[In the following essay, Bradley examines Suetonius's use of “virtue-terms.”]

A noticeable feature of Suetonius' Caesares is the frequent use and illustration of virtue-terms to demonstrate aspects of character. This is not altogether surprising given that virtue-terms were deeply connected with the traditionally moralistic nature of Roman historiography and that, in an increasingly political sense, even under the Republic associations had begun to develop between powerful individuals and certain isolated virtues: Sulla and felicitas, Caesar and clementia provide two well known instances of this. It is worthwhile, however, to examine some of these usages in Suetonius, not least because the possibility of contemporary allusiveness is thereby introduced; any historical work is naturally subject to the influence of developments or tastes prevalent at the time of writing, and when Hadrianic allusions have been detected in Tacitus' Annales¹ the same might be anticipated for the Caesares. An approach of this kind must of necessity be subjective especially since the literary tradition for Hadrian is not above reproach.² Nonetheless, the minimal appearance in the Caesares of words which served as predominant Hadrianic coin legends (annona, felicitas, liberalitas, providentia, clementia, concordia, iustitia, pietas, salus Augusti, securitas,) and their association in the main with mali principes has formed part of an argument that Suetonius and Hadrian felt a mutual, deep antipathy; Hadrianic propaganda as seen from the coinage provided Suetonius with a means of indirect criticism of the emperor.³ Given the fact of Suetonius' dismissal from the government service under Hadrian (HA Hadr. 11.3) that notion is not in itself unpleasing. In what follows, however, attention will be paid to showing that Hadrianic propaganda in this narrow sense had little or no effect on Suetonius and that the extensive use of virtue-terms must be fitted into a wider perspective.

A statistical survey of word usages in Suetonius can be misleading because it fails to give sufficient attention to matters of literary technique. Even though the sum total of appearances of a given word (e.g. clementia) may be few, this is of little consequence if illustrations of the concept are catalogued; there is then no need for pure verbal repetition.⁴ It should be emphasised too that coin legends may be used to characterise a reign or to refer to a specific event during a reign; this means that comparison between terms on coins and in an author is valid only if the usages are consistent (which is difficult to determine), while in literary works a further distinction is required between cases where terms are used with direct reference to a reign (whether general or specific) and cases where terms are used neutrally, simply to communicate. At the commencement of a reign most virtues advertised on the coinage would be symbolic of the aspirations of the new dispensation,⁵ though with such a legend as liberalitas a commemmorative purpose might also quickly appear. Commemmorative issues, however, might refer to such a variety of situations, dependent upon the political climate of the day, that if indeed Suetonius, especially in the early years of Hadrian, were influenced by propaganda slogans, that influence should be expected in all probability to derive from the characterising aspect of the coinage. Thus, usages in the Caesares of virtues related to specific episodes must essentially be judged in terms of historical accuracy. To believe that Suetonius wrote some or all of the biographies with the conscious aim in mind of making allusions to Hadrian would seem to undermine the accuracy of his historical accounts. Yet if the terms are needed for purposes of historical biography then the virtues cannot be claimed of necessity as retrojections of contemporary prevailing motifs. What is required, therefore, is not so much a count of the terms themselves as an examination of the contexts in Suetonius to see precisely how slogans are used.

First a certain amount of pruning is appropriate due to the irrelevance to the problem of a large number of Suetonian passages, either because the reference antedates the reign of the biographical subject or else because the reference is to some person other than the emperor.⁶ For instance, the use of annona at Galba 7.2 can have no implicit connection with Hadrian since Suetonius is here discussing Galba's governorship of Africa. Likewise the use of felicitas at Iul. [Iulius] 35.2, where the term is not applied to Caesar at all but to Pompey. On this basis a whole string of passages can simply be eliminated from consideration,⁷ which is important because it means that some emperors altogether lose association with various virtue-terms.⁸

There are other types of irrelevance. A latinised quotation from Euripides at Iul. 30.5 leaves no more than a tenuous association between Caesar and pietas. The use of annona at Aug. [Augustus] 42.3 is subordinate to a more important idea, the illustration of Augustus as salubris princeps; so also with Aug. 41.2, the illustration of Augustus' liberalitas; Aug. 25.2, the use of servile troops at a time of shortage; and Nero 45.1, the arrival of a ship from Egypt with a disappointing cargo at a similar time of scarcity. Association between annona and Augustus does still exist (Aug. 18.2), but not in the case of Nero; nor, further, in the case of Tiberius, since at Tib. [Tiberius] 34.1 annona is used not with reference to grain in particular but to the high cost of food in general. Neutral usages of salus occur at Aug. 14.1, Calig. [Caligula] 14.2, 15.4, 27.2, Claud. 37.2 [Claudius], Vit. 15.2. The use of securitas at Iul. 23.2 is purely personal with no application to the Caesarian regime at large. The majority of the uses of felicitas in Suetonius do not describe the general felicity of any reign but relate instead to the personal good fortune of the emperor. Thus, at Aug. 94.1 omens are recorded which predicted Augustus' felicitas and at Vesp. [Vespasian] 5.5 it is stated that during Nero's hellenic tour Vespasian dreamed initium sibi suisque felicitatis futurum. Comparable passages here are Nero 40.3 and Vesp. 5.2. Certain usages of liberalitas are neutral or too personalised to contain any political significance, Iul. 38.2, Calig. 46, Claud. 29.1, Galba 15.1, while with clementia Suetonius at times verges on the ironic, as at Tib. [Tiberius] 53.2, Vit. [Vitellius] 14.2, Domit. [Domitan] 11.2, so that such pieces should be dismissed for the reason that literary effect suspersedes any political connotation.

Once these results of contextual examination are all taken into account the number of strictly relevant passages in Suetonius is diminished and the possibilities of deliberate allusiveness substantially curtailed. It remains to see what can be made of the texts which survive the tests of irrelevance.

Given the perennial problem of famine in antiquity all emperors needed to be attentive to ensuring the Roman grain supply. The actions of Augustus and Claudius to safeguard the annona are well known from sources other than Suetonius,⁹ so there is basically little reason to believe other than that Suetonius concerns himself with historical reality at Aug. 18.2 and Claud. 18.1. Moreover, it can be noted that Suetonius' attitude to Augustus is generally favourable while he tends to be non-committal about Claudius. If, then, provisions for the annona appear in favourable contexts in biographies not of mali principes there cannot be any adverse reflection upon Hadrian. Presumably Suetonius would have equally approved Hadrian's annona claims.

Clementia is a term more emotive than the majority of imperial virtues. But again the point needs emphasis that Suetonius approves of clementia at Iul. 51.1, Aug. 51.1, Nero 10.1, and Domit. 10.1; that he provides exempla; and that his accounts are consistent with other sources.¹⁰ It is true that in the cases of the Nero and Domitian clementia may be exemplified in one portion of the biography in order to make its later absence the more condemnatory for the biographical subject, but here Suetonius' immediate concern lies with the subject himself, nothing more. In addition, it has been shown that the very term clementia had undergone significant changes of meaning by Hadrian's time;¹¹ it is questionable therefore to what degree the Suetonian examples of imperial clemency are at all relevant to Hadrianic clementia.

Two passages in Suetonius show how political concord of one sort or another might be elicited. Claudius at his last appearance before the senate urges concordia between his sons (Claud. 46); to the reader of Suetonius' day that could be construed as ominous in view of the events of a.d. 55. Yet it is difficult to spot allusion here or at Otho 8.1, where at the news of Vitellius' acclamation on the Rhine Otho urges the senate to placate Vitellius, to achieve quietam concordiamque.¹².

Detailed inspection shows that the only occasion on which felicitas is used in Suetonius to connote general prosperity for the res Romana is at Aug. 58.2, where Valerius Messala prays for perpetuam felicitatem reipublicae. The lack of direct association with Augustus himself is obvious.

The occurrences of liberalitas promise to be more significant because this terms as a coin legend makes its first appearance under Hadrian; perhaps then a greater chance of implication and allusion. Suetonius to be sure does record and documents items of imperial generosity (Aug. 41.1, Nero 10.1, Domit. 9.1) and he is critical of Tiberius for niggardliness (Tib. 46, 48.3). Three mali principes on the traditional view. The benefactions of Augustus, Nero and Domitian, however, are once more historically exact items,¹³ and the passages from the Nero and the Domitian occur in those sections of the biographies which comprise the acta of which Suetonius approves. In light of the criticism of Tiberius it is fair to maintain that Suetonius looked with approval on any emperor's recognised obligation to provide the Roman populace with periodic gifts, and this must apply to Hadrian too since his provision of largesse is beyond dispute.¹⁴

Of the Suetonian uses of pietas which seem to be valid in a political context four, if not five, can be grouped in a single category, the demonstration of filial piety to the preceding ruler at the beginning of a new reign (Tib. 70.3, Calig. 15.1, Claud. 11.2, Nero 9, ?Calig. 12.3). Independent testimony can again be summoned.¹⁵ Further, this procedure became eventually so standardised a part of any accession that it is difficult to ascertain how hidden meaning could be found in these instances. Admittedly the accession of Hadrian had its sticky side, but in the first century of the Empire very few arrivals to power had been utterly smooth; there was after all nothing unfamiliar about Hadrian's show of pietas to Trajan.

No examples of securitas or iustitia germane to the problem can be found in Suetonius, and providentia never appears at all. This latter fact has been regarded almost as a deliberate omission: in discussion of providential aspects of administration Suetonius must have found it difficult to sidestep the word.¹⁶ Perhaps that is true, though one wonders to how many contemporary readers the omission would be noticeable. Moreover, providentia seems to have a wide scope of meaning in comparison with other virtues,¹⁷ and it may be argued that while the term as such is not employed, its component parts—liberalitas, annona, salus etc.—are. There was thus perhaps no need for the word.

In sum one is compelled to conclude that where the imperial virtues itemised above are employed by Suetonius it is on a basis of historical fact and approval with very little likelihood of contemporary overtones or criticism.

The next step must be to look at the history of the Hadrianic coin legends themselves. As remarked above only liberalitas is new under Hadrian. All the others stretch back into the first century. Annona first appears under Nero and continues into the Flavian period,¹⁸ while an alternative form of the same advertisement, Ceres Augusta, is found under Claudius and the emperors of 68/69.¹⁹Felicitas makes its first entry under Galba and also continues under the Flavians, including Domitian.²⁰ If Suetonius were really minded to draw attention to the annona or felicitas motifs of Hadrian the obvious question of why he paid no attention to these emperors in this respect presents itself. Clementia appears under Vitellius,²¹ and pietas has a not uncommon first century provenance.²² From Tiberius on salus is employed in a variety of ways, for instance the elaborate and specific salus generis humani of the civil war period.²³ So too concordia is variously used.²⁴ These terms, then, should not be considered anything but part of a stock of increasingly traditional and familar imperial virtues, commonly accepted and understood by Suetonius' contemporaries when the Caesares were published.

The argument that has been presented inclines strongly against the theory of allusiveness in Suetonius' biographies. Nevertheless, it can be shown that other writers of the period were influenced by current propaganda slogans,²⁵ and there is still value as far as Suetonius is concerned in the basic idea of a comparison between common coin legends and their counterparts in the imperial lives. What stands out, in spite of the pruning operation above, is not just the use of words which served as Hadrianic motifs, but of a whole spectrum of words, including others such as moderatio or modestia,²⁶ which are drawn upon to portray the character of an emperor or the quality of his reign. Concepts such as virtus, fama, gloria, and dignitas had always been important parts of the Roman historiographical tradition.²⁷ But Suetonius as a rule is not so much interested in these amorphous ideas as the more delimited terms discussed above. His selection of these terms is to some extent random, depending on the nature of the subject's life and period of rule. There may be also favourite ideas which recur in several biographies. And of course his employment of these words is not unique; they occur throughout Latin literature, particularly in the political vocabulary of the Late Republic and again in a contemporary setting equally in Tacitus and, most blatantly of all, in the Panegyric of Pliny. But the choice is deliberate. Also of importance in this respect is the legacy of encomium in the biographical tradition inherited by Suetonius. The virtue-terms are used by Cornelius Nepos though here the treatment is rather different, for Nepos can be unashamedly encomiastic in a way that Suetonius never matches. Further, Nepos' work is moralising in nature and the purpose behind his writings is clearly to provide instruction and edification in the best traditions of Roman historiography.²⁸ In contrast, Suetonius does not adopt overtly any such moralistic or didactic standpoint; indeed, personal statements of any kind at all are rare in the Caesares.²⁹ Thus, while the origins of Suetonian biography can be traced back through Nepos to Greek sources along a variety of paths, and while Suetonius retains moralistic jargon in his work, the terms themselves now have a non-moralistic application, but instead a special political flavour dependent upon the emperor and his deeds. One might maintain, therefore, that the relevance of virtues to Suetonius is to be found more in the political ethos of the principate in his own day than in literary tradition. In fact, it might be suggested that the development of a supply of imperial virtues and attributes through the first century with which the Roman public was increasingly familiar,³⁰ allowed Suetonius a ready made vehicle for assessing emperors and their periods of rule. To concentrate on coin legends alone, however, is too constricted an approach. The celebration of imperial attributes on inscriptions and monuments was just as effective a means of propaganda as the coinage. The visible quality, or otherwise, of the virtues expected from the emperor was readily apparent. Of equal importance to Suetonius besides attributes were their opposites, imperial vitia, naturally not commemorated on the coinage or in any other official manner, yet whose presence in the Caesares cannot be missed. What Suetonious is concerned with, then, is the identification of one figure with any number of stock attributes and the recognition of this at large in Roman society, as well as the potential for abuse of virtues; and this is reflected in his literary method through the use of virtue/vice generalisations and consequent exempla.

Notes

1. R. Syme, Tacitus (1958), 498; 517ff.

2. Of the major literary sources for Hadrian's life and reign Dio's account survives only in excerpted form, while the Augustan life, even though one of the so-called ‘good lives’, is by no means fully reliable. It cannot be axiomatic that our tradition of Hadrian necessarily reflects the full contemporary view.

3. T. F. Carney, ‘How Suetonius' Lives Reflect on Hadrian’ Proc. Afric. Class. Assoc. 11 (1968), 7ff, from which the list of legends is taken. G. W. Bowersock, ‘Suetonius and Trajan’ in Hommages à Marcel Renard, Collection Latomus 101 I (1969), 119ff (cf. K. R. Bradley, JI-ES [Journal of Indo-European Studies] 1 (1973), 217ff) prefers Trajanic allusions. Cf. A Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography (1971), 99f on the avoidance of panegyric by imperial biographers.

4. E.g. Iul. 75.1; Aug. 51.1, and often elsewhere.

5. Cf. H. Mattingly, BMC Imp. [British Museum Catalogs] III cxxiv, clxiv on Hadrian.

6. Both of these conditions seem necessary if any association between Hadrian and a predecessor is to be achieved. It cannot be conceded that the mere appearance of a virtue-term in any context whatever will apply, except in so loose a way as to be meaningless, either to the biographical subject or to Hadrian.

7. Tib. 8 (annona), Aug. 27.2 (clementia), Tib. 20 (concordia), Aug. 3.2, Galba 7.1 (iustitia), Claud. 6.2 (liberalitas), Aug. 66.2, Calig. 1.1, 12.1, Vitell. 3.1, Domit. 11.3 (pietas), Titus 6.2 (securitas), Nero 7.2, Vitell. 17.1 (salus).

8. In actuality Suetonius does not link, as claimed by Carney (art. cit.), annona with Galba, concordia with Tiberius, felicitas with Caesar, iustitia with Augustus or Galba, liberalitas with Claudius, pietas with Augustus, Vitellius or Domitian, or salus with Nero.

9. Tac. Ann. 1.7; Dio 54.1; 55.26. 1-3; 31.4; 60.11. 1-5, RG [Romana Gens] 5.2; 15.1 (see the commentaries of Brunt and Moore).

10. See the evidence variously collected in L. Wickert, RE [Real-Encyclopaedie der Klassischen Alterumswissenschaft] 22² s.v. ‘princeps’ cols. 2234ff; 2241f; 2243; S. Weinstock, Divus Julius (1971), 237ff. For Domitian cf. K. H. Waters, Phoenix 18 (1964), 49ff esp. 71ff; for Nero cf. AJP [American Journal of Philology] 94 (1973), 172ff.

11. M. P. Charlesworth, ‘The Virtues of a Roman Emperor’ Proc. Brit. Acad. 23 (1937), 113ff; cf. Ch. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome (1950), 150ff; Weinstock, op. cit., 233ff.

12. Concordia does not appear on coins of Otho himself (here the prevailing legend is securitas, BMC Imp. I 366) but it does for Galba and Vitellius, BMC Imp. I 317, 368, 375 etc. On concordia in general see M. Amit, ‘Concordia. Idéal politique et instrument de propagande’ Iura 13 (1962), 133ff; J. Béranger, ‘Remarques sur la concordia dans la propagande monétaire impériale et la nature du principat’ Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte und deren Nachleben, Festschrift für F. Altheim I (1969), 477ff; Weinstock, op. cit., 260ff.

13. E.g. RG 15ff (with Brunt and Moore); Tac. Ann. 13.31; 34; Dio 67.4.4.

14. H. Mattingly, BMC Imp. III cxxxi; cxlv; HA Hadr. 7.3.

15. E.g. Dio 56.34.4; 46.3; 59.2.1; 3.7-8; 60.35.2.

16. Camey, art. cit., 19. Observe, however, that Tacitus uses providentia only on three occasions (Syme, op. cit., 738); deliberate also?

17. See the discussion of M. P. Charlesworth, ‘Providentia and Aeternitas’ HTR [Harvard Theological Review] 29 (1936), 106ff; cf. C. H. V. Sutherland, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy (1951), 59f; J. Béranger, ‘La Prévoyance’ (Providentia) impériale' Hermes 88 (1960), 475ff.

18. BMC Imp. I, II index s.v. ‘annona’.

19. Ibid. I, index s.v. ‘Ceres Augusta’.

20. Ibid. I, II index s.v. ‘felicitas’.

21. Ibid. I, index s.v. ‘clementia’.

22. Ibid. I, II index s.v. ‘pietas’.

23. Ibid. I, II index s.v. ‘salus’.

24. Ibid. I, II index s.v. ‘concordia’.

25. For echoes of Nervan-Trajanic propaganda see Tac. Agric. 3.1; Hist. 1.1; Plin. Epp. 9.13.4; Pan. 58.3; 67.3 etc.

26. Modestia, Titus 4.1; Domit. 2.2; moderatio, Iul. 75.1; Aug. 21.3; Tib. 32.2; cf. also indulgentia, Iul. 65; 72.

27. D. C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (1967), passim. These words do of course appear in Suetonius but they do not as a rule form illustrated ideas; for exceptions see Tib. 17.1; Iul. 55.1; Aug. 21.3.

28. See E. Jenkinson, ‘Nepos—An Introduction to Latin Biography’ in Latin Biography (1967), ed. T.A. Dorey, 1ff.

29. G. B. Townend, ‘Suetonius and His Influence’ in Latin Biography (above n. 28), 90.

30. Syme, op. cit., 756.