Even Augustus, universally adored, gets his licks: as a youth he was ruthless in effecting retribution on the enemies of Julius Caesar, callously massacring prisoners to the disgust of those around him.
The literally cutthroat tactics employed by nearly every future emperor as early as their teenage years establish them all as ambitious, audacious, cunning, and usually cruel men, and Suetonius spares none of them. The aim, then, was to establish as completely and honestly as possible the personalities and characters of the clan of Caesars, if only for the reason that one could finally do so without risk of being executed for praising one, or failing to praise another.Įach man, then, and they are very much acknowledged to be men despite posthumous deification, is given an origin story, a catalogue of works and services rendered to the empire, a candid acknowledgement of vices, weaknesses, and even sexual habits, and, more often than not, the circumstances of their assassination. Many still lived who could tell stories of the Neronian conflagration, or whose families had yet to recover from the ravages of Tiberius. Writing from a perspective close to the topic (he was born in the tumultuous year 69, in which Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian all assumed the purple) yet distant enough not to be unduly affected (as imperial secretary under the relatively pacific rule of Hadrian, he had ample time and authority to be objective, at least until he was dismissed in 122 AD), Suetonius was not concerned with writing a chronological account of recent history. It’s a mountain of anecdote and hearsay, so as history it is somewhat unreliable, but it’s as vivid a collection of character portraits as has ever been assembled.
But the stories provided by Suetonius, while they must be read with a skeptical eye now and then, feel too minutely detailed, too personal and arbitrary, to be anything but truth. Creasy wrote in his Battles that the obscure machinations of warring east Asia “appear before us through the twilight of primaeval history, dim and indistinct, but massive and majestic, like mountains in the early dawn.” So one would expect the lives of such rulers as the Caesars to exhibit likewise such mythical prominence.
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