Can a biased historical account be preferred over one that is more even-handed? It’s not an easy ethical question, but in terms of invigorating a reader with the spirit of a lost time, not to mention crafting a deep-dish narrative that pulls you in, the answer can be yes.
That’s even more true if the writer is Suetonius, and the work this account of the early rulers of the Roman empire.
Sharp character sketches and piquant social commentary make the First Century A. D. come alive in a way that makes you believe you are really half-back in time, reluctant to realize much of what he was writing was tabloid journalism for the stylus age. Not fiction, but likely blown well out of proportion for the sake of readability and old grudges.
So what!
Each of the 12 profiles are individually distinctive and readable in their own ways. Not that they are of equal weight. The first six, incorporating Julius Caesar and the first five emperors, account for 241 of the 310 pages in my Penguin Classics edition. The next six emperors make for slightly less depraved and thus less interesting reading, but also have a color and vibrancy to wish their accounts had gone much longer.
Julius Caesar is the star of the show, the man whose will to power created both the empire and the very title “Caesar,” or emperor, though he was stopped short of that milestone himself by assassination. Suetonius describes him as an exemplar of crafty ambition:
It has also been suggested that constant exercise of power gave Caesar a love of it, and that, after weighing his enemies’ strength against his own, he took this chance of fulfilling his youthful dreams by making a bid for absolute rule.
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| Caesar's death in 44 B. C. set off a long civil war. Suetonius quotes him: "I have long been sated with power and glory; but, should anything happen to me, the commonwealth will enjoy no peace." Image from https://onlinecoursesblog.hillsdale.edu/the-assassination-of-julius-caesar/ |
When Caesar’s time is over, his proto-Machiavellian legacy remained for the others to live up to, and invariably fall short of repeating.
As a warrior, Caesar was unmatched, rousing his men with appeals to their fighting spirit, sending away his charger before a key battle so there could be no retreat, even crossing a stream ahead of his men so he would be on the other side to greet his scouts.
As a politician, he gambled everything he had to break with his co-leader Pompey and cross the Rubicon after being expressly forbidden from doing so. “The die is cast,” Suetonius reports him saying. Civil war and sweeping victories for Caesar followed.
There are not a lot of battlefield glories in The Twelve Caesars as the narrative moves from B. C. to A. D. and the focus shifts to other leaders. Suetonius captures instead the qualities of leadership that made each of Caesar’s 11 successors successful or not. Interestingly, the first five –which draw his greatest focus – are a mixed bag that vary from flawed to depraved. Here the question of story-skewing bias begins to emerge.
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| In the standard account, Nero plucks (not fiddles) a lyre as Rome burns before him in 64 A. D. Suetonius has him bursting into song while enjoying the view. Never mind that his palace was an early casualty of the epic blaze. Image from https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-fire-rome/ |
When discussing the last of those five, Nero, Suetonius levels a clear indictment for the burning of Rome:
Pretending to be disgusted by the drab old buildings and narrow, winding streets of Rome, he brazenly set fire to the city, and though a number of former consuls caught his attendants trespassing on their property with tow and blazing torches, they dared not interfere.
In this Suetonius comes into conflict with another Roman historian, Tacitus, who places Nero far away when the infamous blaze happened.
Tiberius, the second emperor after Caesar, is described even more luridly molesting children and tossing those who displeased him from a cliff at his island retreat in Capri. We know there is a basis for this account, if not the emphatic way Suetonius writes of it. But that certainty makes for a compelling tale, and a thesis on how absolute power corrupts and destroys its possessor when not wielded responsibly.
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| Did a forced marriage turn Tiberius mad? Suetonius writes of his love for his wife Vipsania, whom he was forced to divorce for the sake of Augustus's daughter, Julia. After becoming emperor, he ditched Julia as well as any pretense at propriety in his private life. Image from https://romanjews.com/ancient-rome-and-judea-julius-caesar-to-tiberius/ |
Suetonius wrote of these events decades later, in what was known as the Nerva-Antonine line of the Five Good Emperors. These were Caesars who significantly expanded the empire, brought more than the usual amount of wealth and peace, and were not notorious for personal greed or cruelty. What Suetonius presents here is in sharp contrast to that.
The most marked example of this is Gaius, better known as Caligula, Tiberius’s immediate successor. After noting the accomplishments of Gaius’s early accomplishments, he puts the brakes on the love train by adding: “So much for Gaius the Emperor; the rest of this history must needs deal with Gaius the Monster.”
Gaius Caligula murdered, plundered, and overspent his reign into insolvency. “Let them hate me so long as they fear me,” Suetonius records him saying. In Suetonius’s telling, he was also quite mad:
He often danced even at night, and once, at the close of the second watch, summoned three senators of consular rank to the palace; arriving half-dead with fear, they were conducted to a stage upon which, amid a tremendous racket of flutes and castanets, Gaius suddenly burst, dressed in a shawl and an ankle-length tunic; he performed a song and dance, and disappeared as suddenly as he entered.
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| John Hurt as Caligula puts on a show in the 1976 BBC-TV series "I, Claudius," an incident taken from The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius also writes that Caligula would have gold pieces laid on the floor for him to walk over or wallow on. GIF from https://venvsinfvrs.tumblr.com/post/61138938631/caligulas-dance-i-claudius |
One way Suetonius establishes his credibility is by introducing points both for and against a specific emperor. The first true emperor, and Julius’s immediate successor, Augustus, is presented this way. He kills his way to the throne as brutally as any of the Caesars, but once there rules with some amount of grace and restraint.
Suetonius humanizes Augustus by sharing anecdotes of his love for dice, an apparently wholesome love of children, and his patriotic annoyance at citizens who wore Greek cloaks rather than Roman togas.
Like nearly all the Caesars, Augustus was sexually active outside of his marriage, with both women and men. But Suetonius is careful to describe him as no mere wanton:
Not even his friends could deny that he often committed adultery, though of course they said in justification that he did so for reasons of state, not simple passion – he wanted to discover what his enemies were at by getting intimate with their wives.
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| Augustus promises Cleopatra, mother of Caesar's illegitimate son Caesarion, that her son will be spared. Later he ordered Caesarion's death. Suetonius writes of Augustus's cruelty as an aspect of his reign more logic-based than that of later emperors. Painting by Louis Gauffier (1787) from https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/17/a-history-of-rome-in-paintings-15-peace-in-the-age-of-augustus/ |
Suetonius is no prude or moral scold. He can be quite harsh to emperors whose failings were less harmful to others. This is the case with Claudius, Caligula’s successor, who was pushed onto the throne by his nephew’s assassination. Neither cruel nor greedy in Suetonius’s telling, Claudius even extended the Empire into Britain. But he is also presented as a puppet of his various wives and advisors.
Suetonius also dwells on Claudius’s physical incapacities:
These included an uncontrolled laugh, a horrible habit under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth and running at the nose, a stammer, and a persistent nervous tic – which grew so bad under emotional stress that his head would toss from side to side.
The only emperor presented as thoroughly decent is one of the last six, Titus. His reign was short, from 79-81 A. D., and marred by the intrigues of his devious brother and eventual successor Domitian. “Although often given an abundant excuse for revenge, he swore that he would rather die than take life,” Suetonius writes of Titus.
One otherwise senses willingness to kill was part of the job description.
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| Galba, the first of four emperors in the year 69 A.D., replaced the Julio-Claudian line. His reign lasted just six months. "His power and prestige were far greater while he was assuming control than afterwards," Suetonius writes, a common theme among his successors. Image of bust from Musei Capitolini from https://ancientromelive.org/galba/ |
The Twelve Caesars has moments of great pathos and tragedy, but also a strong undercurrent of humor. The worst emperors draw some of the biggest laughs. Nero, we are told, styled himself quite the singer and actor, and used his absolute power to make sure he got a full house whenever he performed:
No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We hear of women in the audience giving birth and of men being so bored with the music and the applause that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear or shammed dead and were carried away for burial.
After the Julio-Claudian line fell out, there came three emperors in one year, followed by a fourth, Vespasian, Titus’s father, who was brutal but at least enjoyed a laugh, right up to the end. Writes Suetonius, “His deathbed joke was ‘Dear me! I must be turning into a god.’”
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| An early printing-press edition of The Twelve Caesars, from 1535. The earliest extant edition dates from the 9th century, and like all later versions, is missing the preface and first few chapters. The second-century work otherwise seems to have survived intact. Image from https://www.mediastorehouse.com/mary-evans-prints-online/suetonius-gaius-suetonius-tranquillus-69-122-8260097.html |
Suetonius was for a time a ranking secretary in the court of Hadrian, one of the Good Emperors. This gave him access to material that informs his history. But he was said to have displeased the emperor by being “too familiar” with his wife. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition says this is why the profiles of the various Caesars get shorter, even when covering reigns closer to his own time. His source material became harder to access.
Strangely, Suetonius never gets around to the emperors of his own lifetime, including ones he knew personally like Hadrian. Given the needling manner in which Suetonius wrote, he might have wound up filling a British wall. Perhaps he found these later emperors less inspiring, if he sought more lurid examples of flawed imperial behavior.
One
must approach Suetonius as the kind of writer who didn’t let the truth get in
the way of a good tale. Still, any lack of veracity is more than made up for by
the verisimilitude of his profiles, his willingness to bore into different
personality traits and political challenges of the rulers covered, and a
refreshing lack of gravity in the way he writes of them.
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