translated by Tom Holland
Think what there is in the name. We acknowledge such historic dynasties as the Tudors, the Medicis, the Hapsburgs. Yet none commands a fraction of the awe inspired by the Caesars. Unworthy and barbarous though many of Rome’s emperors were, they held sway over most of the known world then. No armies in the succeeding 1,000 years outdid their legions at their zenith. No European civilization before the Renaissance matched their culture and engineering skills.
Tom Holland is a master popularizer of the ancients, and his new translation of Suetonius sustains his reputation. In its introduction he describes the 2nd-century author as “a presiding genius over an entire new way of producing and consuming drama”. Holland likens Suetonius’s stories of the first 12 Caesars to modern TV’s Dynasty and The Sopranos.
And, indeed, Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius, derived from Suetonius, became a celebrated BBC series — The Forsyte Saga with poison and incest. The Caesars’ notion of mercy was to permit defeated enemies to have their throats cut before they were crucified.
Suetonius tells the story of Julius in 81 B.C., groaning as he contemplated a statue of Alexander the Great. He was then a mere quaestor, and had achieved nothing memorable at the age — 29 — when Macedonia’s titan had conquered the world.
The author offered physical descriptions of his characters, writing that Julius was “a tall man, of fair complexion, with … dark, piercing eyes. He enjoyed good health, except for a susceptibility late in life to sudden fainting fits, and to nightmares … He had a prodigious sexual appetite.”
Superstitious, as almost every Roman was, Suetonius records without skepticism the vision of a divine musician who appeared before Julius’s troops at the Rubicon during the general’s march to power. This caused him to proclaim: “Let us go where we are summoned both by divinely authored signs and by the wrongs our foes have done us. The die is cast.”
Julius was assassinated in 44 B.C. after a four year-rule as dictator. Suetonius writes: “He abused his position of power, and deserved to be slain.” He was succeeded by his great-nephew Octavius, renamed Augustus, among the greatest emperors. The author writes: “Never … did he make war on a people without just and pressing cause … He could justifiably boast of having found [Rome] made of brick and leaving it made of marble.”
The emperor courted foreign potentates with gifts of thousands of captives. Why are today’s young scholars obsessed with the supposed unique wickedness of the European people trade while apparently indifferent to the Roman slave economy, or for that matter the Arab one?
Augustus’s stepson and successor Tiberius for some time in his youth withdrew from public life. Suetonius suspected that this was prompted by “loathing for his wife, whom he could neither denounce nor divorce”. This child of Augustus’s supremely scheming wife Livia survived two decades on the throne, unloved but not wholly incompetent.
At the time of its creation, the novelty of The Lives of the Caesars was that it focused on the emperors as men, and said little about the empire under their stewardship. It was a gossip’s telling of the Roman story: Suetonius was the Chips Channon of his time. Maybe half of what he wrote is likely to have been true, and Holland says little about which half. The absence of context is sometimes frustrating, although that is Suetonius’s fault and not his translator’s.
A morbid part of our fascination with the Caesars lies in their exploration of the wilder shores of whimsicality. Nero used for fishing a golden net strung with scarlet and purple thread, while the sexual exploits of most emperors would have shocked an Ottoman sultan.
Absolute power made possible absolute cruelty. Augustus forced one of his favorite freedmen to kill himself after discovering that he had been sleeping with citizens’ wives, and ordered the legs of his secretary to be broken for accepting a bribe to reveal the contents of an imperial letter.
Caligula caused some senators to run for miles beside his chariot in their togas, and then to wait on him at table. “Let them hate, provided they fear,” said the emperor, who ensured that a man whom he condemned died slowly so that he would “know he was being put to the blade”.
These were men full of contradictions. After Claudius executed his third wife, Messalina, for serial depravities, he told an assembly of praetorians that never again would he wed, “so terrible was his record of marriages”, then he promptly remarried one of his earlier wives.
Suetonius recorded some Claudian mannerisms that Graves and Derek Jacobi reproduced, “his laughter … an unbecoming bray … his shows of anger, which would see him drool and snort mucus … a stammer … and whenever he made the slightest movement, so the twitching of his head (which was habitual) would become even more violent”. Jacobi made Claudius an on-screen pussycat, but there were plenty of savageries on his watch.
There was none to match Nero’s, however. When that emperor died “such was the public rejoicing that the plebs ran all about the city wearing caps of the kind that are given to slaves when they are granted their freedom”.
The best of the Caesars, Hadrian and Trajan, came after Suetonius’s book ends. But his work offers a peerlessly enjoyable introduction to the earlier imperial Romans. Holland writes that many of Suetonius’s lives are more like collages, but all the better for that. They rank alongside the writings of Tacitus as key sources for the Rome of those times. And while the latter was a propagandist and partisan, Suetonius strove for objectivity.
With Holland’s name on it, the old Roman’s multiple biographies should find a new audience, to remind us that the monsters who, astoundingly, achieve power in 21st-century democracies had forebears in the ancient world who matched them folly for folly, whim for whim, vanity for vanity. Any witness to a Roman imperial triumph would have felt at home in Washington’s Capitol this past January.
Sir Max Hastings is the author of several works of history, a columnist at The Times of London, and a former editor at The Telegraph
