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“... during which time he would do nothing but catch flies and stab them with a well-sharpened pen’. Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to The Lives of the Caesars than the X-rated material. Which ...”

“... Gaius​ Suetonius Tranquillus was a scholar and man of letters on the imperial payroll in early second-century Rome. Around 120 ce he completed his Lives of the Caesars, a set of biographies informed by his access to official libraries and his longstanding insider status at court. Suetonius began with the career of Julius Caesar, whose rise to political supremacy 170 years earlier had marked the end of republican Rome ...”

“... associations. We are often served up with a ‘life of Horace’ that derives, more or less, from Suetonius. For Horace, Suetonius did burrow in the archives, to some effect, but for the most part, he took Horace’s own accounts of his life very literally. While Suetonius, who even ...”

“... of the ancient accounts of Caligula’s reign focus on his cruelty, his excesses and (following Suetonius, who wrote the classic biography of the emperor almost a hundred years after his death) his clinical insanity – an unpredictable mixture of fits, anxiety, insomnia and hallucinations. A whole range of stories tell how he claimed to be a god, to hold ...”

“... these arsonists in sinister tones; it’s clear we are meant to suspect that Nero dispatched them. Suetonius reports that the arsonists were also seen destroying stone buildings with battering rams and siege engines, creating the impression that Nero was trying to destroy his own city. Modern historians, however, have recognised in both reports the actions of ...”

“... it meant to stand in the vestibule of his palace, as many people – but not all – have taken Suetonius, Nero’s biographer, to be suggesting? Did it represent the Sun God, or Nero, or Nero as the Sun God (how would you tell the difference)? However it began, Roman writers refer to repeated attempts to fit its imagery to new circumstances. Several imply ...”

“... of the Celts, and they include a number of famous names, Caesar, Pliny, Lucan, Tacitus and Suetonius among them. Some of them ought to have known what they were writing about, especially Caesar, who spent years fighting against and suppressing the Gauls, and Tacitus, whose father-in-law campaigned against the Celts in Britain, which according to Caesar ...”

“... of vilification has never been easy. The usual approach has been to sift through Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius, assessing each of the anecdotes of tyranny on often arbitrary scales of plausibility and throwing out the more outlandish or more hackneyed tales, leaving nonetheless a fat dossier of accepted atrocities from which to construct a cogent ...”

“... wasn’t a title at all. Two letters purportedly written by Augustus to Maecenas are recorded by Suetonius (around 100 ce) and Macrobius (around 400 ce), one urging Maecenas to chivvy Horace to accept a job as Augustus’ private secretary (‘leave your parasitic table and come to this royal one’), a position Horace declined, and the other poking fun at ...”

“... sources (such as those of Pliny, Cluvius and Fabius; other, shorter accounts can be found in Suetonius and Dio Cassius). Tacitus tells us that Nero, wanting to get rid of Octavia and marry Poppaea, first tried to drum up a charge of adultery; when that failed, he adduced sterility. At first Octavia was granted the estates of two of Nero’s other victims ...”

“... to in Persius 2.55ff. The glowing ears of the adulterous wife (11.189) were anticipated by Suetonius (Aug. 69.1); and ‘the smell of profit’ (14.204) is based on Vespasian’s remark, referred to by Suetonius (Vesp.23) and Dio (66.14.5). But the chapter has many perceptive things to say about Juvenal’s use of ...”

“... and the eloquently written and totally scandalous accounts of his historians, Tacitus and Suetonius. With half the source material expressed in lapidary Latin the biographer has to pay close attention to style. So we have an elegant, artificial memoir, somewhat akin to Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian but less wordy. Massie accepts the administrator ...”

“... was sexual. Nero and Commodus were hardly exemplars of acceptable norms of behaviour, while Suetonius describes the stories of Tiberius’ genital-nibbling ‘minnows’ as ‘grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or to hear told, let alone believe’. A bronze Antinous coin from Smyrna But was Antinous really so young? Smith is ...”

“... my peers.’ And there is no need to re-translate, for the sake of plain speaking, the account Suetonius gives of Tiberius’s goatish habits on Capri; Robert Graves’s translation is sufficiently graphic for most tastes. The Middle Ages and Renaissance pass with incomprehensible anecdotes about lusty millers, many pages of Rabelais, Aretino’s account ...”

“... bad Nero was the only version anyone knew, his reputation distilled from the works of Tacitus and Suetonius, one of them a child and the other not yet born when Nero died by suicide in 68 ad. There was an alternative Nero, however, one whose first five years as emperor, the ‘quinquennium Neronis’ when he was tutored by Seneca and guided by the praetorian ...”