The imperial family had to set standards for the entire empire. When his daughter Julia flagrantly flouted Augustus’s own adultery legislation, Suetonius reports that he had no choice but to exile her. (Such gender stereotypes remain with us today, if one recalls the photo shoot of Julia Gillard knitting in Women’s Weekly).
Augustus’s daughters were praised by Suetonius for spending their time weaving in his house. The same applied to members of his family. Although they are now translated into English, these graphic tales still have the power to shock and unsettle the reader.Īn emperor’s private life and his sexual conduct were fair game because they reflected whether or not he was fit to rule. When the Loeb Classical Library, which features the original Latin and the English translation of classical texts on facing pages, published their first edition of Suetonius in 1913, these chapters about Tiberius’s behaviour were left in Latin because they were considered too scandalous to translate. He chronicles Tiberius’s sordid behaviour on Capri, detailing how he forced men and women to engage in threesomes, had children perform oral sex on him, and raped young men who took his fancy. The tales of the emperors’ sexual habits constitute some of the most famous passages in Suetonius. In Caligula’s case, it is from this point on that we read about his pretensions to divinity, his condemnation of aristocrats to hard labour in the mines, and his sexual immorality.Įmperor Tiberius, played by George Baker, in I Claudius. This “division” – a statement in which Suetonius clearly separates the anecdotes illustrating virtues from the vices – is a feature of several of his biographies. Thus far, it is as if we have been writing about an emperor, but the rest must be about a monster. He even gives due credit to the notorious Caligula, who began his reign by publishing the imperial budget and showing generosity to the people. All emperors appear as flawed men with both virtues and vices, but the balance between them depends on the individual ruler. Suetonius is fair and evenhanded in his treatment of his subjects. This helps to explain the later tales of Nero’s own savagery, because the reader would see that this vice was part of his nature. Early in the Life of Nero, the reader encounters Nero’s grandfather who staged particularly cruel shows in the arena. When Suetonius describes an emperor’s ancestors, he highlights how their qualities influenced the ruler himself. The stories of virtue and vice in the Caesars are carefully selected to illustrate whether emperors measured up to this standard. In the second century A.D., when Suetonius was writing, there was no chance of a return to the Republic, but aristocrats still expected the emperor to behave as if he were merely the most prestigious citizen rather than an autocrat. These categories include the emperor’s virtues (such as justice, self-control, and generosity) and his vices (like greed, cruelty, and sexual excess). Instead, Suetonius tells his readers that he has carefully organized the stories “by categories”. Although Suetonius usually begins with an emperor’s family and upbringing, the bulk of each Life consists of an assortment of memorable, and sometimes salacious, anecdotes about an emperor’s public conduct and private life.īut this is no mere haphazard catalogue of sex and corruption. The structure of the individual biographies has often puzzled modern readers, who expect Suetonius to tell his story in a linear fashion from birth to death. 69 (Galba, Otho, Vitellius), and the Flavian dynasty (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian). Instead The Twelve Caesars includes the Julio-Claudians, Rome’s first imperial dynasty (Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), three short-lived emperors during the civil wars of A.D. Political expediency meant that Suetonius wisely avoided writing about Hadrian.
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