I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits was enough to make my younger brother bury his head in a cushion. Graves had spiced up Suetonius’s racy accounts of violent murder, incest and poison. But, in the world before trigger-warnings, the BBC outdid him in bloodlust. The most gruesome scene in the TV drama – of Caligula doing some amateur surgery on his sister’s stomach to remove their unborn incestuous child from the womb – was pure invention by the screenwriter Jack Pulman.
Graves resented the accusation that he’d relied too heavily on Suetonius to create his bestsellers. Nevertheless, in 1957 he produced his own translation of the biographies of the 12 Caesars. This begins with Julius as precursor of the first imperial dynasty and ends with the last of the Flavians, Domitian, assassinated in AD 96. Although Graves’s version for Penguin Classics has stood the test of time, it was never intended as a school crib. In fact Graves employed the poet Alastair Reed to make a literal translation from the Latin and used it to take flight towards something much less pedestrian.
Now Tom Holland, the princeps (‘first citizen’) of popular Roman history, has provided Penguin with a vibrant new translation of Suetonius that’s closer to the original without being slavishly so. Surprisingly, Holland, who’s been vocal about the government’s decision to axe the Latin Excellence Scheme, has practically nothing to say in his introduction about Suetonian language. This could be a case of if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. ‘Hostile to style and elegance’ was the historian Ronald Syme’s blunt verdict on Suetonius. He had a point.
What is especially praiseworthy about Holland’s Lives is that he doesn’t get too bogged down in all the lengthy sentences and sub clauses. His rendition of the book’s celebrated, almost throwaway line (about Caligula) shows him combining concision with accuracy: ‘But enough of the princeps – what now remains to be described is the monster.’ Without any fuss, Holland deals with the book’s most contentious issue, in the life of Emperor Claudius, accepting that the ‘Chrestus’, who is said to have ‘whipped up’ the Jews ‘into a chronic state of disorder’, is indeed Jesus Christ.
The depiction of the Caesars’ personal idiosyncrasies, to say nothing of their jaw-dropping monstrosities, displays Suetonius’s insatiable appetite for entertaining and characterful stories. Julius Caesar’s distress at his baldness led him to adopt a Trump-style comb-over. He couldn’t wait for the senate to vote him the honour of wearing a laurel wreath to assist in a better cover-up. Augustus, we are told, singed his legs with hot nutshells to make the hairs grow softer. In the depths of his depravity, Tiberius trained small boys to slip between his thighs as he was swimming and tease him ‘with the playfulness of their nibbling’.
Claudius, cowering behind curtains after Caligula’s assassination, is discovered and declared imperator
You don’t forget such things in a hurry. Yet they serve an underlying serious purpose. Suetonius was carving out a place for biography as distinct from history. He wasn’t interested in competing with his great historian contemporary Tacitus. His emphasis isn’t on high politics and great events, more on the everyday aspects of imperial administration. Throughout the Lives he shows a fascination with the excesses of an autocracy, whether it be through an emperor’s capacity to spend money, creating a spectacle by putting on extravagant games, or through his participation in acts of great cruelty. Crucially, Suetonius understood the fusion between public performance and private character.
He was also an innovator in the practice of quoting verbatim from first-hand sources. As the official in charge of the Emperor Hadrian’s correspondence, Gaius Tranquillus Suetonius had privileged access to letters and other archival materials, though his downfall in AD 122, perhaps before he’d written the later, sketchier biographies, put an end to this. His fall from favour appears to have taken place while he accompanied Hadrian on his tour of Britain. Some believe his dismissal was a consequence of over-familiarity with the Empress Sabine. Others suggest that the falling out was the natural by-product of spending a wet summer in northern England.
Readers coming to The Lives of the Caesars for the first time will find many dramatic and memorable scenes to detain them. Caesar crosses the Rubicon; Caligula declares war on the sea and orders his men to collect shells as the spoils of war; Claudius, cowering behind curtains after Caligula’s assassination, is discovered by a soldier and declared imperator.
Nero’s singing never fails to bring a smile. No one was allowed to leave the theatre while Nero was giving a concert. ‘So it was’ that women went into labour during his recitals. People who were fed up with having to listen to him and applaud him ‘got round the fact that the gates to the theatre were locked… by pretending to be dead and having themselves carried out as though to a funeral’.
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