The Lives of the Caesars
By Suetonius
Translated by Tom Holland
Penguin, 432 pages, $35
A Thessalian warlock meets the ghost of dead Julius Caesar alone in the pathless waste. A cloud of flying ants swarm an emperor and drag him down to hell. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus bolt open of their own accord and summon Nero. Caligula stands before the ocean at night and it swells into a giant luminescent phantom and begins to speak. This isn’t Amazon Prime sexing up Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the Age of TikTok: It’s the original source, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, the hallucinatory second-century A.D. collection of biographies of Julius Caesar and his first eleven successors. Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History, the world’s most popular history podcast, has done us all a service with his new translation. It shines a spotlight on an under-read and underappreciated classic.
Classical Roman literature is typically divided into two eras, the Golden Age, when Virgil and Cicero and Caesar and Horace laid down the canons of perfection and taste; and the Silver Age, which was bizarre, gory, louche, decadent, hyperintellectual, perverse. Suetonius closes the Silver Age. Every stereotype about the decadence of the Roman Empire is here. Julius Caesar’s infinite sexual appetite, which made him “a man with every woman, and a woman with every man.” Vitellius’s wild dinner parties of peacock brains and flamingo tongues. Caligula bringing prisoners into his dining room so he could watch them being tortured over meals. The perfect proportions of Hellenic art, we are told, derive from Apollo’s oracular utterance “Nothing to excess.” The thesis of The Lives of the Caesars is that Caesar and his followers did everything to excess. Here we find ugliness in place of proportion; but ugliness with a meaning.
“Suetonius depicts what is under everyone’s clothes.”
It is easy to feel that our era loves the Roman Empire too much, and the frugal, law-abiding, freedom-loving Roman Republic too little. I would rather see a new Hollywood movie about Scipio Africanus than another Gladiator retread. Yet the basic reason for having a republic at all is found on every page of the Lives. The emperors are powerful, but with this power comes no grace, no elevation of virtue or capacity to justify such power. In the very Caesars themselves, who have given their name to absolute power in the West for millennia, Suetonius can find no mystique. Here are no heroes, no mandate of heaven. They are caliphs of nobody. Just human beings, no more. He makes sure to describe them all as if naked: “potbellied,” “balding,” “speckled with birthmarks,” “with splayed feet and bandy legs.” In his introduction, Holland claims that “Suetonius was not, nor had any wish to be, a historian... He did not bother himself with the precise details of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, nor of the ferociously complex political machinations that had accompanied Augustus’ rise to power, nor of the tortured relationship between Tiberius and his fellow aristocrats.” Perhaps he merely wrote a different type of history, and for different reasons. Historians tend to swaddle their subjects in great robes of historical dignity. Suetonius depicts what is under everyone’s clothes.
We tend to think of the arrival of Julius Caesar and the destruction of the Republic as the end of freedom. Suetonius, by focusing on the persons of the emperors, shows that this reading is incorrect. In fact, the arrival of the Empire meant unlimited freedom—for one individual. Indeed this book is primarily a study in such freedom. Caligula during a meal with two friends suddenly begins laughing, and when asked why, he answers, “Why, only that with a single nod I could have either of your throats cut here and now!” Augustus is dining with a friend when he gets up, takes the man’s wife away, has sex with her, and returns, “with her hair dishevelled and her face bright red from ear to ear.” He knew the husband and wife were powerless to oppose him.
This is a sobering thought for every republic, that freedom corrupted might well devolve in this way. The worst form of slavery is a society where the leaders feel themselves completely free. What is slavery itself, but someone else’s freedom over you? Suetonius writes of a man thrown into the arena to fight wild beasts. He loudly protested his innocence before the crowd. The emperor had his tongue cut out and threw him back to the beasts. Caligula found out that someone in his court was taking small doses of poisons to bring on immunity, and laughed. “What antidote,” he boasts, “is there against Caesar?”
There was, of course, an antidote against Caesar, as history would prove. When Caligula addresses some legionaries with an intention of executing them, some leave to go grab their own weapons. Caesar was free because he was armed; but that meant armies could be free too. Caligula backed down. This would become the story of the remainder of Roman history. All constitutional checks on the emperor’s authority had vanished; the army would become the only other remaining source of authority. Weapons were the custodians of liberty.
There are plenty of places where a scholar might quibble with Holland’s translation, which as a whole is really not better or worse than others. It replaces the Penguin translation of Robert Graves (who also novelized Suetonius as the I, Claudius series). Graves had a tendency to John Bull the Romans, speaking of Julius Caesar as “colonel,” an attempt at clarity which probably makes the text more obscure. Holland restores “military tribune,” presuming that a reader can Google the term. “Optimates” similarly replaces “the aristocratic party.” There are times when Holland simply uses the translation to insert an entire footnote into the text. Where Suetonius has two words, “Telephus nomenclator,” Holland translates “Telephus, a slave whose duty it was to remind his mistress of the names of the people she met.” There are Britishisms like “slaphead” and “a poky attic” which Americans may not understand, and colloquialisms like politicians “screwing Ptolemy” which seem out of place. The Roman concept of pudicitia—sexual integrity, chastity—Holland translates as “the sexual privileges of a free citizen.” How Caligula could have violated his own sexual privileges of a free citizen—Suetonius accuses him of violating his own pudicitia—is unclear, though I think even modern British people should understand that he had no respect for chastity in himself or anyone else.
Some of the traditional high points Holland fumbles: When Caesar defends himself from the assassins, shouting, “That is violence!” (“Ista quidem vis est”) Holland gives us, “Why, you are using force on me.” “Veni vidi vici” becomes “Came saw conquered,” which I understand—the amazing thing about Caesar’s inscription was its brevity—but it’s not in fact correct, and “I came I saw I conquered” is quite brief enough. But none of these details rise to the level of an objection. The translation is eminently readable, correct in almost all details, and gives the modern reader a perfectly harrowing read. Other translations do as well, but if you read the Holland translation you will also be au courant.
James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus proclaim “History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Suetonius wrote the book of the nightmare. It is no surprise that it should be populated by ghosts, by strange portents, by horrors, by encounters so uncanny one cannot believe they are real: ants devouring Tiberius’s pet snake; emperors posing between the statues of the gods in striking attitudes for the benefit of their worshippers; a half-sacrificed bull covering Domitian in blood; Julius Caesar at a dinner party the night before his death, proclaiming that the best death was one that was “sudden and unexpected;” the Year of the Four Emperors, when two emperors commit suicide to avoid the kind of death the third had, for he, Vitellius, “was tortured to death by having his flesh delicately and methodically sliced from his body on the Gemonian Steps, from where his corpse was then dragged on a hook to the Tiber.”
“The Lives of the Caesars is a portrait of the political world into which Jesus was born.”
All this recalls another of Holland’s books, Dominion. In it Holland sets out to put the lie to Gibbon, who insisted that the Roman Empire comprised “the most civilized portion of mankind” and Christian superstition had set the world back 1400 years. Dominion contends that the civilizing power of the modern West is mostly derived from Christianity, and not the pagans. The Lives of the Caesars is a portrait of the political world into which Jesus was born, the prime evidence of the world at the moment of Incarnation. It is mostly a horror show, of a grotesquerie even our modern television shows have not yet descended to.
The professors have of course disputed all this, and there are none of these emperors for whom modern scholars have not written apologias, claiming that Suetonius had slandered Caligula, Nero, Tiberius, and more. Suetonius was Hadrian’s court librarian and had far better sources to work from than modern historians do; he also lived through some of the reigns he wrote of. Whatever his bias may be—an academic problem which we may safely say will never be resolved—Suetonius has become the West’s great prophet of the Dostoevskyan nightmare where “everything is permitted.” The quality of his work has made it a classic, long after all the panegyrics these men had during their lifetimes have long been forgotten. “Remember,” he has Caligula say, “I am allowed to do anything to anybody.”
“Just when the gods had ceased to be,” wrote Flaubert, “and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.” Suetonius captures this moment, when man had the power to possess his desire, unencumbered by moral absolutes. It reads as a tale of degradation and corruption and horror. Suetonius describes Tiberius’s character as “mud mixed with blood.” Like the other emperors, he gave expression to the violence and vice that just await an opportunity to live in the world. The Lives of the Caesars are hardly beach reading, and parts might well make a reader sick. Yet this is a book that can change us, arming us with indelible images of human suffering and corruption. Suetonius’s study of individual character under conditions of unlimited power remains an essential asset for any mind wishing to understand humanity. Holland’s translation is as easy a route in as could be desired. He deserves our thanks.