SOURCE: Bowersock, G. W. “Suetonius in the Eighteenth Century.” In Biography in the 18th Century, edited by J. D. Browning, pp. 28-42. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980.

[In the following essay, Bowersock presents a survey of works that attest to eighteenth-century scholarly and literary interest in Suetonian-styled biography.]

When Boswell appealed to authority in introducing his Life of Johnson, he invoked Plutarch, “the prince,” he declared, “of ancient biographers.” There followed a quotation, first (ostentatiously) in Greek and then in translation, of the familiar lines from Plutarch's Alexander the Great on the value of apparent trifles in a man's action or conversation for the illumination of his character. Earlier in the eighteenth century the Abbé de la Bletterie in France had similarly invoked the name of Plutarch to sanctify his biography of Julian the Apostate, and he had similarly seen fit to cite exactly the same passage from the life of Alexander.¹ No reader with any knowledge of Plutarch's Lives could have taken the invocations of that ancient master seriously. Neither Boswell nor the Abbé de la Bletterie wrote biographies in the Plutarchean manner. The sole point of contact was the celebrated passage they both quoted to justify the inclusion of superficially insignificant details.

As a result of the famous and often reprinted translations of Plutarch by Amyot, North, and Dryden, Plutarch's name had become almost synonymous with the genre of biography. And if Plutarchean parodies, like the anonymous Life of John Wilkes, Esq., published in 1773, presuppose some acquaintance with the original biographies in the reading public, it would nevertheless be dangerous to assume that Plutarch's Lives were read as often as they were placed on bookshelves or mentioned in prefaces. They were a legacy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the eighteenth, and there was no one to say that they were not the very models of good biography. But Plutarch is like the Bible: you can find an appropriate quotation in support of whatever you are doing. The passage in the Alexander spoke eloquently to the more creative and adventurous biographers of the eighteenth century, even though they must have been perfectly well aware of the great distance between themselves and Plutarch. Their interest, for its own sake, in sordid details of personal life, the abundant record of conversation on all manner of themes, the fascination with bad people as well as good are all far removed from Plutarch's world. When Plutarch undertook to compose the life of Demetrius, whom he judged a person of reprehensible character, he felt obliged to offer his readers an apology and an explanation for doing something that seemed unedifying.² Plutarch had no interest in human character on its own, but only as a basis for moral instruction. He had no interest in socially insignificant people, but only in the great. He cared little for the lives of literary figures.³

If the most important and original contributions to biography in the eighteenth century came, as most would probably agree, from Samuel Johnson (and through him Boswell) and also from Rousseau, whose Confessions are an undoubted masterpiece in the autobiographical genre that Johnson thought the ultimate form of biography, then it was certainly not Plutarch who provided whatever inspiration from antiquity those writers may have had. Of the ancient biographers Suetonius comes much closer to Johnson and Rousseau, and it is surprising that no one has hitherto attempted to trace in any detail the fortunes of his Lives of the Caesars and his Lives of the Poets in the eighteenth century. In his new book entitled Samuel Johnson, Biographer Robert Folkenflik touches very briefly on this subject and leaves it after just two paragraphs.⁴ It is clear that Suetonius was not a conspicuous author in the education of the time. In his translation of the Lives of the Caesars of 1732, John Clarke observed, “Notwithstanding this great and apparent usefulness of Suetonius, he has, I think, got but little footing in our schools.”⁵ But it is equally clear that scholars and superior men of letters both in England and on the continent were at the same time well acquainted with Suetonius and were, in addition, remarkably concordant in their estimate of his qualities and achievement.

To assess the place of Suetonian biography in the eighteenth century it would be well to start with the interest shown by professional classical scholars and then to move on to the influence of this interest on the literary milieu in general. Against the background that emerges men like Johnson and Rousseau, as well as Gibbon and Duclos, will appear in sharper focus. While no classical author can ever serve wholly to explain works of genius in a later age, he can nevertheless help us to understand them better. I shall attempt to argue that while Plutarch represented the biographical ideals of the past, as seen through Amyot, North, and Dryden, it was Suetonius who represented what was new in the genre as it developed in the eighteenth century.

After the pioneering work on the text of Suetonius by Isaac Casaubon toward the end of the sixteenth century, little was done with this author until he was taken up in the final third of the next century by the Dutch scholar Graevius at Utrecht. Graevius' edition of 1672, and revisions of his work that appeared in 1691, 1697, and 1703, became the foundation for widespread study of Suetonius in England as well as the Netherlands. It is still not well known that Richard Bentley was actively preparing an edition of Suetonius in Cambridge at least between the years 1713 and 1719.⁶ He was in touch with both Graevius and Graevius' pupil, Burman. He assembled collations of eight manuscripts of Suetonius and entered annotations for his new text into four separate copies of Suetonius in his possession. Bentley never brought his work to completion, possibly because it was becoming amply apparent that the market was glutted. In addition to Graevius' editions, those by Patinus of 1675, Pitiscus of 1690, and Jacob Gronovius of 1698 were still in circulation; and Graevius' text was the basis of further printings in 1705, 1706, 1707, 1708, 1714, 1715, 1718, and 1722. An English translation of Suetonius by Jabez Hughes, John Hughes' brother, appeared in 1717 and was reprinted in 1726. Bentley perhaps despaired of being heard amid such frantic activity; he was not in any case prone to fads.

Among scholars this extraordinary enthusiasm for Suetonius continued deep into the century. Pieter Burman, Graevius' pupil, produced an edition of his own in 1736, to be followed by Ernesti's edition of 1748 and Oudendorp's of 1751. One can readily sympathize with Gibbon's note on the edition of Oudendorp, about which he had read in the Bibliothèque raisonnée: “Mais pourquoi en faire une après celle de Graevius?”⁷ Hughes' English translation was replaced in 1732 by John Clarke's which was soon reprinted in 1739. As the century wore on, Oudendorp was reprinted in 1761 and Ernesti, incorporating notes by Oudendorp, in 1775. It is probably fair to say that there was greater professional interest in Suetonius in the eighteenth century than there has ever been before or since.

Perhaps the most influential of those who read Suetonius at the turn of the century, when Graevius' edition was still relatively new, was Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire was known and reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. His entry for Suetonius was very full and took open issue with certain seventeenth-century clerical writers who found fault with the biographer's frankness and occasional obscenity. In replying to this ecclesiastical censure, Bayle adopted a view of Suetonius which became commonplace in subsequent decades. He presented Suetonius as a model of candor, sincerity, and impartiality. Suetonius reports without judging, he tells what he knows without fear, he flatters no one. It may be something of a surprise for a modern reader of the Lives of the Caesars to think of their author as a paradigm of objectivity; but that is how the eighteenth century, using Bayle's spectacles, perceived him. Here are Bayle's words (or rather, some of them): “C'est un tissu perpétuel de faits choisis et curieux, et rapportés d'une manière succincte, sans digressions, sans réflexions, sans raisonnemens. Il y règne un caractère de sincérité qui fait sentir, sans aucune peine, que l'auteur ne craignait rien et n'espérait rien, et que la haine ni la flatterie ne conduisaient point sa plume. Voilà de grands charmes pour les lecteurs de bon goût … C'est un écrivain qui a trouvé l'art de prévenir sur sa bonne foi, et c'est une grande marque qu'il écrivait sans passion.” As to the notoriously indelicate passages, especially in the life of the emperor Tiberius, Bayle observes, “La manière dont Suétone a particularisé les débauches des empereurs n'est nullement une preuve, ni qu'il aimât les impuretés, ni qu'il se plût à les décrire, ni qu'en général il y eût rien à désirer à sa probité et à son honnêteté. Cela fait voir seulement qu'il était fort ingénu et fort sincère.”

When one turns from Bayle's Dictionary to the preface to John Clarke's translation of Suetonius in 1732, it is hard not to feel that Clarke had been reading Bayle quite recently. In any case, his view of his author is very much that of his time, and I quote it: “The character of Suetonius is that of a plain honest impartial author, that appears to have writ with all possible coolness, and without the least bias upon his mind at all; or any other concern, than that of delivering to the world a faithful and just account of the behaviour and conduct, both public and private, of the several emporers, whose lives he has given us, so far as he himself could come at it … There is nothing in him like flattery, disguise or concealment in the least. He has, as an honest historian should do, given as well the foul, as the fair side of them all …”⁸ Far from being corrupting or indecent, Clarke judges Suetonius' work “highly proper to be put into the hands of our youth at school and university.”

Throughout his career Edward Gibbon, ironist though he was, consistently maintained a view of Suetonius identical to that of Bayle and Clarke: Suetonius composed his lives truthfully, without passion or prejudice. In 1764 Gibbon noted in his journal that Voltaire had questioned the historical reliability of Suetonius' account of Tiberius' sexual excesses as an old man on the island of Capri.⁹ Gibbon, who manifestly understood both Suetonius and old men much better than Voltaire, observed that Tacitus appears to confirm Suetonius in this matter, and furthermore “Je n'apperçois aucune trace de haine dans leurs écrits. Ils le justifient souvent, ils distinguent avec autant de bonne-foi que de pénétration les Époques différentes de la dissimulation, des cruautés et des débauches publiques de cet Empereur … Pour ces débauches recherchées qui étonnent M. de Voltaire, c'est précisément dans un Viellard de 70 ans que je les trouve vraisemblables.”¹⁰

Over a decade later, in his celebrated Vindication of the chapters on Christianity in the Decline and Fall, he took a similar view of Suetonius. He recalled the “honest complaint” of a sixteenth-century writer “that the lives of the philosophers have been composed by Laertius, and those of the Caesars by Suetonius, with a much stricter and more severe regard for historic truth, than can be found in the lives of saints and martyrs, as they are described by Catholic writers.”¹¹ After this provocative attack on a very special and highly partisan genre of biography, Gibbon went on to say that if Suetonius “had disguised the vices of Augustus, we should have been deprived of the knowledge of some curious and perhaps instructive facts, and our idea of those celebrated men might have been more favourable than they deserved.”¹² Finally near the end of his life, as he made notes for the revision he never carried out of the opening chapters of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon once again showed his belief in the integrity of Suetonius as a biographer. “I here confused,” wrote Gibbon of his account of Augustus' family, “the maternal with the paternal descent of Augustus … The opposite reports of friends and enemies are honestly and doubtfully stated by Suetonius.”¹³

What I am suggesting was the dominant view of Suetonius in the eighteenth century reappears in France explicitly in the preface which Voltaire's disciple, Jean-François de la Harpe, affixed to his translation of Suetonius, published in 1771 (a year in which two translations of the Lives were published in French). La Harpe declares, in language again reminiscent of Bayle, “Il raconte sans s'arrêter, sans paraître prendre intérêt à rien, sans donner aucun témoignage d'approbation ou de blâme, d'attendrissement ou d'indignation … Il résulte de cette indifférence un préjugé très-bien fondé en faveur de son impartialité: il n'aime ni ne hait les hommes dont il parle; c'est aux lecteurs à les juger … Il suffit de lire dix pages de Suétone pour voir qu'il n'est d'aucum parti et qu'il écrit sans passion.”¹⁴ Although La Harpe's translation had taken its origin from a request from the Duc de Choiseul,¹⁵ he was aware of a wider interest in certain places. “L'auteur d'Émile,” he wrote, “regrette quelque part qu'il n'y ait plus de Suétone.”¹⁶ Jean-Jacques Rousseau had indeed said something like that, for in Émile he recommends the study of biography as a beginning of the study of the human heart. The biographical historian penetrates to the secret places of his subject and catches him unawares. But it is only in the writings of the ancients that such educational biography can be found. Today, laments Rousseau, decency keeps men from speaking out: “La décence, non moins sévère dans les écrits que dans les actions, ne permet plus de dire en public que ce qu'elle permet d'y faire … On aura beau faire et refaire cent fois la vie des rois, nous n'aurons plus de Suétones.”¹⁷

Voltaire, who had, we may recall, suspected Suetonius' report of Tiberius' senile pleasures, stood apart, as he often did, from the conventional assessment of Suetonius in the eighteenth century. He had not been at all pleased by La Harpe's plan to translate Suetonius: “Je suis très fâché que vous enterriez votre génie dans une traduction de Suétone, auteur, à mon gré, assez aride et anecdotier très suspect … j'aimerais bien mieux … une nouvelle tragédie de votre façon.”¹⁸ But even Voltaire warmed to the project in time and eventually told La Harpe how much he looked forward to the translation. He must have been disappointed when it appeared. The scholars of Europe tore it apart.¹⁹ When they had done with exposing all La Harpe's errors, the poor man must have wished he had followed Voltaire's advice and written a tragedy instead.

Voltaire apart, casting (as Gibbon wrote) “a keen and lively glance over the surface of history”, we see a remarkable uniformity in the way in which those secular writers who knew Suetonius' work judged him. It is difficult not to believe that the availability of an exceptionally large number of editions, commentaries, and translations sparked the interest, dormant for a century, in this forceful, outspoken, and well documented biographer, so different from Plutarch. Although there is no reason to think that Suetonius' name was a household word, as Plutarch's was, there is every reason to think that many of the literary leaders of the age found him, on the whole, sympathetic. He seemed to be an honest reporter, who used all the sources he could find to present, without praise or blame, portraits in the round. His emperors were no paragons; he knew their strengths and their weaknesses. And even in the worst of them he knew their virtues. It is only after a recitation of Caligula's merits that Suetonius makes his renowned transition to the vices: Hactenus quasi de principe, reliqua ut de monstro narranda sunt (So much, as it were about an emperor; the rest must be told as of a monster).²⁰ There is less to go on for Suetonius' biographies of poets and grammarians, but it is of great significance simply that he chose to write them at all; and in the eighteenth century rather more extant biographies of poets were credited to him than now. The works of Suetonius' predecessors in literary biography were not known in the eighteenth century, and his successors in the genre, such as Diogenes Laertius and Philostratus, had a more limited scope. Altogether the new interest in Suetonius, from Graevius and Bayle onward, may be expected to have had some connection with the new doctrines of biography in the same period. For those doctrines, most clearly visible in Johnson and Rousseau, are uncannily close to those ascribed to Suetonius.

Already in 1722 John Hughes had written the lives of Abelard and Heloise which he prefixed to a translation of their letters: “We find in them surprizing mixtures of devotion and tenderness, of penitence and remaining frailty, and a lively picture of human nature in its contrarieties of passion and reason, its infirmities and its sufferings.”²¹ In a standard work on the art of biography in eighteenth-century England the author comments on the date of this passage, “an early date for such an observation.”²² But it is not perhaps so early when we recall that it was precisely John Hughes' brother who had published, five years before, the first eighteenth-century translation of Suetonius into English. It is above all in the presentation of contradictory characteristics that the peculiarly Suetonian mark can be distinguished, as Bayle had justly noted. Since attention to personal detail and meaningful trifles is as much Plutarchean as Suetonian, the pronouncements of Roger North, though in many ways anticipating Johnson, do not represent so bold a departure from the standard of Plutarch as that of Hughes. North's insistence on the desirability of personal acquaintance with the subject of a biography looks forward to Johnson, of course;²³ but it is, in itself, a doctrine without any clear classical antecedent. As a biographer, Goldsmith too is essentially in the Plutarchean tradition, with his emphasis on moral judgements.²⁴

Though anticipated here and there, Johnson was in fact the truly original biographer of his age. His formidable genius cannot be explained simply in terms of reading and influences, but it seems increasingly evident that among the ancients Suetonius must have held a special attraction for him. So voracious a reader as Johnson cannot have missed the new interest in Suetonius in England and abroad, and he must have found in him a biographer who exemplified the searching candor he craved in biography.

In writing about the Lives of the Poets many a modern critic has been impelled to mention Suetonius if only for comparison,—a justifiable comparison. There is a dramatic echo of the Life of Augustus at the end of the Life of Dryden.²⁵ But one can go further with the Life of Savage, where again the influence of Suetonius has been suspected. I believe it can be proved. In the Lives of the Caesars Suetonius turns regularly at the end of a life to a series of topics which he has evidently reserved in each case for a general treatment in the context of the subject's death. Either before or just after the notice of death he dilates on the physical characteristics, personal manner and literary tastes of the subject. It will be necessary, and by no means disagreeable, to quote at some length from several representative lives to establish this point. For the present purpose I shall use the translation of John Clarke from 1732. On the emperor Tiberius:

“He was in his person large and robust, of a stature somewhat above the usual size; broad shouldered and chested, and in his other parts proportionable. He used his left hand better than his right … He was of a fair complexion … He had a handsome face, but frequently full of pimples, with large eyes … He walked with his neck stiff and unmoved, commonly with a frowning countenance, being for the most part silent, very seldom talking to those about him; and when he did, it was very slowly, and with an effeminate motion of his fingers … He had small regard to the gods or matters of religion, being mightily addicted to astrology … Yet he was exceedingly afraid of thunder … He applied himself very diligently to the liberal arts, both Greek and Latin. In his Latin stile he affected to imitate Corvinus Messala … But he rendered his stile obscure by an excess of affectation and niceness … He composed a lyric ode … some poems in Greek in imitation of Euphorion, Rhianus and Parthenius, with which poets he was wonderfully taken …”²⁶

Next, on the emperor Claudius:

“He had a majestic and graceful appearance, either standing or sitting and especially when he was asleep; for he was tall, but not slender. His gray locks became him well, and he had a fat neck. But his hams were feeble, and failed him in walking … Besides he had a stammering in his speech, and a tremulous motion in his head … Though in the former part of his life he had but a very crazy constitution, yet upon his advancement to the empire he enjoyed a good state of health … He was sensible of his being subject to passion and resentment, but excused himself therein by proclamation … Amongst other things people admired in him his forgetfulness and want of thought … He frequently appeared so careless in what he said, so regardless of circumstances, that it was believed he never reflected or considered who he himself was, or amongst whom, or at what time, or in what place he spoke … By the encouragement of T. Livius … he undertook the writing of a history … In his reign too he writ a great deal, which he constantly had rehearsed to his friends by a reader … He compiled too the history of his own life, in eight books, full of impertinence, but in no bad stile … He likewise applied himself with no less care to the study of the Graecian literature, declaring his love of that language, and the excellency thereof upon all occasions.”²⁷

Now, on Nero:

“His stature was a little below the ordinary size: his body so spotted and marked as to make a vile appearance; his hair somewhat yellow, his countenance fair rather than handsome, his eyes grey and dull, his neck fat, his belly prominent, legs very slender, but his constitution very healthful … He was much addicted to poetry and composed verses readily and with a great deal of ease; nor did he, as some think, publish those of other people for his own. I have had in my hands some little pocketbooks of his, with some well known verses, all of his own writing; and writ in such a manner that it was very apparent, they were not transcribed from a copy … He had likewise a mighty fancy for painting and image making, but above all things, an extravagant affection for popular applause.”²⁸

With these passages in mind, all written by Suetonius in connection with the notice of death, compare Johnson, in the Life of Savage, immediately after he has recorded his subject's death:

“He was of a middle stature, of a thin habit of body, a long visage, coarse features, and melancholy aspect; of a grave and manly deportment, a solemn dignity of mien, but which upon a nearer acquaintance softened into an engaging easiness of manners. His walk was slow, and his voice tremulous and mournful. He was easily excited to smiles, but very seldom provoked to laughter … He had the art of escaping from his own reflexions and accommodating himself to every new scene. To this quality is to be imputed the extent of his knowledge compared with the small time which he spent in visible endeavours to acquire it … His method of life particularly qualified him for conversation, of which he knew how to practise all the graces. His temper was in consequence of the dominion of his passions uncertain and capricious; he was easily engaged and easily disgusted; but he is accused of retaining his hatred more tenaciously than his benevolence … As an author … he has very little to fear from the strictest moral or religious censure … Of his stile the general fault is harshness, and the general excellence is dignity.”²⁹

The mark of Suetonius on this concluding part of the Life of Savage is surely unmistakable.

In France Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had lamented in Émile the absence of a contemporary Suetonius, nevertheless acknowledged in a footnote that there was one writer of the time who had, at least in part dared to imitate Suetonius: “Un seul de nos historiens, qui a imité Tacite dans les grands traits, a osé imiter Suétone … dans les petits; et cela même, qui ajoute au prix de son livre, l'a fait critiquer parmi nous.”³⁰ Rousseau was referring to that enfant terrible of the establishment, Charles Pinot Duclos, whose biography of Louis XI had scandalized the French authorities and who had acquired a large following with the publicity that naturally attaches to moral condemnation.³¹ Both Gibbon and Walpole knew Duclos principally as the author of the Louis XI; and Rousseau was quite right in signaling, with obvious approval, the Suetonian character of that work. Although Duclos himself survived notoriety to become the perpetual secretary of the French Academy and to enjoy what Gibbon maliciously judged the scorn of colleagues who failed to do him the honor of hating him,³² the rebel Rousseau had a considerable respect for him. The feeling appears to have been mutual. Rousseau dedicated his opera Le devin du village to Duclos in gratitude for his good offices in getting the work produced, and Rousseau kept for more than twenty years his copy of Duclos' Confessions du Comte de + + +, a work which he much admired.³³

Rousseau's appreciation of the biography of Louis XI was therefore part of a larger interest in its author's writings. In view of the bold, unorthodox tastes and opinions of both men, it is scarcely surprising that Suetonius should have constituted one of the links between them. Duclos would certainly not have repudiated Rousseau's assessment of the character of his life of Louis XI, nor would any modern reader of that work. That the king is presented in the round with all his faults and foibles is remarkable enough. Louis may have sincerely believed that it was the part of a good host not only to share his dinner with a guest but also to share his bed with him; but only a Duclos, a Rousseau, or a Suetonius were likely to report so hospitable an instinct. Duclos knew perfectly well what he was doing, as he makes eloquently clear near the end of the life: “La principale erreur où l'on tombe en voulant peindre les hommes, est de supposer qu'ils ont un caractère fixe, au lieu que leur vie n'est qu'un tissu de contrariétés: plus on les approfondit, moins on ose les définir. J'ai rapporté plusieurs actions de Louis XI, qui ne paroissent pas appartenir au même caractère. Je ne prétends ni les accorder, ni les rendre conséquentes. Il seroit même dangereux de le faire: ce seroit former un système, et rien n'est plus contraire à l'histoire, et par conséquent à la vérité. J'ai représenté Louis XI dévot et superstitieux, avare et prodigue, entreprenant et timide, clément et sévère, fidèle et parjure, tel enfin que je l'ai trouvé, suivant les différentes occasions.”³⁴ This account of the aims of Duclos' biography could be applied verbatim and with complete accuracy to the Lives of the Caesars.

The resemblance between Duclos and Suetonius is not confined to method and outlook. Both were uncommonly fortunate in having direct and privileged access to documentary material. In May of 1741 Duclos was officially entrusted with the manuscript of the Abbé Legrand, which was to form the core of his biography of Louis XI. This remarkable windfall provided the biographer with far more revealing detail than his sponsors expected. The Legrand manuscript served Duclos much as the inquisition register of Jacques Fournier has recently served Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his stunning account of Montaillou. Suetonius, by virtue of his post as ab epistulis (secretary in charge of correspondence) in the court of the emperor Hadrian, had direct access to the imperial archives; and many of his most illuminating passages depend upon material he found there. He evidently studied with care the documents, letters, and memoirs he uncovered; when he cited them, he did so judiciously and tellingly. The parallel between Duclos and Suetonius becomes even closer when we observe Duclos duly installed as perpetual secretary of the Academy. He emerges as an ab epistulis of the eighteenth century, differing from his Roman predecessor in the much longer and more successful tenure of his office.

It was Duclos who particularly urged Rousseau to write an autobiography;³⁵ and we may well imagine, in view of the relations between the two men, that the insistence of Duclos was taken seriously. When Rousseau resolved to undertake the work, he chose as a title Confessions, which naturally evokes above all the self-revelations of Augustine. Yet Rousseau cannot have forgotten Duclos' Confessions du Comte de + + +, which he had admired for so long; and Rousseau rewarded Duclos' solicitude with a memorable letter in which he formulated the principles of his autobiography: “Mais j'ai beaucoup à dire,” he wrote, “et je dirai tout; je n'omettrai pas une de mes fautes, pas même une de mes mauvaises pensées. Je me peindrai tel que je suis: le mal offusquera presque toujours le bien; et malgré cela, j'ai peine à croire qu'aucun de mes lecteurs ose se dire, Je suis meilleur que ne fut cet homme-là.”³⁶ These words, written to Duclos from Môtiers in January 1765, are more Suetonian than Augustinian in spirit; and they anticipate very closely the words of the second and definitive introduction which Rousseau eventually placed at the beginning of the Confessions.

Rousseau's emphasis on the importance of domestic and superficially trifling details in biography had led him to what he considered a new and unique kind of autobiography. Like Johnson, Rousseau had pushed his views on biography to their inevitable conclusion: as he put it in the original preface to the Confessions, “Nul ne peut écrire la vie d'un homme que lui-même.” Johnson likewise declared, “No one is so fit to be a man's biographer as the man himself.” Both men had arrived at this position from a concept of biography which demonstrably owed more to Suetonius than to any other antecedent biographer. Obviously the temperament and genius of both predisposed them in this direction, and it is perhaps safer to say that they found in Suetonius an echo of their own sentiments rather than a model.

But there can be no denying that the fortunes of Suetonius in the eighteenth century were closely bound up with all that was most original in the biographical writing of that time. If he was not so familiar an author as Plutarch to the public at large, he was certainly well known to those scholars and biographers who were at the forefront of their profession. By the middle of the eighteenth century the works of Plutarch had acquired that universal and uncontested respectability which effectively precludes any fertilization of creative minds. The energetic work of editors and critics on Suetonius' Lives in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century heralded a new era in biography. Suetonius' works became widely available. They were controversial and exciting. Neither the anathema of the church nor even the disdain of Voltaire could prevent them from having an impact on some of the greatest writers of the age.

Notes

1. The citation occurs at the end of the preface to La Bletterie's work, first published anonymously with an Amsterdam imprint in 1735.

2. Plut., Life of Demetrius, ch. 1.

3. His biography of Pindar, now lost, was probably due more to Plutarch's well attested devotion to his Boeotian homeland than to any great interest in the poetry of the Boeotian Pindar.

4. R. Folkenflik, Samuel Johnson, Biographer (1978), pp. 97-98. I am indebted to my friend and colleague, W. J. Bate, for drawing my attention to this book.

5. Clarke's Suetonius, p. V. Jabez Hughes, Degory Wheare, and Thomas Blackwell all expressed a similar opinion. See H. D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England (1978), p. 22.

6. M. Ihm, “Richard Bentley's Suetonkritik,” Sitzungsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, phil-hist. Classe, 23 May 1901; Edmund Hedick, Studia Bentleiana III: Suetonius Bentleianus (1902).

7. Le journal de Gibbon à Lausanne, ed. G. Bonnard (1945), p. 234.

8. Clarke's Suetonius, p. IV.

9. Le journal de Gibbon à Lausanne, (n. 7 above), p. 240.

10. Ibid.

11. E. Gibbon, Vindication, ed. P. Craddock in The English Essays of Edward Gibbon (1972), p. 303.

12. Ibid.

13. Craddock (n. 11 above), p. 342.

14. De la Harpe, Suétone (1771), pp. 2-3.

15. Cf. A. Jovicevich, Jean-François de la Harpe, adepte et renégat des lumières (1973), p. 68.

16. De la Harpe (n. 14), p. 2.

17. J. J. Rousseau, Émile, Book 4 (Paris, 1874), p. 278.

18. Quoted by Jovicevich (n. 15), p. 68: Voltaire, Corr. 71.244.

19. Cf. Jovicevich (n. 15), pp. 68-69; Christopher Todd, Voltaire's Disciple: Jean-François de la Harpe (1972), p. 89.

20. Suet., Cal. 22.

21. John Hughes, Lives of Abelard and Heloise (1722): quotation with comment in D. A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (1941), p. 343 n. 100. In Stauffer's work of 572 pages Suetonius' name occurs twice.

22. Stauffer (n. 21 above), loc. cit.

23. Cf., most recently, Folkenflik (n. 4 above), p. 83 and p. 185 n. 19.

24. Stauffer (n. 21 above), pp. 380-86; Folkenflik (n. 23 above), p. 83.

25. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. C. B. Hill (1905), vol. 1, p. 469.

26. Suet., Tib. 68-70.

27. Suet., Claud. 30, 39-42.

28. Suet., Nero 51-53.

29. S. Johnson, Life of Savage, ed. C. Tracy (1971), pp. 135-39.

30. J.J. Rousseau, Émile, (Paris, 1874), p. 278, note.

31. See E. Heilmann, Charles Pinot Duclos: Ein Literat des 18. Jahrhunderts und seine Beziehungen zu Rousseau, d'Alembert, Marmontel und anderen, Diss. Berlin (1936); P. Meister, Charles Duclos, Thèse Bâle (1956); J. Brengues, Charles Duclos (1704-1772) ou l'obsession de la vertu (1971).

32. Gibbon, Journal (n. 7 above), p. 196.

33. Meister (n. 31 above), p. 43.

34. C. P. Duclos, Oeuvres (1820), vol. 4, p. 331.

35. Cf. Meister (n. 31 above), pp. 42-43.

36. J. J. Rousseau, Corr. complète, vol. 23 (1975), no. 3875, p. 100.