Suetonius

Description

Suetonius, a Roman historian, was the author of The Lives of the Caesars - one of the most vivid surviving documents of the early Roma empire. His biographies illuminate not only the political history of the twelve rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, but also the whole social and cultural world to which these Caesar's belonged. In the first major study of Suetonius in English, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill places the biographer in the context of tastes and intellectual currents of the early second century AD, and uses the portraits of earlier emperors to cast light on the values and ideology of the court of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian whom he served. Thanks to Suetonius' attentions to the personal lives of the Caesar's, their tastes, sexual preferences, and superstitions, and his neglect of grand affairs of state and military narrative , he has been underrated as a serious historical source and compared unfavourably with his contemporary, the historian Tacitus. Wallace-Hadrill looks freshly at Suetonius in his own terms as a scholarly and antiquarian writer rather than a failed narrative historian. He shows how biographies reveal aspects of early imperial society and culture which Tacitus' narrative neglects, and how important he is as a source for the current generations of historians, interested as much in a society and culture as in politics and warfare.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill was Director of the British School at Rome between 1995 and 2009, and then Professor of Roman Studies, and Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He has been awarded an OBE for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Suetonius: the scholar and his Caesars (1983) and Suetonius (1995), both available from Bloomsbury; and more recently Rome's Cultural Revolution (2008) and Herculaneum: Past and Future (2011).

His book is an important contribution to the social history of the Roman elite in general as well as to Suetonian studies in particular. An integrated portrait of Suetonius and his age emerges, one that is compelling and imaginative. -- Classical Philology This is an excellent treatment of a much misunderstood author, written with equal expertise in literature and in social history. -- Times Literary Supplement Wallace-Hadrill's refreshing approach to Suetonius is one that no social, or other historian of the Roman Empire can afford to ignore. -- Classical World