote biographies of the annalists in whom he shows no interest and ignore the evidence of Jerome who confirms his inclination to the men of learning? While we can never be confident that an author not named by Jerome was therefore not the subject of a Suetonian biographical notice, we should be most wary of supposing that Suetonius dealt with any group not represented in Jerome. Another such group is that of the fashionable ‘Stoic’ biographers of the early empire, familiar from the letters of Pliny. Arulenus Rusticus had written a life of his master Thrasea Paetus, and Herennius Senecio of Helvidius Priscus; both biographers met their ends, allegedly in consequence, under Domitian. Pliny's friend Titinius Capito wrote on the deaths of some of Domitian's victims; while Fannius had completed three volumes on the fates of Nero's victims when he himself died in ad 105-6. But despite Pliny's effusive praise for these biographers, there is no sign that Suetonius interested himself in them. Indeed the one reference he makes to Rusticus reveals his ignorance: he attributes to him the life of Helvidius.⁷⁹

It is best to avoid forming too fixed an idea of the layout of the Illustrious men. More important is to grasp its character, learned and idiosyncratic; not at all after the style of a modern handbook of literary history, dealing with everything that ought to be there, but following where the author's interests and reading led, and packed with recondite information. Perhaps we should envisage the collection growing by a process of crystallisation, and not in a straight line. Bavius and Maevius, even Varius and Tucca, may owe their place (if indeed they enjoyed entries of their own) to an attempt to explain things about Virgil. Other misfits could owe their mention to similar reasons. Servilius Isauricus, listed by Jerome, is not otherwise known as an author. But he does, as it happens, feature in an anecdote in the life of the rhetor Epidius (28). Octavian and Antony were told by a political opponent that it was better to be a follower of Isauricus than of the slanderous Epidius, as they were.

If we seek to extend Jerome's list, we should think in the first place of authors Suetonius knew and used: Domitius Marsus the epigrammatist, who had things to say about Orbilius, Epirota, Bavius and Tibullus; Ticidas, a follower of Valerius Cato; Ateius Capito, the Augustan jurist, warm supporter of the family grammarian Philologus. Another candidate might be the grandfather of Galba, more famous for his studies than for political achievement, who wrote a history which Suetonius describes in terms so well applicable to his own work, multiplex nec incuriosa, ‘manifold and not lacking in scholarship’ (3.3). Above all we miss the name of Santra, antiquarian and biographer, who is to us no more than a name, but a name known from Suetonius.

LITERARY LIVES AND CAESARS' LIVES

It is worth lingering over the Illustrious men simply because it explains so much about the Caesars. It was a work of very considerable learning. Suetonius needed to be at home in at least part of the work of each author about whom he wrote. Of course, it was not all original research. Inevitably he owed much to a succession of predecessors, criticising each other in turn, as did Nepos, Fenestella and Asconius, and also to the commentaries of his master, the formidable Probus. Even so, the sheer range of the work meant that there could be no simple dependence on forerunners. It is most implausible that this should have been his first publication, which Pliny awaited so impatiently in ad 105. The book is the fruit of long years of scholarly study, and ought to follow the bulk of the less demanding philological and antiquarian essays. In its wake, Suetonius could approach the Caesars with a mind already stocked with information; and this is surely what he did, moving more or less directly from the lives of authors to Caesars.

The progression was a natural one in more than one sense. Nepos, and probably Hyginus, had included generals or politicians alongside literary figures in their biographies. Twelve Caesars formed a series in much the way that poets or grammarians did, only the scale was rather different. But there is another way in which the Illustrious men naturally drew the author on to the Caesars. One of the features of the literary lives one cannot miss is the acute awareness of the relations between the authors and the outside public world. This comes across markedly, as we have seen, in the Grammarians and rhetors. The essay is primarily about cultural history, not literary history. It is concerned with the absorption by the Romans of Greek education, and with the rising public esteem of the arts and their practitioners. The same is true of the Poets. The life of Terence revolves round the relations between the playwright and his aristocratic patrons. Scipio, Laelius and others—were they contemporaries of Terence? Is it true that his patrons wrote his comedies for him? There is no literary criticism here, no attempt to assess Terence's contribution to the Roman comic tradition. The lives of Virgil and Horace are equally obsessed with the patronage of Maecenas and Augustus, and perhaps the most valuable feature of either of them is the citation of letters from Augustus. The life of the orator Passienus Crispus describes the way he earned approval in succession from Tiberius and Caligula (when the latter asked whether he had committed incest with his sister, he tactfully answered ‘Not yet’). This reads very much like the account of Vitellius' courtier father (2.4-3.1). The life of Lucan concerns his rise and fall in Nero's favour; at first rewarded with a quaestorship, he quarrelled when Nero walked out of a recitation, and signified his contempt for Nero's verse by citing it aptly in a public latrine; eventually, he turned conspirator.

Even in the fragments preserved by Jerome, one is aware of the presence of Augustus and his successors. The orator Atratinus committed suicide in the bath, and left Augustus his heir. Asinius Gallus was horribly punished by Tiberius. Quintilian was brought to Rome from Spain by Galba. The fragments referring to philosophers suggest that Suetonius was largely concerned with persecutions and expulsions of philosophers and astrologers. Nigidius died in exile. Anaxilaus, Pythagorean and magus, was expelled from Italy by Augustus. Seneca was exiled by Claudius and driven to death by Nero. Vespasian exiled all philosophers. Titus recalled them: Musonius Rufus returned from exile in ad 80. Domitian expelled philosophers yet again. We may recall the struggle rhetoric had for recognition at Rome in the face of censorial and consular edicts: for philosophy the struggle against public opinion went on much longer, and Suetonius surely was interested in tracing it.⁸⁰

The author of literary lives was thus already familiar with the Caesars. One thing led to another. Writing the life of a poet like Furius Bibaculus led to the life of the grammarian Valerius Cato he said so much about (or perhaps the other way round). Writing of the Augustan poets or the early imperial orators and rhetors led to lives of the Caesars themselves. In fact ‘Caesars’ was an ingenious choice, given Suetonius' chronological predelictions. It allowed him to handle the late republic as well as the early empire.

How did the scholar set about equipping himself for his new task? The writing of history is a time-consuming undertaking. Cassius Dio tells us that it took him ten years to do his reading before he put pen to paper. Cicero himself would have liked to have become Rome's first real historian, but he frankly admitted that history, unlike philosophy, could not be written as a hobby in odd moments. The younger Pliny too shied off the onerous task of collating variant versions. It is easy to imagine that Suetonius had a hard grind of historical research ahead of him before he could write his Caesars. Yet it may be quite wrong to suppose he ever undertook it.⁸¹

One feature of the Caesars is, to our sorrow, only too palpable. The quality falls off sharply as the work progresses. The Julius and Augustus are in a class apart for length, minuteness of focus, abundance of documentation and liberal citation of authorities. The Julio-Claudian lives are still substantial, but they lack the freshness and sharpness of the first two. The citation of original documents falls off, and is largely limited to the early parts of the Caesars which actually fell in Augustus' reign. Authorities are no longer named; the detail becomes cruder; and the regrettable habit of covering up for lack of information by generalising from single instances emerges. The next three, civil war, lives are sketchy indeed. There is interesting material on the background and early careers of Galba, Otho and Vitellius, but the handling of their reigns and even their private lives is cursory in the extreme, hardly amounting to a couple of paragraphs. Perhaps the brevity of their reigns may excuse this; but the sad decline continues with the Flavians where there is no such excuse. The Vespasian is an interesting and sympathetic life, but its detail is extraordinarily thin. The Titus is closer to romance or panegyric than biography. The Domitian is an improvement, and contains some precious details; but it must be a matter of lasting regret to the historian that the biographer who spent his early life in Domitian's Rome and who knew so many people, inside the palace and out, who could remember the same period, dealt with this life in the same number of chapters as the Galba.

The explanation for this decline may be sought partly in the author's disgrace. We know that at least the first instalment of the Caesars was dedicated to Septicius while still in office. He and the biographer were dismissed early in Hadrian's reign (as we have seen), and it is quite possible that the Caesars still awaited completion at the time of the dismissal. It is nice to think of a dispirited Suetonius, out of favour, mechanically completing his most ambitious undertaking without the old zest and energy. But even if this happens to be right, the dismissal was no more than a psychological excuse for neglecting what the author had little appetite for in the first place. The pattern of decline of interest corresponds so exactly with what we have observed in the Illustrious men that there can be no doubt that the same predispositions of the author lie behind both.⁸²

This should provoke further reflections on the scholarly author's methods and sources. He did not transform himself from scholar to historian, but set about his new task in his old way. What did he read? Writing on authors, he read their works. He did the same for the Caesars. He may have made direct use of Julius' Commentaries for his analysis of his generalship. He read Augustus' private correspondence with great care. He also used his autobiography, and the letters of Antony to or against him. He read Tiberius' brief autobiography, and was shocked to discover him laying the death of Germanicus' children at Sejanus' door, despite the fact that one was executed after Sejanus' fall (61.1). Claudius also wrote eight volumes of memoirs that displayed his lack of tact (41.3); the biographer could quote his indignant complaint at the brutishness of his pedagogue (2.2). Nero was famous for his poetical aspirations: Suetonius used Nero's poems to condemn his charioteering from his own lips (24.2), and to identify a senator who claimed to have compromised the young Domitian (Dom. 1.1). Domitian wrote a light essay On looking after hair: the biographer cited it to illustrate the emperor's sensitivity about his own baldness (18.2). All these works were private, literary, products. It seems not to have crossed his mind to make an analysis of the public official documents of each emperor as a modern historian would. But then, maybe the secretary knew too much about the circumstances of composition of official documents to think that worthwhile.

Then there were contemporary documents. Julius' friend Oppius wrote a useful biography: the author recalled an incident on a journey when he had a sudden attack of fever and Julius gave up his own bed (72); or how Julius ate a dish dressed with bad-tasting oil rather than embarrass his host (53); and doubtless he provided many other details. Julius' other close friend, Cornelius Balbus, described the discovery of prophecies of doom immediately before his murder (81.2). Augustus' freedman Julius Marathus could similarly supply intimate details of his physique (79.2), and had wild messianic tales of a proposed slaughter of innocents at his birth (94.3). To balance these friendly accounts were contemporary invectives. Julius was plentifully slandered; for involvement with Catiline by his colleague Bibulus, the orator Curio, the historian Tanusius Geminus and by a certain Actorius Naso (9); and for sexual misconduct by (among others) the orators Dolabella, Curio father and son, and Cicero (49-52), by Bibulus, Memmius and Pompey, and by the poets Calvus (49.1), Catullus (73) and Pitholaus (75.5). Augustus was libelled in his youth by open ‘letters’ of Antony, Cassius of Parma and doubtless others including anonymous lampoons (2-4 and 68-70). Suetonius also produces lampoons against Tiberius (59), Nero (39.2), Otho (3.2) and Domitian (14) and records the appearance of a pamphlet under Claudius arguing that nobody ever pretended to be a fool, despite the emperor's public claims to have done so (38.3).

There is much more in this vein. The important point is that the vast majority of sources whom Suetonius names, or cites verbatim, which he does with considerable frequency in the first two Caesars and only exceptionally thereafter, are not the standard historical sources or indeed works in general circulation, but just the kind of sources he had drawn on in the Illustrious men, obscure, ephemeral or distinctly ‘literary’.

This is not to say that he makes no use of historians. He quotes them when they provide first-hand evidence. Asinius Pollio could vouch for the words of Julius immediately before the battle of Pharsalus: ‘They would have it so’ (30.4). The disloyal Cremutius Cordus, whose works were banned by Tiberius (61.3) but taken off the black list by Caligula (16.1) described the tense atmosphere in the senate when Augustus conducted his purges (35.2). An anonymous consular historian, most likely Servilius Nonianus, witnessed the incident when Tiberius was prompted by a dwarf jester to hasten a condemnation (61.6). Finally he cites the elder Pliny once in order to refute him: Pliny reported seeing an inscription in Germany which proved Caligula was born there, quite wrongly (8).

Ancient historians were habitually shoddy, by our standards at least, about citing their authorities. Predecessors are rarely named except at points of disagreement or error. Silence is no argument for ignorance. Inevitably Suetonius must have based himself on standard historical accounts of the principate. The numerous correspondences of detail between him and Tacitus, Plutarch and Dio demonstrate that he drew on some of the same sources as they did. It is even possible on the basis of such comparison to come some way towards reconstructing which these sources were. But though this exercise is important for understanding the relationship between the Caesars and other surviving historical accounts, it should not be allowed to overshadow what is special and unusual about Suetonius.

Suetonius had to use historians; but there is little sign that they excited him. The proper procedure of the ancient historian was to read through his predecessors, comparing and judging their accounts, and to seek to produce a version that was more accurate and more elegant. Here lay the labour and the challenge. It was not a challenge Suetonius rose to. The fact that the sources he names and quotes are not historians, except when they happen to be conveying personal anecdotes, reflects his very unhistorical approach. The obscure, out-of-the-way, antiquarian details were the ones he was capable of contributing and enjoyed contributing. We should be very cautious of overestimating the amount of time and effort he put into reading and digesting the historians, though undoubtedly he did use them. It is relevant to recall which ‘historians’ appear on Jerome's list. Sallust and Livy were the grammarian's favourites, and he may be expected to have known them well. The elder Pliny was a kindred spirit, and surely appealed to him. But, these apart, we cannot assume that he had any special familiarity with historians as opposed to antiquarians and writers of memoirs, nor that he undertook more than the inevitable minimum of investigation in this direction for the Caesars. At any rate, he covered his traces, and he cannot now be caught out.⁸³

The investigation of oral sources was the second main element of the historian's craft. It may be imagined that the closer Suetonius came to his own times, the more he relied on non-written sources, and that this contributed to his failure to name authorities in the later lives. Again, the matter is very hard to control. The prevalence of what we regard as ‘gossip’ in some of the lives has led many to suppose that Suetonius made use of orally-circulated stories and rumours. Yet the labour involved in collecting oral accounts was considerable, even for those not so conscientious as Thucydides. The very lack of detail in the Domitian is a strong indication that Suetonius took little pains on this score. It is safest to imagine him continuing with his philological methods, which involved essential reliance on the library supplemented by the occasional personal anecdote. The grammarian Nisus, as Suetonius reports, used to say that he had heard from his elders that Varius in editing Virgil's epic changed the order of two books, and deleted four prefatory lines. Suetonius' own personal contributions are very much along these lines. He recalled at the end of the Lucan that the poet's works used to be lectured on at school. In the Grammarians he remembered how the one called Princeps used to declaim rhetorically and dispute grammatically on alternate days (4.9). In the Caesars he reminisces to similar effect. His grandfather used to report the inside palace story about Caligula's Baiae bridge—it was all to frustrate an astrologer's prediction (19.3). His father used to describe the final, glorious, moments of Otho which he witnessed (10.1). He himself remembered the appearance of a false Nero (57.2) and an anti-semitic trial under Domitian (12.2). Perhaps too it was he who had seen inscriptions celebrating Vespasian's father in Asia (1.2) and statues of Titus throughout Germany and Britain (4.1); or even the golden dice thrown by Tiberius in the fountain at Padua (14.3).⁸⁴

The scholarly biographer had no need to transform himself into a historian in order to tackle his new subject. He could draw on his old expertise, especially his familiarity with writings of all sorts from the ages of Cicero and Augustus. He could use his old methods: little more than a reading of the standard period histories would be necessary to provide the essential historical backbone. He could also indulge old interests. Caesars were not totally different from orators. Julius had claims to a ranking as one of Rome's leading orators, as Cicero's testimony showed; a comparison of texts indicated that Strabo Caesar was his first model (55.2). Augustus had firm views on rhetorical style, pungently expressed, and had mocked Antony as falling between two rival schools (86). Tiberius was nothing if not a self-conscious speaker: his style was that of Messala Corvinus, but marred by excessive obscurity (70.1). Caligula too had a ready tongue, and criticised the style of the fashionable Seneca as sand without cement (53). Claudius spoke in public often enough, but his total lack of a sense of propriety undermined his efforts (39-40). Nero, still a student in age at his accession, declaimed in public to general approval (10.2). Suetonius had already observed in the Grammarians and rhetors what good this did to the profession (25.6). Galba at least came from a family of accomplished orators (3). Vespasian made up for a lack of educational polish by his lively sense of humour (22-3). Titus' early promise as an orator was considered remarkable (3). Domitian is criticised for his neglect of style; yet Suetonius had to admit that he could put things remarkably neatly. It was he who said it was the misfortune of a prince that nobody would believe a conspiracy had been discovered unless he was killed (20-1).

BIOGRAPHICAL FORM

In the Caesars we see emperors not only as orators, but as historians, poets, grammarians, critics and essayists. The Illustrious men leaves its unmistakable stamp. But it should not be invoked to explain everything. In particular it is necessary to tread warily in the question of biographical form. The problem is how far the literary lives provided a ready-made formula which could be applied without further ado to the Caesars. Fragmentary though the preservation of the poets' lives may be, enough survives to show that there were many striking formal similarities with the Caesars. Yet it is essential to bear in mind the question of scale. Even the shortest of the Caesars exceeded the longest of the Poets (undoubtedly Virgil) by an order of magnitude. The vast majority of the literary lives were no more than thumb-nail sketches. In one case the author was crippled by the paucity of his information, and needed to deploy all his learning in order to say anything: in the other there was an embarras de richesse. It would be a remarkable formula indeed which could cater for both.

What, first, is ‘biographical form’ and what is special about that met in Suetonius?⁸⁵ There is, as we have seen, an otiose sense in which any biography has a form which makes it instantly recognisable as such. Certain features are common to numerous types of biographical record. Parentage, date of birth, details of education, nature of main achievements, date and circumstances of death, names of spouses and offspring, value of estate and other details of this order can naturally be found in any Suetonian life, as in any other ancient life, or any modern one. The presence of this basic framework, though it instantly alerts the reader to the fact this is biography, can indicate little more. But when it comes to describing character and personality there is much wider scope for variation, and it is here that Suetonius may be felt to impose his sign manual.⁸⁶

His characterisation of Claudius may serve as a specimen (30-42). Once the analysis of Claudius' rule has reached its climax in the description of the way his wives and freedmen dominated him, the biographer turns to the personal details. First his appearance, the impression of dignity conveyed by his build and grey head, counteracted by the absurdity of his body and features when in movement, his spluttering laugh, running nose and stuttering tongue (30). This is followed by a comment on his state of health, which with the exception of a bad attack of the gripes was good (31). Next we are given an account of his way of life. His style of entertainment is described as lavish, though it is observed that he had quaint theories about flatulence (32). Then some details of his routine: he had a marked appetite for food and wine (he once left his seat of judgment tempted by the smells of a nearby sacerdotal dinner), slept very little, but tended to nap while at work; had a strong, but strictly heterosexual libido; and amused himself by dicing, for which he had a passion (33). We now move to an account of his salient traits of character: he had a marked sadistic streak, evinced in his fondness for death-sentences and for gladiatorial duels (34); he was exceptionally timid and gullible, which led to his manipulation by palace staff (35-7); he was given to outbursts of wrath, which he admitted openly, and he failed to convince the public that his folly was put on (38); and he was exceptionally absentminded (39). Finally the biographer turns to his intellectual side: his conversational style (40), his activities as an author (41) and his accomplishments in Greek (42).

No two of the Caesars are exactly the same, but a corresponding group of personal details is found in almost every one, composed of the same basic items (appearance, style of living, characteristics, intellectual pursuits) or a selection of them, in this order or in a variation on it. The same formula shines through in the more substantial literary lives. Horace was short and fat, and Augustus wrote teasingly to him to say that so voluminous a man should write more voluminous poems. His sexual appetite was intemperate: his bedroom was lined with mirrors. He lived mostly in his country hideout which was still pointed out near a grove at Tibur. (This last is a most Suetonian aside: the house where Augustus was nursed was also ‘still pointed out’—6.) The biography then went on to discuss Horace's poetry. Virgil was tall and dark, but suffered from bad health, stomach pains, headaches and blood-spitting; he had little appetite for food and wine, was mildly homosexual, but in general was wholly proper in behaviour, and painfully shy. After some notes on his properties and family, the Life goes on to examine his studies, not proceeding to his poetry before observing his interest in medicine and mathematics, and his lack of gift for oratory.

Among the Illustrious men, Horace and Virgil were evidently treated at exceptional length. The majority of the sketches will have included at most one or two details of this sort. Terence was of medium height, slender and dark. That is all in a relatively full life. Nothing is said of the physique of any of the surviving grammarians and rhetors, except that Sextus Clodius had bad eyesight (29). Remmius Palaemon is the only one of that series about whose personal life much could be said: he was very arrogant, called Varro ‘the pig’, was so luxurious in his life-style that he bathed several times a day and outspent a considerable professional income, while his perverse sexual tastes gave him a bad name (23).

On this basis, can we say that Suetonius used the same biographical formula for the Caesars as for authors? It is helpful to consider how Plutarch approached the same problem, for comparison throws up both similarities and contrasts. Plutarch's formula for personal details is very similar in that he gives exactly the same sort of details. He describes Sulla's appearance, his complexion blotched like a mulberry, and his style of life, his fondness for entertainers and actors, his behaviour at dinners, and his proneness to sexual indulgence (Sulla 2). We hear about Pompey's character, his charm and tact, his majestic appearance, enhanced by the swept-back hairstyle modelled on Alexander's, his relationships with mistresses, and his simple tastes in food (Pompey 1.3-2). Again, Crassus' way of life was very moderate and restrained, and accusations of adultery were untrue; but this millionaire was certainly avaricious when it came to money; his hospitality was generous and he was a man of high culture, a very able orator, well read in history, and a dabbler in philosophy (Crassus 1-3).

These examples are enough to show that Plutarch drew on the same group of topics as Suetonius: appearance, character, way of life, physical appetites and cultural interests. But there are also considerable contrasts. The style has a completely different feel. Suetonius is factual and compact, as if he were rattling off a list of prescribed items. Plutarch is much more relaxed and flowing, and the reader is led along from one point to another without noticing the transitions. The information emerges so naturally from the course of the discussion, and the illustrative anecdotes are told with such charm, that it is not easy to recognise the presence of a schema. Plutarch's treatment of this aspect of a biography is in line with his approach as a whole. He writes as an essayist, treating a man's life as a story worth telling for the interest of the tale, and worth discussing for the improvement to be derived from its morals. He narrates and ruminates where Suetonius lists, analyses, informs.⁸⁷

The value of the contrast is to show what extraordinarily different use could be made by contemporary authors of the same biographical framework. Yet Friedrich Leo, in a study of the ancient biographical tradition of fundamental importance, drew wider conclusions from the contrast. He wrote at a period, at the turn of the century, when classical philology was much affected by Mendelian biology. It seemed that literature could be scientifically categorised in the same way as plants, divided into genus (genre) and species, each variant being traced back to its original descent. Leo saw in Suetonius and Plutarch two branches of the same family, biography; one branch scholarly and informative, the other philosophical and reflective. He argued that the two species had already split off from each other in the third century BC. Suetonius was the descendant of a long line of scholarly biographers writing lives of literary men, Plutarch of philosophical (‘peripatetic’) ones writing about men of action.

Leo's genetic classification never fitted the surviving specimens. Nepos' Lives and Tacitus' Agricola, the main Latin biographies apart from Suetonius, cannot be usefully interpreted in these terms: the Agricola is neither philosophical nor scholarly, but historical, being in its core section concerned with the conquest and government of Britain. Worse, when a papyrus fragment of the Life of Euripides by the peripatetic Satyrus was discovered, it proved a complete surprise: it is in dialogue form. But then, a work of literature is not a plant. The form of a plant is determined by its genetic make-up: it cannot choose. But an author can make what he will of a work of literature, and though ancient authors liked to place their works in a recognisable tradition, they did so as a conscious act of will, and made their own decisions about where to follow tradition and where to part from it. The great value of Leo's book was to show that Suetonius' biographies do indeed belong to a long scholarly tradition. The discovery of an Alexandrian collection of Bioi Endoxōn Andrōn (‘Lives of Illustrious Men’) would cast invaluable light on the Illustrious men. But the fallacy is to suppose that because the Caesars was written by one deeply versed in this tradition, its fundamental features were predetermined: the plant had its genetic make-up, and, once Roman emperors had been crossfertilised with literary biography, they would automatically grow up in a certain form.

In fact there are vast areas of the Caesars for which the Illustrious men can offer no precedent. They could offer, for example, no possible framework for handling the public administrative life of an emperor. Suetonius set about this in what was certainly a scholarly way, and I shall suggest that he was here much influenced by the Roman antiquarian tradition (chapter 6); but this had nothing to do with literary biography. It is also important to realise how little the literary lives explain about an area where they might have provided a model, that is the description of character.

The biographical schema common to Suetonius and Plutarch offered an opportunity for describing character. Traits of personality, whether the avarice of Crassus or the idiosyncrasies of Claudius, could be enumerated along with other personal features, most naturally directly after a description of physical appearance. But though both authors make occasional use of this method, it is exceptional. It is only really suitable for a short biographical sketch. In a full length portrait, character is much too important for such perfunctory treatment. The two biographers go different ways. For Plutarch the interpretation of ēthos is so central that he prefers to let it emerge from the whole narrative of a man's life: his actions over a long period of time gradually reveal his true character. In the Caesars character is also of great importance, but in a different way. Virtues and vices form a large part of what makes an emperor good or bad, and Suetonius sets about documenting them in a scholarly way. Each vice or virtue is taken separately, and exemplified by a list of actions and anecdotes (below, chapter 7).

Suetonius' method here has no more to do with literary biography than does Plutarch's. The approach he has adopted is that of encomium, in which it was strongly recommended that actions should not be narrated chronologically, but distributed under virtues. Xenophon's encomium of the Spartan king Agesilaus set the model. After a brief chronological survey of Agesilaus' career and campaigns, Xenophon offers a series of chapters that document his virtues: piety, justice, temperance, courage and wisdom, and then some less definable qualities. This is a method designed for handling men of action, particularly kings. It is merely perverse to suggest that when Suetonius employed the same scheme on emperors, because it was a non-narrative method it must have been the product of the scholarly biographical tradition.⁸⁸

Imperial biography was a much more demanding project than anything Suetonius had yet undertaken. He needed to draw on all his resources of learning and experience in order to rise to the challenge. The lives of literary figures offer an essential clue as to how he contrived to write biographies that were more than potted history. They explain much about his intellectual horizons, his methods and his interests. They should not be asked to explain everything. He drew extensively on all his previous scholarly work, on Games, the Calendar and other antiquarian subjects. He enriched the scholarly biographical schema from other sources, encomium and native Roman tradition. In consequence, the Caesars is very much sui generis.

Notes

1. The date of publication of the Caesars has been much debated. It is tied by the dedication to Septicius' prefecture, but there is no agreement when that ended. The traditional dating of Septicius' fall to 122 has recently been defended by Alföldy (1979) and Syme (1980a) against the arguments of Crook (1957) and Gascou (1978) for 128 or later. Syme, Tacitus (1958) 780 (cf. 1980b, 120) pointed out that Tit. 10.2 refers to Domitia Longina, the widow of Domitian, still alive in 126, in terms that suggest that she was by then dead. If Septicius fell in 122, it may well be that later volumes were published after the fall, as suggested by Townend (1959). The case put up by Bowersock (1969) that the last six lives were published first is refuted by Bradley (1973).

2. The dates of publication of the Annals remain in dispute. The arguments of Syme, Tacitus 465ff. in favour of publication extending into Hadrian's reign are not universally accepted: see F. R. D. Goodyear, The Annals of Tacitus 2 (1981) 387-93. Syme (782) thinks that the Neronian books may be later than Suetonius: contra, J. Beaujeu, Rev. Et. Lat. 38 (1960), 234-5. All attempts at precise relative chronology are dangerous: the habit of recitation made it possible for authors to know each other's views before publication.

3. S's [Suetonius's] career has been much discussed since the first collection of the evidence by the humanist Politian, on whom see Brugnoli (1968) 187ff. Macé's thorough study (1900) superseded all previous accounts, and even correctly predicted that an inscription might one day be discovered which would show him to have been a bibliothecis (228). Since the discovery debate has been rife.

4. S's date of birth was placed in 69 by Macé (35ff.), rejecting Mommsen's date of 77; in 67-72 by C. P. Jones, Phoenix 22 (1968) 129. Baldwin (1975a) thinks a date as early as 62 possible, implausibly. Syme, JRS [Journal of Roman Studies] 67 (1977) 44 suggested that the name Tranquillus pointed to the year 70. On S as a follower of Quintilian, see Dalmasso (1905/6) and D'Anna (1954) 87ff. On Probus, see below, ch.2.

5. Pliny refers to S as in his contubernium at 1.24.1 and 10.94.1 (in contubernium adsumpsi). Sherwin-White (The Letters of Pliny 690) rightly refers this to a literary relationship, comparing the literary contubernales at 1.2.5. We may also compare the contubernium between the orator Fronto and his pupils, discussed by E. Champlin, Fronto and Antonine Rome (1980) 45-6. The same metaphor is found in S of the relationship between master and pupil (Gramm. 7, Gnipho and Dionysius, ib. 30, Albucius and the orator Plancus) and between emperors and men of learning (Aug. 89.1, the philosopher Areius; Tib. 14.4, Thrasyllus; 56, Seleucus). It appears from these passages that contubernium involved staying under the same roof.

6. Pliny Ep. 1.18 (the court case), 1.24 (the estate), 5.10 (brink of publication), 3.8 (military tribunate), 10.94 (favour from Trajan). There are two main uncertainties. Did S ever hold a military tribunate? Della Corte (1967) 143 assumes so; Syme (1981) 106 rightly doubts that he ever took any military post. Possibly the mere fact that he was offered the tribunate was an honour that conveyed prestige: for parallel cases, see Champlin, Fronto and Antonine Rome, 99. The second uncertainty is whether S accompanied Pliny to Bithynia: Syme (1981) 107 argues that he did. In both these contexts Pliny's use of contubernium has been misunderstood as implying a military relationship (see Macé 77-80 against Roth, and recently Baurain (1976) 124f.).

7. The importance of the part played by literary culture in public life in the second century is brought out by Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (1977) esp. 83ff. For a comparable picture of Rome a generation later than Suetonius, see Champlin's Fronto 29ff.

8. The Hippo inscription was first published by E. Marec and H. G. Pflaum (1952). Townend supported the inference that S was a native of Hippo. Crook (1957), however, followed by Gascou (1978), argued that S only visited the town with Hadrian. Syme, Tacitus 780f. pointed to Pisaurum as the ultimate origin of the family; but accepts Hippo as the patria, cf. (1980a) 80. F. Grosso, Rend. Acc. naz. dei Lincei 14 (1959) 263-96 put up a case for Ostia, but new epigraphical discoveries made this impossible: see R. Meiggs, Roman Ostia² (1973) 584. For argument over the details of S's public career, see also H. G. Pflaum, Les Carrières procuratoriennes équestres (1960) 219ff., Townend (1961a), van't Dack (1963), Baurain (1976), Syme (1981).

9. SHA Hadrian 11.3. For speculations as to the cause of S's disgrace, see Crook (1957), Baldwin (1975a& b). Carney (1968) examines at length the relationship of S with Hadrian, arguing that in some points they saw eye to eye and in others disagreed profoundly. But Syme (1980b) 128 and (1981) 112f. rightly plays down the episode.

10. On S and Septicius see Macé 87ff. Della Corte (1967) 22 sees Septicius as replacing Pliny as S's patron; he goes too far in supposing that this involved a major reorientation of the ideas and loyalties for S. Cizek (1977) 181ff. goes to further extremes. For Pliny's support of the nephew, Erucius Clarus, Ep. 2.9.

11. The date of S's death is unknown: see Macé 220ff., showing that he is not the Tranquillus mentioned in Fronto's correspondence in the 160s (ad Ver. Imp. 1.5, Loeb ed. vol. 1, 306). Macé, in order to account for his prolific output, guesses that S lived until c.141; but the bulk of his scholarly works probably preceded the Caesars (below, ch.2).

12. Millar, Emperor 90-1 rightly sees S's official posts as recognition of literary distinction. The date of publication of the Illustrious men is unknown, but it is not the work announced by Pliny in 105, as many have supposed. For detailed discussion, see below, ch.3.

13. On the general problems of biography and history, see the discussion of A. Momigliano (1971) 1ff. The distinction between the two was a much repeated commonplace: see Momigliano 99. Plutarch's handling of the problem is discussed by Alan Wardman, Plutarch's Lives (1974) 2ff. On Plutarch's biographical aims, see also D. A. Russell, Plutarch (1973) 100ff. and C. R. Pelling, ‘Plutarch's adaptation of his source material’, JHS [Journal of Hellenic Studies] 100 (1980) 127ff. J. Ginsburg, Tradition and Theme in the Annals of Tacitus (1981) perceptively argues that Tacitus exploits annalistic form, especially in the Tiberian books, to underline the contrast between form and content under the principate.

14. On this extraordinary agglomerate of biographies, inappropriately called Scriptores Historiae Augustae (SHA), there is ceaseless debate. Their imitation of S is acknowledged by all, but oddly there is no satisfactory study of their debt. On the tension between biography and history in these lives, see R. Syme, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (1968) esp. 94ff. with the criticisms of Momigliano, English Historical Review 84 (1969) 568. See also H. W. Bird, ‘Suetonian influence in the later lives of the Historia Augusta’, Hermes 99 (1971) 129ff.

15. S's relations with Tacitus are discussed by Macé, 80ff. and by Syme, Tacitus 781-2. But though the two were not competitors, S was not above scoring points off Tacitus: see Townend (1967) 88f.

16. The debt of Roman historiography to the pontifical annals is described by Cicero, de Oratore 2.52ff. On structure in Roman historians, see the convenient survey of A. H. McDonald, ‘The Roman historians’, in M. Platnauer (ed.), Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship (1968) 465ff.

17. The still classic study of ancient biographical form is Leo's Die griechischrömische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form (1901). For a more detailed discussion of the question of biographical form, see below, ch.3. There is a handy introduction to the problems of modern biography in the series ‘The Critical Idiom’ by Alan Shelston, Biography (1977). The importance of the social rhythm was first brought out by Stuart (1928) 189ff., further developed by Steidle (1951) 108ff. and by Lewis (forthcoming).

18. On the genre of ‘Deaths of Famous Men’ see H. Bardon, La Littérature latine inconnue 2 (1956), 207-9. No specimen survives, but several titles are known from the first century AD; by Fannius on the victims of Nero (Plin. Ep. 5.5.3), by Junius Rusticus on Thrasea Paetus and Herennius Senecio on Helvidius Priscus (Tac. Agricola 2.1) and by Titinius Capito (Plin. Ep. 1.17.3 and 8.12.4). All these were evidently martyrologies, mostly with a marked Stoic tinge: that element is missing from S.

19. Note however the possibility that the ground was prepared by some earlier biographer. Plutarch has a much more restricted analytic section describing the valour Caesar inspired in his troops and the personal example he set (16-17). Oppius, the friend of Caesar who wrote a life of him, cited by Plutarch Caes. 17.4 and S.Jul. 53 may have had anecdotal material arranged in this fashion.

20. The Murena conspiracy attracts endless controversy: for a neat summary of the debate, see R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes Book II (1978) 151ff. Dio's narrative is 54.3.

21. The dangers of S's analytic approach are excellently brought out by Flach (1972), building on Townend (1959) 288ff. Bradley's Commentary on the Nero (1978) brings out the distortions and false generalisations that mar this life; Bringman (1971) does the same for the Tiberius.

22. Venini (1974) examines the parallel narratives of the civil war in the lives of Galba, Otho and Vitellius and shows that when S does turn to narration, he does not do so in a historian's fashion. The concentration on the individual and the ‘linearity’ of his account set him apart not only from Tacitus but from Plutarch.

23. The ancient library catalogue (pinax, index) took the form of a list of names of authors and their works: Seneca commented that it might take a lifetime to read a library index (de Tranquillitate 9.4). For the details, RE [Real-Encyclopaedie der Klassischen Alterumswissenschaft] XX, 1408ff., s.v. Pinax. The official records (hypomnēmatismoi) of petty Egyptian officials and those of emperors (commentarii) are known to have been kept in diary form: von Premerstein, RE IV (1901), 735ff., s.v. Commentarii. For a recently discovered excerpt from the imperial commentarii (the Tabula Banasitana), see Comptes Rendues de l'Académie des Inscriptions (1971) 468ff. On the senatorial archive, see now J. M. Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (1982), 65f.

24. The fundamental character and limitations of the subject-matter of the ancient historian are identified by H. Strasburger, Die Wesensbestimmung der Geschichte durch die antike Geschichtsschreibung (1966). His insights are taken up by M. I. Finley, ‘Myth, memory and history’, in The Use and Abuse of History (1975) 11ff. and by A. Momigliano, ‘Tradition and the classical historian’, in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (1977) 161ff.

25. See further below, ch.3.

26. On S's handling of these topics, see below, ch.6.

27. The stylistic pretensions of ancient historiography are well illustrated by Pliny Ep. 5.8, a letter to Titinius Capito in which the writer turns down the invitation to write history partly on the grounds of its exacting stylistic demands. The very different expectations of biography are betrayed in Pliny's characterisation of the works of Fannius: ‘somewhere between conversation and history’ (Ep. 5.5.3). On the contribution of rhetoric, see T. P. Wiseman, Clio's Cosmetics (1979), with important qualifications by P. A. Brunt, ‘Cicero and historiography’, in Miscellanea … E. Manni (1979) 311-40. The contrast between the style of S and historiography has been demonstrated in detail by Sage (1979), who shows S's avoidance of the historian's stock-in-trade.

28. The scholarly nature of S's style was understood by Leo (1901) and Funaioli (1932 and 1947). There are useful analyses of his style by Bagge (1875), Freund (1901) and (most conveniently) in Mooney's Commentary (1930) 611-39. The repetitiveness of the rubric style emerges from the investigations of Mouchova (1968). On the use of the perfect verb, see Dihle (1954) 50. For those who take a rather different view, see below, n. 32.

29. On S's vocabulary, see the lists in Mooney 611ff.; Slusanski (1975) examines some of his technicalities, particularly literary ones, Tomulescu (1977) his use of legal terminology and Ramondetti (1977) his terminology relevant to senatorial procedure. Among bureaucratic terms, which S is the first or only surviving literary author to employ, I note: officium in the sense ‘department’ (Vesp. 14, cf. ILS [Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae] 1921), ducenarius of procurators (Cl. 24), rationarium (Aug. 28.1), formalis epistula (Dom. 9.3), ordinatio of appointment to a post (Dom. 4.2), fiscalis (Dom. 9.3), confisco, instrumentum of a collection of documents (Vesp. 8.5), angusticlavius (Oth. 10: the only occurrence of a word much used by modern textbooks), amanuensis (Ner. 44, Tit. 3).

30. Townend (1960) emphasises the exceptional nature of S's use of Greek citations longer than a single word. He plausibly suggests the Greek savant Ti. Claudius Balbillus as the ultimate source for certain of them (115ff.). A minor Greek anecdotalist is precisely the sort of author S was likely to draw on. Greek technical terms in S are listed by Mooney 611f.

31. On Tacitus' use of the senatorial acta, see Syme, Tacitus 186ff. and 278ff.; JRS 72 (1982) 73ff. Claudius' oration preserved at Lyons (Smallwood, Documents … of Gaius, Claudius and Nero no. 367) has been frequently compared with Tacitus' recasting (Ann. 11.23-4): most recently see M. T. Griffin, ‘The Lyons tablet and Tacitean hindsight’, CQ [Classical Quarterly] 32 (1982) 404ff. For citation of documents in Varro, see e.g. de Lingua Latina 6.86-8. The value of S's contribution is appreciated by Flach (1972) 285. On the gulf between historiography and antiquarianism, see Momigliano, ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’, in Studies in Historiography (1966) 1ff.

32. The verdict of Croce comes from ‘Variazioni intorno a Svetonio’, Quadri della Critica 14 (1949) 16. For the reasons for his distaste, see Piero Treves, ‘Biografia e storia in Svetonio’, preface to Svetonio: Vita dei Cesari (Milan 1962). The reaction to the critical view of S was started by the important book of Wolf Steidle, Sueton und die antike Biographie (1951). In his wake, various scholars have sought to demonstrate S's ‘artistic’ control: Hanslik (1954) in the Augustus, Croisille (1969/70) in the Claudius and Nero, Brutscher (1958), Gugel (1970) and Müller (1972) in the Julius. More recently Cizek (1977) has laid emphasis on the so-called technique of gradation; and Gugel (1977) has looked for ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’ among the rubrics (Gugel 11ff. has a good survey of the literature to date). There is, however, excellent sense in the plea of Drexler (1969) to judge the author by his content not his ‘art’.

33. The contrast of techniques with historiography is demonstrated by Sage (1979).

34. The stylistic links between S's descriptions of appearance and the dry ‘iconistic’ style of the physiognomists is shown by G. Misener, ‘Iconistic portraits’, Classical Philology 19 (1924) 97ff. On stylistic links with the jurists, see below, ch.6, n.17. On Roman technical literature, see now the Cambridge History of Classical Literature: II, Latin Literature, ed. E. J. Kenney (1982), 286-92 (Varro and Nepos), 493-4 (Vitruvius and Celsus), 667-73 (Pomponius, Columella, the elder Pliny, Frontinus), 678-80 (Gellius). The stylistic aspirations of these authors vary considerably, from Varro's hasty impatience with fine style to the clumsy flourishes of Pomponius or Pliny.

35. The moral and exemplary aims of Roman historians are explicit e.g. at Sempronius Asellio fr. 1 (Gellius Noctes Atticae 5.18.9), Sallust Jugurtha 4, Livy Preface 10, Tacitus Histories 1.3 and Ann. 4.33. On Lepidus as a model, Ann. 4.20. The conventional aims of historiography are neatly summarised in Lucian's essay On how to write history, on which see G. Avenarius, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (1956). On the audiences of ancient historians, A. Momigliano, ‘The historians of the classical world and their audience’, Ann. Scuol. Norm. Pisa ser. 3 vol. 8 (1978) 59ff.

36. Virtues and vices in S are naturally value-laden, but elsewhere he avoids value-laden words. The neutrality of his style is shown by Ektor (1980).

37. The quotation is from Epitome de Caesaribus 48.18, cited by Flach (1972) 288. S's successor as imperial biographer, Marius Maximus, was notoriously more interested in scandal for its own sake: R. Syme, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (1968) 89ff.; Emperors and Biography (1971) 113ff. The view of S as a gossip is epitomised by J. W. Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age³ (1964) 508: ‘A great deal of it partakes of the nature of a chronique scandaleuse based upon tittle-tattle about the emperors and compiled by a literary man with the muck-rake, too keen upon petty and prurient detail to produce a scientific account of his subjects.’ That S writes for ‘the man of the street’ is claimed by Paratore (1959) 341.

38. That S shares assumptions on how a ruler should behave with Pliny in the Panegyric and other Romans is argued below, particularly in ch.7. It does not follow that S shows Pliny's didactic purpose, made explicit at Ep. 3.18.2. On ancient ‘mirror of princes’ literature, see below, ch.7. n.7.

39. Against the argument of della Corte (1958) that S writes for an equestrian bourgeoisie, see below, ch.5.

40. Recommendations for military posts at least partly on literary grounds are made by Pliny at: 2.13.7 (Voconius Romanus), cf. 10.4.4; 3.2.3 (Arrianus Maturus); 4.4.1 (Varisidius Nepos—P notes that he is learned, for him the most important thing: disertum, quod apud me vel potentissimum est); 7.22.2 (Cornelius Minicianus). P's backing for Iulius Naso for a magistracy includes reference to his father's support of studia: 6.6.3. The recommendations which make no mention of learning are addressed to Trajan: 10.26 (Rosianus Geminus), 86a (Gavius Bassus), 87 (Nymphidius Lupus). The anonymous and fragmentary recommendation 10.86b at least mentions humanitas. Consideration of the workings of patronage under the empire should now start from R. P. Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (1982) esp. 41ff.

41. On literary patronage, see P. White, ‘Amicitia and the profession of poetry in early imperial Rome’, JRS 68 (1978) 74ff., with the criticisms of Saller 28ff. Against the picture of a distinct class of ‘military men’, see B. Campbell, ‘Who were the “viri militares”?’, JRS 65 (1975) 11ff.

42. On Titinius, see Pliny Ep. 1.17 and 8.12. On the genre of martyrologies, above ch. 1, n. 18. On men of learning in the imperial entourage, Millar, Emperor 83ff. and below, ch.4.

43. On the transformation of Roman education, see the classic account of H. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (Eng. trans. 1956) 229ff.; and recently S. F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome (1977). The most serious attempt to come to grips with the problem of the place and function of education in Roman society is J. Christes, Bildung und Gesellschaft (1975).

44. The best discussion of S's scholarly activities in relation to the Caesars is still Macé (1900) 242ff. especially valuable for stressing the numerous links of subject matter between the Caesars and the other works. However, Macé's notion that S taught as a grammaticus (54f. discussing Suda s.v. Trankullos, John Lydus de Mag. 1.34, Plin. Ep. 1.24.4) is rightly rejected by subsequent scholars. The emphasis by Leo (1901) on the profound importance of the traditions of Alexandrian scholarship for the understanding of the Caesars has been played down by recent writers on S to their detriment. Important discussions of the scholarly works from a purely philological angle are Funaioli (1932) and Brugnoli (1968). For further details on the list of works see below.

45. The best text of the de Grammaticis et Rhetoribus is the Teubner edition of G. Brugnoli (1960); there is also an edition with useful complementary notes by della Corte (ed. 3, 1968). Disappointment at the absence of literary history is expressed by Funaioli (1932) 608, G. M. A. Grube, The Greek and Roman Critics (1965) 313, and elsewhere. Its value as an educational document is seen by all works on ancient education; as a social document it has been exploited by S. Treggiari, Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic (1969) 110ff.; and recently following the hint of J. Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Eng. trans. 1974) 125, in the thorough investigation of freedman grammarians by J. Christes, Sklaven und Freigelassene als Grammatiker und Philologen im antiken Rom (1979).

46. A. Gwynn, Roman Education from Cicero to Quintilian (1926) 59ff. argued that the ban on teaching was caused by the popularis sympathies of Plotius Gallus. Bonner, Education 71f. shows that this interpretation will not stand. The importance of the aristocratic ambience is seen by Christes, Bildung und Gesellschaft 136ff. The transformation of the social background of the leading Roman orators is neatly illustrated by W. Kunkel, Herkunft und soziale Stellungen der römischen Juristen² (1967) 287f.: under Augustus leading senatorial families (Paullus Fabius Maximus, M. Claudius Marcellus etc.) mix with new men like Cassius Severus. Under the Julio-Claudians, aristocratic orators disappear, giving way to provincials and new men.

47. Particulars of Greek teachers in Rome were collected by A. Hillscher, ‘Hominum litteratorum Graecorum ante Tiberii mortem in urbe Roma commoratorum historia critica’, Jahrb. f. class. Phil. Suppl. 18 (1892) 355ff. For grammarians of servile status, Christes, Sklaven und Freigelassene gives a thorough discussion; many of the salient details appear in Bonner, Education 47ff. On the impact of Greek culture on late republican and Augustan Rome, see G. W. Bowersock, Augustus and the Greek World (1965). Since most of the information on teachers of servile/freedman status comes from Suetonius and Hermippus via the Suda, I give the reference to these in the text. On Hermippus himself, see Christes 137ff.

48. A few details above derive from elsewhere than Suetonius or the Suda. Ateius Philologus: that the grandfather of the jurist was a Sullan centurion is attested by Tac. Ann. 3.75; identification with the Ateius who stormed Athens in Plut. Sulla 14 is almost certain; I infer from Capito's praise of Philologus that he had been taught by him. Tyrannion: also familiar from Cicero's correspondence; the libraries he was involved with were those of the brothers Cicero (ad Att. 4.4A.1, 8.2; ad Q. fr. 3.4.5); the Aristotelian library of Apellicon plundered from Athens, Strabo 13.608f.; and his own of 30,000 volumes (Suda); on his capture see also Plut. Lucull. 19.7. Timagenes: the story of his rise from cook is given by Seneca Contr. 10.5.22; further, see Bowersock, Augustus 109f. and 125f.

49. The value of the elder Seneca's (not always accurate) history of the rise of declamation is carefully discussed by J. A. Fairweather, Seneca the Elder (1981) esp. 104ff. Seneca conceals the extent to which declamation was already established in Cicero's lifetime. See also S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation (1949) and M. Winterbottom's introduction to the Loeb translation of the Controversiae.

50. On imperial librarians, see further below, ch.4. On the career of Pompeius Macer, Bowersock, Augustus 38f.

51. For the state and education under the empire see Marrou, History of Education 299ff., Bonner, Education 159ff., and G. W. Bowersock, Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (1969) 30ff., especially on immunities for teachers. The main evidence is in the Digest 27.1.6, together with an edict of Vespasian; McCrum and Woodhead, Documents of the Flavian Emperors no.458. The new inscription, apparently dating the immunities back to the triumviral period, is published by D. Knibbe, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigr. 44 (1981) 1ff. For the special process for recovery of fees (Digest 50.13.1) see Christes, Bildung und Gesellschaft 1ff., discussing an old controversy among legal historians.

52. On the role of education in the social development of the empire, see the suggestive discussion of Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (1978) 76ff. For the theme of ‘Romanisation’, see also A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship² (1973) 397ff.

53. For the spread of education to the provinces, Marrou 292ff. On Asclepiades of Myrleia, Strabo 3.157. For rhetoric in Gaul, see Mayor's note on Juvenal 15.110 (382ff.). Parallels to Pliny's endowment to Comum are discussed by Sherwin-White on Pliny Ep. 4.13 (288). Some inscriptions recording grammatici in Italy and the provinces are collected in Dessau ILS 7761-7770.

54. See Tacitus Agricola 21.2; Ogilvie and Richmond in their commentary (32f. and 224) gather the evidence for Demetrius. Tacitus Ann. 3.43 shows the same process in action at Autun. Marrou 294 cites Plutarch Sertorius 14 as a precedent.

55. The historical importance of the Second Sophistic has been amply demonstrated by Bowersock, Greek Sophists. G. Kennedy, in Bowersock (ed.), Approaches to the Second Sophistic (1974) 17ff., stresses the basic but forgotten point that these sophists were essentially professors of rhetoric, and that the educational system lies at the root of the movement.

56. That Latin grammarians were freedmen is assumed as a generalisation (for all periods) on the basis of S's lives e.g. by Bonner, Education 58. However, M. Rutilius Aelianus, grammaticus at Beneventum, belonged to the local curial class (ILS 6497); P. Atilius Septicianus of Comum was freeborn and an honorary member of the local council (ILS 6729); though Q. Tuticanus Eros who enjoyed the same distinction at Verona was probably a freedman (CIL [Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum] 5.3433; see Christes, Sklaven und Freigelassene 152). The names of the following leading grammatici of the second century ad show no signs of servile origin: L. Caesellius Vindex, Q. Terentius Scaurus, Velius Longus, Aemilius Asper. Scaurinus son of Scaurus was naturally freeborn; as was Pertinax, temporarily the successor of Apollinaris, though his father was a freedman. This is not, however, to obscure the fact that teachers of rhetoric always enjoyed more prestige than grammarians.

57. On the life and times of Gellius, see Friedländer, Sittengeschichte 4, 284ff. (Life and Manners 4, 322ff.). Though Gellius is much exploited as a source of fragments, his value as a witness to contemporary culture (apart from the phenomenon of ‘archaism’) is little noticed. See, however, E. Champlin, Fronto and Antonine Rome 46ff.

58. Discovered in a monastery on Mount Athos in c.1865 by Emmanuel Miller and published in 1868, these Byzantine extracts have now been edited by Jean Taillardat (1967) and the text conveniently amplified from later derivative works, in particular the Homer Commentaries of Eustathius.

59. The most effective demolition of Reifferscheid's use of Isidore is that of Wessner (1917). On Isidore, see Jacques Fontaine, Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l'Espagne wisigothique (1959) 16 and 748f. The notion of S's Prata as a great encyclopedia will hardly survive the sceptical survey of G. Brugnoli (1968) 137ff., who sees in it a collection of miscellaneous essays, possibly gathered after the author's death.

60. For the great Alexandrian tradition, R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the beginnings (1968) is invaluable. But for the Roman tradition one must fall back on the bare sketch of J. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship 1 (1903). See also A. Gräfenhan, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie im Alterthum 4 vols (1843-50). On early Latin scholarship, F. Leo, Plautinische Forschungen² (1912) 23ff. still breathes life.

61. Macé (1900) 243 divides the works into four categories: 1. grammar and literary history; 2. archaeology and institutions; 3. historical biography; 4. natural history. ‘Literary history’ is a misleading description of the literary biographies; ‘natural history’ depends on dubious assumptions about the nature of the Prata. My own division is an approximate one designed to illustrate the author's methods. For convenience I list known titles.

    (i) Lexicographical. On names and types of clothes (Roth 281); On physical defects (Roth 302); On insults (Roth 282); On weather-signs, On names of seas and rivers, On names of winds (all from the Prata, Roth 304f.). Against the authenticity of the Differentiae Sermonum (Roth 306ff.), see G. Brugnoli, Studi sulle differentiae verborum (1955).

    (ii) Essays on institutions: On Greek games (Roth 275); On Roman spectacles and games (Roth 278); On the Roman year (Roth 281); On Rome and its customs and manners (Roth 282); On the institution of offices (Roth 302).

    (iii) Biographical. Illustrious men (Roth 287); On famous courtesans (302); On kings (Roth 303).

    Miscellanies, the Prata and de Rebus Variis (Roth 303), naturally elude my categorisation. (The two titles might, I suggest, refer to the same work; it may indeed have been no more than a collection of the above-named essays.) On signs in books (Roth 281) on critical signs and possibly shorthand is a variant on lexicography, following the usual listing process. One work falls into a class of its own, On Cicero's Republic (Roth 281); we only know that it was not a commentary, but polemical, a reply to Didymus Chalcenterus.

62. Taillardat in his introduction (22ff. and 36ff.) argues confidently for Pamphilus as the immediate source of S in both works, drawing ultimately on Didymus; any similarities between S and Pollux Onomasticon which groups words, in the fashion of Roget's Thesaurus, according to topic, are thus explained by derivation from a common source. To accept this with confidence one needs a demonstration that Pamphilus also grouped by topic; if that could be shown, it might help explain S's monographs on words for particular types of things. But in that case what was left for S to do?

63. No help on the question of relative chronology is offered by Pliny Ep. 5.10 urging S to publish his first work (in 105/6 according to Sherwin-White's book date). Macé (1900) 66, like several others, assumes that this was the Illustrious men, quite without warrant, and in my view without probability; see below, ch.3.

64. The list of Telephus' works comes from the Suda. For discussion, Wendel RE V A (1934) 369ff.

65. The classic statement of the case that S was driven by idle curiositas is by Funaioli (1947). Steidle and his followers have combated this view with reference to the Caesars; it is a pity that nobody has tried to make sense of the scholarly works. The implied assumption that there is no more to scholarship than fact-collecting is an odd one.

66. It is not suggested that all S's monographs can be subsumed under the head of ‘life and manners’. Fragments on names of winds and waters suggest an interest in natural history; this has been blown up out of proportion by seeing in the Prata an encyclopedia of natural history (above n. 6). A solitary hint of pure grammatical interest is the fragment on prepositions from the de Rebus Variis: Roth 303, Reifferscheid fr. 205.

67. For the essays On games, see Reifferscheid frr. 181-98. The more austere collection of Roth 275-80 shows at a glance how much more frequent citations of this work are than of other scholarly essays. The best notion of the scope of the Roman games is given by Tertullius' essay on the topic; for a judicious discussion of the extent of its debt to S, see the edition of E. Castorina (1961) 97-104. The links with the Caesars are described by Macé 317ff. On the Troy game, see Roth 278 = Reiff. fr. 197; performances of the game in the Caesars at Jul. 39.2, Aug. 43.2, Tib. 6.4, Cal. 18.3, Cl. 21.3, Ner. 7.1; the pyrrhic at Jul. 39.1 and Ner. 12.1-2. See further below, ch.6.

68. Many of these links are noticed by Macé: on dicing, 282-4; on offices, 300-2; on the calendar, 307-10; on physical defects, 331-5; on clothes, 306. Athenaeus 13.567a cites essays on Athenian prostitutes by Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollodorus of Athens, Ammonius, Antiphanes and Gorgias.

69. The names of S's predecessors are preserved in Jerome's preface to his own de Viris Illustribus = Reifferscheid fr. 1. All are discussed by Leo (1901). The Greek tradition is discussed by Momigliano (1971) esp. 73ff. For Satyrus' Life of Euripides, see Italo Gallo, ‘La vita di Euripide di Satiro e gli studi sulla biografia antica’, Parola del Passato 113 (1967) 134ff. On the title of S's work, see Brugnoli (1968) 41ff., arguing that it may have been Catalogus virorum illustrium.

70. Recent scholarship has focussed on the lives of the poets. Rostagni (1944) produced a new edition of these lives. Paratore (1946, revised 1950) is an extended criticism of Rostagni's edition. H. Naumann (1974 and 1979) has argued for the authenticity of the surviving lives of Terence, Horace, Virgil and Lucan. E. Fraenkel, Horace (1957) 1ff. is a valuable commentary on the Suetonian life.

71. Attempts to reconstruct S from Jerome move from Mommsen's paper of 1850 ‘Ueber die Quellen der Chronik des Hieronymus’, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (1909) 606ff. Roth 287-301 and Reifferscheid 3-144 with discussion at 363ff. offer alternative reconstructions based on Jerome. A thorough examination of Jerome's notices name by name was undertaken by R. Helm, Hieronymus' Zusätze in Eusebius' Chronik (Philologus Suppl. 21,2, 1929). Brugnoli (1968) 57-60 shows how little progress has been made since. For the circumstances and methods of Jerome's compilation, see J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome, his life, writings and controversies (1975) 72ff. That Jerome worked from a mutilated manuscript is argued by Brugnoli (1968) 131ff.

72. G. B. Townend in an unpublished paper, of which Townend (1972) is a brief report, makes the attractive suggestion that Juvenal's seventh satire draws on the Illustrious men in cataloguing ill-rewarded literary types, poets, historians, orators, rhetoricians and grammarians; cf. also JRS 63 (1973) 152. He goes on to suggest that S's order was the inverse of Juvenal's, and that it was because Jerome had before him a progressively more mutilated manuscript that his own list is so lacunose. I am grateful to Professor Townend for showing me the full text of his paper.

73. Roth lxxviii inferred that the Illustrious men must have appeared before Pliny's death, and is generally followed, e.g., Macé (1900) 69ff., Funaioli (1932) 598, Brugnoli (1968) 59. Rostagni (1944) xi is more cautious. But the worthlessness of this argument was seen already by Reifferscheid 422: one might as well suppose that the Caesars must have been written before the death of Nerva in 98. The only life likely to have transcended the limit of Domitian's death is that of the rhetor Julius Tiro. However, even this is to assume that he happens to be identical with the Julius Tiro whose disputed will came up before Trajan in AD 105, Plin. Ep. 6.31.7f., a possibility not even considered by Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny 394.

74. The gaps in the list of poets are discussed by Rostagni (1944) xix-xxiv who concludes, in my view rightly, that S's coverage was very uneven. Quite different is the list of ‘classics’ given by Quintilian 10.1.85-100. That Jerome made some omissions is certain, and Rostagni 133ff. rightly attributes to S the manuscript life of Tibullus with its typically Suetonian quotation of Domitius Marsus.

75. Scholars are divided as to whether the orators before Cicero were included by S: thus Reifferscheid 406 supposes that they were not, but Funaioli (1932) 606f. challenges this. That S knew Cicero's Brutus emerges from Jul. 5.1 and 56.2. The question must remain open.

76. Macé 262f. simply assumes that the early imperial annalists must have been covered by S. Similarly Reifferscheid 407f. assumes the philosophers must have been there. In fact the majority of notices in Jerome are about expulsions of philosophers from Rome: this is a likely enough Suetonian theme, see below.

77. Reifferscheid 375 puts Pylades in the preface to the Poets, but is not followed by Rostagni 5ff. Mommsen 613 included Tiro in the life of his master Cicero; but this fails to accommodate the clearly Suetonian history of stenography which Reifferscheid frr. 105-7 associates with Tiro. Following Mommsen 616f. all scholars reject the possibility of series of lives of jurists and doctors; Sulpicius and Artorius are variously disposed of, by subterfuge or neglect.

78. Though S does not cite pre-Ciceronian orators, he does occasionally betray knowledge of their existence: Julius modelled his style on Strabo Caesar (55.2), Galba's ancestor Sulpicius was one of the leading speakers of his day (3.2). He also knew of Licinius Crassus (Ner. 2.2) and Hortensius (Tib. 47).

79. On these biographers, see above, n.18. On Rusticus' biographies, Tacitus Agricola 2.1 is to be preferred to Dom. 10.3.

80. Macé 256ff. notes the frequency of allusions to Caesars in the Illustrious men. He also observes that S failed to make use of most of these items in the Caesars, surely because it was the authors, not the Caesars, on whom these anecdotes cast light. Macé's observation undermines the argument of Brugnoli (1968) 33f. that the Grammarians and rhetors must have been published later than the rest of the Illustrious men and later than the Caesars on the grounds that the Caesars ignores information contained in the Grammarians.

81. So Dio 72.23.5, Cicero de Legibus 1.8-9, Pliny Ep. 5.8.12.

82. The decline was observed by Macé 361ff. and attributed to S's decline in interest. Townend (1959) 286ff. further documented the extent of the decline and connected it with his dismissal from office; the idea is supported by Syme (1980) 116ff. But J. A. Crook (1969), in a review of della Corte advocated a return to Macé's explanation.

83. Macé's chapter on the sources of the Caesars (357ff.) is judiciously restrained. There can however be little doubt that S used Cluvius Rufus, as Townend has shown in a series of papers: Townend (1960), Hermes 89 (1961) 227, ib. 92 (1964) 467, Am. Journ. Phil. 85 (1964) 337.

84. Della Corte (1967) 143-52 stresses S's character as ‘memorialista’ with his love for the anecdotal. If the anecdotes and sayings in the later lives are of oral provenance, they are of a different type from the oral evidence historians collected. Syme (1981) 111f. conjectures that certain items are the fruit of the author's own travels.

85. Ancient biographical form has been much discussed since Leo (1901). The most substantial contributions have been Stuart (1928), Steidle (1951), A. Dihle, Studien zur griechischen Biographie (1956), Momigliano (1971).

86. The occurrence of these topics on the ancient gravestone is nicely illustrated by R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Roman Epitaphs² (1962) 266ff.

87. For a comparison between Plutarch and S, see A. Wardman, Plutarch's Lives (1974) 144ff.

88. S's debt to encomium was seen by Steidle (1951) 129ff., accepted by Momigliano (1971) 87. For an introduction to the ancient encomiastic tradition, see D. A. Russell and N. G. Wilson, Menander Rhetor (1981) xiff. The practice of panegyric under the empire and its influence on S is discussed below, ch.7.

Suetonian lives are abbreviated as follows:

Jul.: Divus Iulius

Aug.: Divus Augustus

Tib.: Tiberius

Cal.: Caligula

Cl.: Divus Claudius

Ner.: Nero

Galb.: Galba

Oth.: Otho

Vit.: Vitellius

Vesp.: Divus Vespasianus

Tit.: Divus Titus

Dom.: Domitianus

Gramm.: de Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (the numeration is continuous as in Brugnoli's Teubner text. The Loeb text numbers the rhetors separately. Thus Gramm. 26 = Loeb On Rhetoricians 1 etc.)

No chapter or paragraph numbers are given for the lives of the poets since there is no agreed system of reference.

Fragments of other works are cited from both the edition of Roth (Teubner 1858) and that of Reifferscheid (1860) as appropriate.

Bibliography

This is not a complete guide to further reading on Suetonius. I have listed only the most important editions and a selection of commentaries (A), and books and articles on Suetonius referred to in the notes by author's name and date of publication (B). I have excluded numerous unpublished doctoral dissertations. For further reading on subjects other than Suetonius and his writings the notes should be consulted.

A. Editions and Commentaries

Quae supersunt omnia: ed. C. L. Roth (Teubner, Leipzig 1858).

Praeter Caesarum libros reliquiae: ed. A. Reifferscheid (Leipzig 1860).

De vita Caesarum: ed. M. Ihm (Teubner, Leipzig, ed. maior 1907, ed. minor 1908).

(Caesars, Grammarians and Rhetors, Poets): trans. J. C. Rolfe, 2 vols. (Loeb Classical Library, 1914).

Vies des Douze Césars: trans H. Ailloud, 3 vols. (Coll. Budé, Paris 1931-2).

De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus: ed. G. Brugnoli (Teubner, Leipzig 1960).

———:trans. with comm., F. della Corte (Bibl. Loescheriana, Turin, 3rd ed. 1968).

De Poetis: ed. A. Rostagni (Turin 1944, reprinted Arno 1979).

Peri blasphemiōn, Peri paidiōn, extraits byzantins: ed. J. Taillardat (Paris 1967).

Divus Augustus: comm. E. S. Shuckburgh (Cambridge 1896, reprinted Arno 1979).

———: comm. M. A. Levi (Florence 1951).

———: comm. J. M. Carter (Bristol Classical Press 1982).

Tiberius: Ch. 1-23 comm. M. J. du Four (Philadelphia 1941); ch. 24-40, comm. J. R. Rietra (Amsterdam 1928), reprinted as single vol. (Arno 1979).

Nero: comm. B. H. Warmington (Bristol Classical Press 1977).

———: comm. K. R. Bradley (Coll. Latomus 157, Brussels 1978).

Libri VII-VIII (Galba to Domitian): comm. G. W. Mooney (Dublin 1930, reprinted Arno 1979).

Divus Vespasianus: comm. A.W. Braithwaite (Oxford 1927).

B. Books and Articles

G. Alföldy (1979), ‘Marcius Turbo, Septicius Clarus, Sueton und die Historia Augusta’, Zeitschr. für Pap. u. Epigr. 36, 233-53.

———(forthcoming), ‘Römisches Staats- und Gesellschaftsdenken bei Sueton’, Ancient Society (forthcoming).

G. D'Anna (1954), Le Idee Letterarie di Suetonio (Florence).

P. Bagge (1875), De elocutione C. Suetonii Tranquilli (Upsala).

B. Baldwin (1975a), ‘Suetonius: birth, disgrace and death’, Acta Classica 18, 61-70.

———(1975b), ‘Was Suetonius disgraced?’ Echos du Monde Classique 19, 22-6.

C. Baurain (1976), ‘Suétone et l'inscription d'Hippone’, Les Etudes Classiques 44, 124-44.

G. Bowersock (1969), ‘Suetonius and Trajan’, in Hommages à Marcel Renard (Coll. Latomus 101) 1, 119-25.

K. R. Bradley (1973), ‘The composition of Suetonius' Caesares again’, Jnl. Indo-Europ. Stud. 1, 257-63.

———(1976), ‘Imperial virtues in Suetonius' Caesares’, Jnl. Indo-Europ. Stud. 4, 245-53.

———(1981), ‘The significance of the spectacula in Suetonius' Caesares’, Rivista storica dell' Antichità 11, 129-37.

K. Bringmann (1971), ‘Zur Tiberiusbiographie Suetons’, Rhein. Mus. 114, 268-85.

G. Brugnoli (1968), Studi Suetoniani (Lecce), reprints of articles published between 1954 and 1964.

C. Brutscher (1958), Analysen zu Suetons Divus Iulius und der Parallelüberlieferung (Noctes Romanae 8).

T. F. Carney (1968), ‘How Suetonius' lives reflect on Hadrian’, Proc. African Class. Ass. 11, 7-24.

E. Cizek (1977), Structures et idéologie dans ‘Les Vies des Douze Césars’ de Suétone (Bucharest-Paris).

F. della Corte (1967), Svetonio, Eques Romanus (Florence 1958; ed. 2, 1967)

J. Couissin (1953), ‘Suétone Physiognomoniste dans les Vies des XII Césars’, Rev. Et. Lat. 31, 234-56.

J.-M. Croisille (1969/70), ‘L'art de la composition chez Suétone, d'aprés les vies de Claude et de Néron’, Annali dell' Instituto Italiano per gli studi storici 2, 73-87.

J. A. Crook (1957), ‘Suetonius ab epistulis’, Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. n.s. 4, 1956-7, 18-22.

———(1969), CR [Classical Review] n.s. 19, 62-3, reviewing della Corte.

E. van't Dack (1963), ‘A studiis, a bybliothecis’, Historia 12, 177-84.

L. Dalmasso (1905/6), ‘Un seguace di Quintiliano …’, Att. Ac. Sc. Torino 41, 805-25.

A. Dihle (1954) reviews Steidle, Gött. Gel. Anz. 208, 45-55.

S. Döpp (1972), ‘Zum Aufbau der Tiberiusvita Suetons’, Hermes 100, 444-60.

H. Drexler (1969), ‘Suetons Divus Iulius und die Parallelüberlieferung’, Klio 51, 223-66.

J. Ektor (1980), ‘Limpassibilité et l'objectivité de Suétone’, Les Etudes Classiques 48, 317-26.

D. Flach (1972), ‘Zum Quellenwert der Kaiserbiographien Suetons’, Gymnasium 79, 273-89.

J. W. Freund (1901), De Suetonii Tranquilli usu atque genere dicendi (Diss. Breslau).

G. Funaioli (1932), ‘Suetonius’, RE IV A, 593-641.

———(1947), ‘I Cesari di Suetonio’, in Raccolta di scritti in onore di F. Ramorino (Milan, 1927), 1-26, reprinted in Studi di letteratura antica (1947) 2,2, 147-79.

J. Gascou (1976), ‘Suétone et l'ordre équestre’, Rev. Et. Lat. 54, 257-77.

———(1978), ‘Nouvelles données chronologiques sur la carrière de Suetone’, Latomus 37, 436-44.

H. Gomoll (1935), ‘Suetons bibliotheksgeschichtliche Nachrichten’, Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 52, 381-8.

H. Gugel (1977), Studien zur biographischen Technik Suetons (Wiener Studien Beiheft 7: Vienna).

———(1970), ‘Caesars Tod (Sueton, Div. Iul. 81,4-82,3). Aspekte zur Darstellungskunst und zum Caesarbild Suetons’, Gymnasium 77, 5-22.

R. Hanslik (1954), ‘Die Augustusvita Suetons’, Wien. Stud. 67, 99-144.

F. Leo (1901), Die griechisch-römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form (Leipzig).

G. Lewis (forthcoming), ‘Suetonius’ Caesares and their literary antecedents’, in H. Temporini (ed.), Aufstieg u. Niedergang der römischen Welt II (forthcoming).

G. Luck (1964), ‘Ueber Suetons Divus Titus’, Rhein. Mus. 107, 63-75.

A. Macé (1900), Essai sur Suétone (Paris).

E. Malcovati (1977), ‘Augusto fonte di Svetonio’, in Festschrift für Rudolf Hanslik (Wiener Stud. Beiheft 8), 187-95.

E. Marec-H. G. Pflaum (1952), ‘Nouvelle inscription sur la carrière de Suétone, l'historien’, Compt. Rend. Ac. Inscr., 76-85.

A. Momigliano (1971), The Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge, Mass.).

B. Mouchova (1968), Studie zu Kaiserbiographien Suetons (Acta Univ. Carolinae; Phil. et. Hist. Monogr. xxii; Prague).

W. Müller (1972), ‘Sueton und seine Zitierweise im “Divus Iulius”’, Symb. Osl. 47, 95-108.

H. Naumann (1974), ‘Noch einmal: Suetons Virgil-Vita’, Philologus 118, 131-44.

———(1979), ‘Lücken und Einfügungen in den Dichter-Viten Suetons’, Wien. Stud. 92, 151-65.

E. Paratore (1946), Una Nuova Ricostruzione del ‘Del Poetis’ di Suetonio (Rome 1946, 2nd ed. Bari 1950).

———(1959), ‘Claude et Néron chez Suétone’, Rivista di cultura classica e medioevale 1, 326-41.

P. Ramondetti (1977), ‘La terminologia relativa alla procedura del senatum habere in Svetonio’, Atti. Ac. Sc. Torino 111, 2, 135-68.

T. Reekmans (1977), ‘La politique économique et financière des autorités dans les Douze Césars de Suétone’, in Historiografia Antiqua … in honorem W. Peremans (Louvain), 265-314.

P. Sage (1979), ‘Quelques aspects de l'expression narrative dans les XII Césars de Suétone’, Rev. Belg. Phil. 57, 18-50.

D. Slusanski (1975), ‘Suétone-critique littéraire. Problèmes de vocabulaire’, Actes XII Conf. Int. Et. Class. Eirene (1972), 115-19.

W. Steidle (1951), Sueton und die antike Biographie (Zetemata 1; Munich 1951; reprinted 1963).

D. R. Stuart (1928), Epochs of Greek and Roman Biography [Journal of Roman Studies] (Berkeley).

R. Syme (1980a), ‘Guard Prefects of Trajan and Hadrian’, JRS 70, 64-80.

———(1980b), ‘Biographers of the Caesars’, Museum Helveticum 37, 104-28.

———(1981), ‘The travels of Suetonius Tranquillus’, Hermes 109, 105-17.

C. St. Tomulescu (1977), ‘Les Douzes Césars et le droit romain’, Bull. Inst. Dir. Rom. 80, 129-58.

G. B. Townend (1959), ‘The date of composition of Suetonius' Caesares’, CQ [Classical Quarterly] n.s. 9, 285-93.

———(1960), ‘The sources of the Greek in Suetonius’, Hermes 88, 98-120.

———(1961a), ‘The Hippo inscription and the career of Suetonius’, Historia 10, 99-109.

———(1961b), ‘The post ab epistulis in the second century’, Historia 10, 375-81.

———(1962), ‘The trial of Aemilia Lepida in A.D. 20’, Latomus 21, 484-93.

———(1967), ‘Suetonius and his influence’, in Latin Biography, ed. T. A. Dorey (London), 79-111.

———(1972), ‘Suetonius and literary biography’, abstract in Proc. Class. Ass. 69, 27.

P. Venini (1974), ‘Sulle Vite Svetoniane di Balba, Otone e Vitellio’, Rend. Inst. Lomb., Cl. Lett. Sc. Mor. St. 108, 991-1014.

P. Wessner (1917), ‘Isidor and Sueton’, Hermes 52, 201-92.

A. E. Wardman (1967), ‘Description of personal appearance in Plutarch and Suetonius: the use of statues as evidence’, CQ n.s. 17, 414-20.