Penguin Classics (2025) h/b 448pp £19.65 (ISBN 9780241186893)
Tom Holland, already well-known as a historian of ancient Rome, now offers this substantial translation of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, from Julius Caesar (who was never formally ‘Emperor’) to Domitian—thus of course including the notorious ‘Year of the Four Emperors’, AD 69. The book includes a Glossary, Maps, and The Family of Augustus; there are sparse Endnotes (rather a pity that, for example, H. does not quote the famous summing-up by Tacitus of Galba: maior privato dum privatus esset et omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset.
The translation is preceded by an admirable Introduction, which tells us all that is known—it is not very much—about the life of Suetonius, a comfortably placed member of the equestris ordo, who was born around AD 70 and died at an indeterminate date between AD 122 and AD 140. (In the reviewer’s inexpert opinion, closer to the second date than the first). Suetonius was fortunate in his friendship with the younger Pliny ‘who repeatedly pulled strings for Suetonius, helping him to buy a farm, granting him experience of provincial administration, even procuring him legal privileges from Trajan’.
We can also learn from a fragmentary inscription found in Numidia in 1952 that there was more: Suetonius, who clearly had lofty connections, was also successively appointed to be in charge of the imperial archives (a studiis) and Rome’s libraries (a bibliothecis) but promotion did not stop there; he was appointed to be Hadrian’s ab epistolis—responsible for managing the imperial correspondence. In AD 122 he accompanied Hadrian to Britain; however, he and his close friend Sulpicius Clarus were at some stage dismissed by Hadrian for inappropriate behaviour in the company of Hadrian’s wife Sabina: nothing more is known, and the penalty was at least less severe than that visited later upon Ovid, whose crimen et error led to his permanent banishment by Augustus.
Suetonius presumably retired to work on his scholarly and antiquarian endeavours (but we do not know when The Lives were written). H. rightly devotes several pages to the (sometimes contradictory) sources used by Suetonius; his suggestion that his access to sources was greater when he was holding important positions under Trajan and Hadrian seems intuitively right and helps to explain the greater detail of the accounts of the lives of Julius Caesar and Augustus.
There are available several translations of Suetonius’s Lives: only one calls for comment here—the venerable two volume Loeb edition, originally dating from 1913 by J.C. Rolfe, but updated in 1998 by Donna W. Hurley with a helpful introduction by K. B. Bradley. These scholars are responsible for ‘changing many expressions and circumlocutions more appropriate to the beginning than to the end of the (twentieth) century’—in other words, the revised Loeb translation is now ‘post-Dover’, with no need to print, in certain circumstances, the Latin on both sides of the page. H. takes full advantage of this. (I found that it was occasionally necessary to remember that Suetonius was writing biographies, not a history of Rome; even the catastrophic loss of Augustus’ legions in AD 9 near Osnabruck [not the Teutoburger Wald, as the work of the archaeologists has shown] is dealt with in cursory fashion.)
Traduttore traditore runs the Italian bon mot, one that is all too often justified: and indeed how many translations manage to combine faithfulness to the original with a version which reads as though it is not a translation? Suetonius was described as writing vere (rather than diserte) and indeed his Latin is straightforward. H. succeeds remarkably well in combining accuracy with readability. It is impractical to quote version against version at length, but here at random is a tiny passage from Nero, chapter 34:
(Loeb) ‘His mother offended him by too strict surveillance and criticism of his deeds and acts, but at first he confined his resentment to frequent endeavours to bring upon her a burden of unpopularity…’
(Holland) ‘So aggravating did he find his mother, who was forever poking her nose into what he was doing and saying, and scolding him for it, that at first he tried to dent her popularity…’
The differences of course are tiny, but this reviewer found that H.’s style read with a smooth naturalness which almost never called for reference to the Latin—a rare quality indeed, even allowing for the fact that prose is always likely to be ‘easier’ to translate than poetry.
Is this a book to be recommended? On the grounds of style and fulness and liveliness of content, surely yes: that mythical figure the ‘general reader’ will enjoy it, while being startled not only by the abundant revelations of the emperors’ sex lives, but also the many instances of casual cruelty (and executions) which pervade the book—even Augustus cannot be exonerated. This is not the Rome of Lex, Ius, Fas and Mos.
That fine historian Fergus Millar wrote ‘The Emperor is what the Emperor does’, and this is exactly what Suetonius gives us. Had the Republic become a ‘screen and a sham’? It is not the business of Suetonius to examine questions like that, but it is remarkable, given the behaviour of the principals, that the Roman Empire lasted as long as it did.
Colin Leach