(2) He went to serve in Asia as aide-de-camp to the provincial governor Marcus Thermus. There are many Mariuses in this fellow Caesar.” Eventually friends of his persuaded Sulla to relent, at which he spoke the much quoted words: “Have your way and take him but bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding. divorce her, but Caesar obstinately refused and had to go into hiding from Sulla’s wrath. The dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla demanded that Caesar ‘put her away’ i.e. (1) Aged barely 18, Caesar married Cornelia, daughter of the consul Lucius Cornelius Cinna, of Gaius Marius’s party. The Life consists of 89 short sections which fill 40 pages of the Penguin translation. Why? Did Augustus suppress them as he is said to have suppressed Caesar’s juvenile writings, in order to manipulate and burnish the legend of his adoptive father? Just as with Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar, Suetonius’s life appears to be missing the first section, about the great man’s family and boyhood. Penguin still publish the translation they commissioned in the 1950s from the famous novelist and poet Robert Graves, a writer who is just as charming and gossipy as Suetonius (see his wonderful memoir Goodbye To All That). Suetonius assembles evidence for and against his subjects – then leaves it for the reader to decide.

In his introduction to the Penguin edition, the renowned classicist Michael Grant (1914 to 2004) points out that Suetonius’s main contribution to the genre was that he moved away from the traditional eulogistic treatment of dead great men to take a more ‘astringent’ and ‘disenchanted’ view (lovely words).Ībove all, he avoids the heavy moralising of earlier writers (Sallust with his heavy moralising and Plutarch with his negative opinion of Caesar, both spring to mind). Although this sounds dry the result is the opposite the inclusion of lots of juicy gossip and anecdotes, delivered with a deadpan, non-judgemental expression. Suetonius only briefly covers the facts of the lives before moving to more personal, non-political material about his subjects, classified and arranged according to subject matter. So Suetonius departed from the strictly chronological approach of the historians, and of his younger contemporary, the biographer Plutarch (46 to 120), and a chose a different method. (Taken together, Suetonius and Tacitus are our only major sources for this critical, formative period in the history of the western world. Suetonius realised that the genre of biography needed to strike out in a different direction from history, not least because of the overpowering example of Publius Cornelius Tacitus, whose Annals and Histories describe the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and the Year of the Four Emperors. Which is why 69 came to be called The Year of Four Emperors.) Three of them ruled for only a few months each –Galba from June 68 to January 69 Otho from January to April 69 and Vitellius from April to December 69 – before Vespasian seized power and stabilised the situation, ruling from 69 to 79. (It may be worth pointing out that Nero’s suicide in 68 led to a period of anarchy in which a succession of generals seized power. As it says on the tin, The Lives of the Caesars includes biographies of the first 12 Roman emperors, being:

The Lives of the Caesars, by contrast, has survived almost in its entirety (it is thought that only some of the opening sections of the first life, Caesar, are missing). He wrote The Lives of Illustrious Men, 60 or so biographies of poets, grammarians, orators and historians, almost all of which has been lost (except for short lives of Terence, Virgil and Horace). Pliny describes him as a quiet and studious man devoted to his writing. Subsequently he served on the staff of emperors, being in charge of the emperor’s libraries under Trajan and then managing the emperor Hadrian’s correspondence.

He is recorded as serving on the staff of Pliny the Younger when the latter was governor of Bithynia in north Turkey in 110 to 112 AD. He may have taught literature for a while, he seems to have practiced the law. He was born around 70 AD, probably in a town in modern-day Algeria. Not much is known about Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, generally referred to as Suetonius.

Tarpeian rock gaius julius caesar