“... adults and young favourites, and ancient literature can seem quite reticent on the subject. Suetonius can barely bring himself to say what Tiberius did with unweaned infants, but in the best biographical tradition manages to overcome his reticence. Everyone knew that freeborn boys and girls were off limits: violations were subject to harsh ...”

“... by a single potentate: political history collapsed more readily into biography. Unsurprisingly, Suetonius, the other great biographer of antiquity, was Plutarch’s contemporary. Personal improvement, Plutarch suggests in one essay, is best achieved by ‘setting before one’s eyes those who are good or who have been so’. Think of a quandary, and imagine ...”

“... visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she thought. ‘Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,’ she said, only that’s not Wilde but La Rochefoucauld.The vanity and the intoxication with power is overwhelming. ‘You know,’ Hillary later ...”

“... he filled in the many gaps with some deft cutting and pasting from classical Roman authors such as Suetonius. There have been countless studies of Charlemagne in many languages since then, not least the wave that arrived around 2014 to mark the duodecentenary of his death, but few have been as ambitiously biographical as Nelson’s. Historians of early ...”

“... month). For the full count the reader is exhorted to consult the copious biography written by ‘Suetonius Optatianus’. This emperor claimed the historian as an ancestor and enjoined that copies of the books be made every year. Hence unique testimony to the transmission of classical texts in an obscure epoch. Next, language and style. By paradox this ample ...”

“... Elder, Vegetius, Macrobius, Boethius and other prose writers. No trace, however, of Caesar, Livy, Suetonius, Tacitus and other later classroom standards, still less lascivious lyricists and romancers like Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan. Even of the approved classical authors, nothing seems to have been sent overseas with the Anglo-Saxon missions to the ...”

“... is quicker with jokes about ‘The Killers’ and ‘Prufrock’ and lines from Walter Bagehot and Suetonius than a truly plain-speaking private dick ought to be. When the drunken novelist tells him that good stuff is written fast, and that claims to the contrary are ‘a lot of mish-mash’, he says: ‘It didn’t come easy to Flaubert, and his stuff is ...”

“... and even with notions of pure blood as attributed to Augustus by the imperial biographer Suetonius. While Rome’s Cultural Revolution eloquently insists on the bottom up transformation of Roman society and culture, the story it tells inevitably allows Augustus some of his traditional agency, as well as his pivotal status. We may not want to ...”

“... generally whenever he heard that someone had died quickly and without suffering,’ his biographer Suetonius reported, ‘he prayed for a similar euthanasia for himself and his family.’ Other suicides may have been passed over unmentioned because they are not exemplary. Anton van Hooff has argued that the ancient stigma against death by hanging means it was ...”

“... Ages that although Caesar was called a caeso matris utero, ‘from the cut womb of his mother’, Suetonius remarked that Caesar’s mother died much later, during her son’s Gallic wars. Clearly this could not be true; women did not survive this operation. Yet people (women as well as men) kept doing it. Why? Sometimes, if the mother had died, in a ...”

“... whose approach was influenced by the Roman historians of the late Republic – Tacitus, Sallust, Suetonius, Cicero and Lucan. The chronicles are full of juicy examples of greed, ambition, covetousness, duplicity and the manipulation of ‘the people’ by scheming politicians. By relying too heavily on these accounts, Watts argues, modern historians have ...”

“... of authority knew and used the distinguished historians of the period of tyranny, Tacitus and Suetonius. Echoes from them, and from Seneca, recur in Tudor writers. Wyatt uses as one of his refrains circa regna tonat – ‘thunder lours around courts’ – from Seneca’s Phaedra. And issues of a heavy and dangerous power bring menace to his love ...”

“... appears in a few places in one out of a multitude of manuscripts, and in a single sentence of Suetonius there is a reference to Jewish rioting in Rome in AD 49 led by one Chrestos – which may or may not be relevant). Stewart’s view of the early Church as exercising powers of censorship and control is anachronistic: as an illicit private society it was ...”

“... prejudice, while Salway himself does as much in taking Claudius a good deal more seriously than Suetonius did. Despite such possible drawbacks of the ‘Greats’ approach, the overall effect of Salway’s book is that one can see how Britain fitted politically and socially into the Roman world; and Salway makes effective use of evidence from sub-Roman Gaul ...”

“... Titus, in 81 (Vespasian had died in 79, a few months before Vesuvius erupted). Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius, all writing after Domitian’s assassination, portray him as a vicious, homicidal tyrant, especially towards the end of his reign, but it isn’t evident that he was much worse than many other emperors: he executed fewer senators than Claudius, for ...”