Some time in the early ninth century AD, a Frankish scholar named Einhard sat down to write a biography. His theme was a worthy one. Charlemagne, the greatest king of his age, had died in 814, after a reign of almost 50 years. During that time he had won many wars, sponsored numerous reforms and served as the patron of a golden age of learning. The surest measure of his achievements was that in 800, in Rome itself, he had been crowned emperor: the heir of the Caesars. Centuries might have passed since the collapse of Roman rule in western Europe, but the allure, the charisma, the prestige of the vanished empire still haunted Frankish scholars. This was why, when Einhard sought a model for his biography of Charlemagne, he turned not to a recent source, not to the life of a saint or a Christian ruler, but to an older text by far.
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus had lived some seven centuries previously, during the heyday of Roman power, and a single copy of his most famous work, a series of biographies of the Caesars, had been preserved in a Frankish monastery. This text constituted a great compendium of riches: details, many of them startlingly personal and intimate, of the first Roman emperors. Unsurprisingly, then, Einhard treasured it. He knew what fortune had preserved for him: the very template of how to write about a Caesar.
Suetonius’s collection featured 12 lives in all. The first was that of Julius Caesar, the dictator whose name had become synonymous with imperial rule; the last, that of Domitian, an emperor who had come to power 81 years after the birth of Christ. The biography that most interested Einhard, however, was the second – the longest and most detailed in Suetonius’s collection. Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, had been commemorated by the Romans as the first and greatest of their emperors: a ruler who laid the vast edifice of Roman power on such solid and splendid foundations that it still, long after its collapse in western Europe, served the Franks as the great exemplar of an empire. To Einhard, the comparison with Charlemagne appeared obvious. Augustus had fought wars, passed laws and presided over a golden age. The 12 Caesars whose lives constituted the theme of his collection were enshrined for medieval Europe as the very archetypes of emperors.
And so they remain to this day. That Rome tends to live more vividly in people’s imaginings than other ancient empires owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Pharaohs and shahs may have presided over civilisations as brilliant and influential, but no one ever wrote about them as Suetonius wrote about the Caesars. His subjects seem familiar to us as few other rulers from antiquity do. They wrestle with funding shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals. We are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities. The chilly marble of their portrait busts is transfigured into flesh and blood.
Yet just as they can seem something familiar, political figures we might almost imagine being dissected on social media, so at the same time is it a potent part of their fascination that, like long-extinct apex predators, the Caesars portrayed by Suetonius are alien, terrifying, strange. Even Augustus, the emperor who served Einhard as the model for his portrayal of Charlemagne, is described as committing acts of chilling cruelty: gouging out the eyes of a suspected spy with his thumbs, butchering 300 human victims in sacrifice. The portrait of the imperial court we gain from Suetonius is one repeatedly blotted by perversities and crimes. The court of the Caesars remains an unnerving place.
Indelibly though the various emperors are drawn, The Lives of the Caesars ranks as much more than a collection of individual biographies. Read in its entirety, it furnishes a sweeping analysis of how, over the course of a century and a half, autocracy came to bed itself down in the Roman state, evolve and replicate itself. It is a drama shaped as well by its interplay with a further dimension: that of the supernatural. So rooted in the diurnal realities of political life are Suetonius’s biographies that the intrusions of the otherworldly, no matter how repeatedly they occur, invariably deliver a jolt. Ghosts are glimpsed on lonely roads, phantoms on the banks of distant rivers, and portents everywhere.
Suetonius, when he gives us the lives of the Caesars, conveys the eerie sense that many of the events he is relating had been scripted well before they occurred. To rule as the master of the world is rarely, in his biographies, to rule as the master of one’s own fate. When Nero, consulting an oracle, is warned to beware the 73rd year, he jumps to the conclusion “not just that he would be enjoying many more years of life, but that these would be blessed by remarkable and unbroken good fortune”. Yet he finds himself doomed all the same, overthrown by a general – Galba – who, when he launches his coup, is in his 73rd year. Galba’s downfall in turn is presaged by an earthquake and an ominous dream. And so it continues. Far from constituting merely an amalgam of lurid anecdotes, The Lives of the Caesars possesses the grandeur of a great cycle of tragedies.
This is the quality that has rendered it, over the course of the past century, perhaps the most influential of all classical texts on popular culture. When Robert Graves, writing in the early 1930s, set to fictionalising the first half of The Lives of Caesars in his novel I, Claudius he opened the way for Suetonius to become a presiding genius over an entire new way of producing and consuming drama. Television, it turned out, was ideally suited to dramatising the kind of dynastic feuding that the Roman biographer had portrayed in such scrupulous and scabrous detail. In 1976, 42 years after the publication of Graves’s novel, the BBC’s adaptation of I, Claudius scored a brilliant success by exploiting to the full everything that was most sensational in Suetonius. In the United States, TV drama was quick to absorb the lesson.
“It was the longest time of peace in Rome’s history. He was a fair leader and all his people loved him for that.” Such was the praise lavished on Augustus by Tony Soprano, family man and mobster, in “Pax Soprana”, an episode in the first season of The Sopranos. Tony himself, the resentful son of a nightmarish mother named Livia, more closely resembled Augustus’s successor, Tiberius, than Augustus himself; yet for all that, he demonstrated, just as Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne had done a millennium and more before, the enduring influence of Suetonius’s portrait of the first Roman emperor. Where the Frankish scholar had seen the model of a Christian king, however, the writer of “Pax Soprana” saw something very different: the extremes of intimidation and violence that underlaid the original Augustan peace. To rule is to kill; to kill is to court death. Such was the lesson that The Lives of the Caesars had to teach. The theme, refracted through I, Claudius and The Sopranos, joined the television of the 21st century to the great exemplar of dynastic biography. Poison, incest, prophecy: all were staple moves in a game of thrones.
If there is much in The Lives of the Caesars that is bound to seem disconcertingly, even frighteningly alien, then so also is there much that can strike us, even after the passage of two millennia, as not entirely strange. Einhard found in Suetonius’s life of Augustus a mirror held up to Charlemagne; more recent commentators have repeatedly compared US presidents to the Caesars. Cartoonists love to portray Donald Trump in a laurel wreath. They are responding to a quality that Suetonius, in his analysis of what made an effective emperor, was fascinated by: a taste for the limelight, the strut of an actor on top of his game, an ability to bend and command narratives. Augustus, Suetonius noted, was a man who “particularly loved to watch boxers”: a great enthusiasm, as he goes on to note, of the urban plebs. Trump, in a similar manner, has been such a fan of wrestling that he ranks as the only president in the entire history of the United States to have been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Rather like Nero, with his taste for playing the lyre in public or competing in the Olympics, Trump was not content merely to be a spectator – he wanted to step into the ring. The Battle of the Billionaires, a proxy wrestling match fought in 2007 between Trump and Vince McMahon, the owner of WWE, culminated in a victorious Trump strapping McMahon to a barber’s chair and shaving him bald. The spectacle, Trump has bragged in his customary manner, won “the highest ratings, the highest pay-per-view in the history of wrestling of any kind”.
Augustus, who ranks, perhaps, as the smartest, shrewdest, subtlest politician in the entire history of the West, would never have done anything half so vulgar. Nevertheless, he understood, just as Trump instinctively does, that to stand at the head of a superpower is to stand too as an actor upon the great stage of the world. When Augustus lay on his deathbed he asked for a mirror, “ordered his hair combed and his lolling jaw set straight”, and then, after admitting his friends into his presence, and asking them whether they thought that he had played his part well in the comedy of life, quoted these lines: “If the play has been a good one, then please clap your hands/And let me leave the stage to the sound of your applause”. Trump, rather as Caligula or Nero did, will leave the stage to the sound of boos as well as applause; but he will do so as the kind of leader whom Suetonius would no doubt have enjoyed hugely writing about.
All of which is to say that The Lives of the Caesars remains what it has been ever since it was written: a classic, as capable of reinterpretation today as it was back in the age of Einhard. Invaluable as a source for Europe’s foundational experience of autocracy, it is also one of the most gripping and readable collections of biographies ever written. Within its pages are scenes of celebrated drama: Julius Caesar standing on the banks of the Rubicon and walking into the senate house on the Ides of March; Caligula ordering his soldiers to gather seashells in their helmets and planning to make his horse a consul; Nero ordering the murder of his mother and singing as Rome burns. There are descriptions of emperors which, once read, will never be forgotten: Augustus’s yellow teeth; Claudius’s shows of anger, “which would see him drool and snort mucus”; Domitian agonising over his baldness. The descriptions of the troubled relations between Tiberius and his mother and of how Caligula, “though he had a naturally off-putting and hideous face”, “worked diligently in front of a mirror to make it even more so, contorting it into all kinds of fearsome expressions”, constitute passages of dark comedy worthy of Dickens.
Darkness and light; the unsettling and the familiar; sweeping action and punctilious detail: all are here. The Lives of the Caesars are more than merely lives. They are also a part of the common stock of our imaginings: the stuff of our shared fantasies, terrors and dreams.
This is an excerpt from Tom Holland’s introduction to Suetonius’s “The Lives of the Caesars”, published by Penguin Classics
The Lives of the Caesars
Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland
Penguin Classics, 448pp, £23.75
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[See also: The Contested life of Roger Casement]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation