The Twelve Caesars

"I thought that if I was going to choose five books on Roman history I really had to choose a Roman historian because, for modern historians, Roman historians have always been the great model. Because the classics are classics. Throughout the Middle Ages when people wanted to have a model they would look back to great Roman historians. I was thinking I should possibly have chosen the man who I think is the greatest Roman historian, Tacitus , who is a sort of pathologist of vice, particularly the vice of autocracy. I think he is one of the all-time great historians. But I decided against that because my next two choices are very infused with the spirit of Tacitus. So I thought I would go for something slightly lighter, which is to Tacitus what I guess a gossip magazine like Heat is to The Times Literary Supplement ! Suetonius’s work is a collection of biographies of the first 12 Roman rulers, from Julius Caesar through to Domitian. And it really had a crucial sense of shaping our understanding of Imperial Rome as a place of vice and savagery and sexual depravity and violent, brutal, bawdy splendour. I think that what would leap out would be the shenanigans of Caligula, who indulged in incest, forced prostitution – lunacies that would put… Absolutely, or Nero, who actually went one better than Caligula by having his mother killed and is said to have burnt down Rome, although he probably didn’t. The one that I find most intriguing wasn’t actually an emperor, but the first one listed by Suetonius – Julius Caesar. And that is simply because he has exerted such a magnetic appeal on future generations. His influence is so clearly massive and he is seen by many people as a very attractive figure. My own feeling is that he is actually much darker, verging on psychopathic, but it is that tension between the man who in his correspondence is witty and charming set against the record of someone who brought unbelievable slaughter and mayhem to Gaul and then to his own people. And it is that combination of creativity and destruction within him that I think makes him one of the all-time magnetic figures in world history."

"When you do read it, it’ll have a familiarity to it. All of this stuff will leap out, and you’ll think, ‘Ah, of course, that’s where that story comes from!’—because Suetonius has been the most influential in shaping what we think of the Roman emperors. So if you’re going to make a documentary on Caligula or Nero, for example, Suetonius will be your first port of call. I should have mentioned about Tacitus that most of his work has survived. Sadly, a section that is lost is the part on Caligula’s reign. Caligula gets the full treatment from Suetonius, who is incredibly critical of him. There’s an interesting passage in Tacitus where he writes that previous histories of the emperors were written either when the emperor was alive and people were being sycophants, or else after their death, when the hatred still rankled. What Tacitus is saying is that there is no such thing as an unbiased account of the emperors. He claimed that he was writing without anger or bias: ‘ sine īrā et studiō’. But, of course, he is very biased against Augustus, for example. So with Suetonius, we come to a great storyteller. It is a good read, with all of the racy gossip about the emperors. Then the question is, how much of it is true? Tacitus is probably the best of them in terms of being responsible. With Polybius, they’re probably the two who stick most closely to the truth and are honest about their sources and when they speculate. The interesting thing about Suetonius is that he started off like that. He was writing around the same time as Tacitus. He was Hadrian’s private secretary and had access to the imperial records, which was a fantastic resource. But he then got involved in a sex scandal with Hadrian’s wife, and was sent to outer darkness, and lost his access. It’s like a scholar in Oxford losing their card to the Bodleian Library. He couldn’t do his research, and it was at that point that he thought, ‘Oh, what the heck!’ And—just possibly—began making things up or at least reporting on hearsay. In particular with Nero and Caligula, you wonder how much he was just repeating legends that were created after their deaths to blacken them—the ‘black legend’, as it were. I’ve got a friend who’s a Roman historian who loves Nero and thinks he got a very bad rap. Mary Beard argues that Nero wasn’t necessarily a bad emperor, but because he was killed, he had to be bad: they had to paint him as someone who was a villain. Then, over the decades, these stories grew more and more preposterous, and ultimately, Suetonius got hold of them and began writing about them, and someone like Caligula is portrayed as a complete psychopath. If we had Tacitus, there’d be a counterweight to that. And it may be that Suetonius had access to Tacitus’s work, and so some of that is in there. But I think for the most part, he was not willing to let the truth get in the way of these wonderful stories and rumors and memories that people had in ancient Rome. Yes, and he’s a great source on Nero. There are certain moments in Roman history where you can look at almost all of the writers and compare their accounts. With Nero, both Suetonius and Cassius Dio claim that he set the Great Fire of Rome himself, that he deliberately burned it because he wanted to make his palace. Tacitus says that Nero was away from Rome at that time and therefore not responsible. He is a bit more ambiguous. Tacitus says Nero rushed back to Rome a day or two later and started relief efforts, making camps for the homeless and so on. But then Tacitus does hint that when the fire began spreading, perhaps Nero realized, ‘Well, this is half burnt already. If it all gets burnt, then I’ll have an even bigger park for myself.’ So that’s a good case where Tacitus is much more measured and exculpatory than someone like Suetonius, who’s very quick to judge. Tacitus looked at things a little bit more carefully. Yes, and let’s face it, we love biography , and he is a great biographer. The other person I could have put on the list was Plutarch . In some ways, both Suetonius and Plutarch are biographers, rather than strict historians. Unlike Polybius, Suetonius isn’t so much concerned with the sweep of Roman history. What he wants to look at is the psychology of the people that he’s writing about and bring them alive for us. One of the things that we have to think about when we look at these histories is, ‘To what purpose were they writing?’ In some ways, it was propagandistic, pro-emperor, or maybe like Tacitus, anti-tyranny and anti-authoritarianism. But they’re also writing as memory keepers. All of them seem to believe that Rome was the most remarkable society history had ever produced. They want to make Rome live for eternity with their words, which, in some ways, it has done—thanks to them. It would be interesting to know! The difficulty is that there is a hobby in medicine of taking historical characters and looking at their symptoms and making judgments about what it was. So Caligula has been diagnosed with all sorts of things. The problem is that because they’re in a different discipline—they’re in medicine, and just assume facts are facts—they don’t really interrogate the source and ask, ‘Is what Suetonius says true? Did Caligula actually make that bridge across the Bay of Naples and ride across it wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great ?’ Stories like that strain credulity, and if you don’t look at them critically, you can be deceived by them. Exactly. By a certain point in the book, I thought, ‘I don’t need to make an editorial comment that this is nonsense.’ So when in 133 BCE Tiberius Gracchus goes to the Senate, I talk about how he stubbed his toe, there was a snake in his helmet, and birds squabbling on his neighbour’s roof. The reader can draw his or her own conclusions about whether those omens presaged his murder later that day. What’s so interesting about this bizarre stuff is that the Romans were such a superstitious bunch. It’s one of the things that I find most remarkable about them. In some ways, they’re very rational and not that philosophical. The Greeks were the philosophers; the Romans were the fighters and the orators. And yet they were just cringing with fear about a snake appearing at the wrong moment. How can you master the world when you have to knock twice (or whatever it might be) and have all these prophylactic gestures just to make sure that you didn’t get clubbed to death in the Senate?"