Week Twelve: The Lives of the Caesars

Decadence, debauchery, depravity, decline. That was my week with Suetonius and twelve of the Caesars (okay, maybe not technically TWELVE—more on that in a bit). At times this book had me questioning why it was even on The Honest Broker’s “Humanities in 52 weeks” list! Lives of the Caesars kept me company while we were on vacation in the British Virgin Islands last week. It wasn’t exactly light reading but I did find it interesting. Suetonius would be an amazing dinner party guest, willing to dish the dirt, gossipy, never letting the actual facts get in the way of a great story.

As a background, Suetonius wrote his Lives of the Caesars around 120 AD, during Hadrian’s rule. Lives covers the first dozen emperors, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He includes in that dozen three from the very turbulent years of 68 and 69 AD, Galba, Otho and Vitellius, who came at the end of the Julio-Claudians, none of whom were ever really recognized as a Caesar. He ends with Domitian, who acceded the throne in 81 and died in 96. Suetonius himself was born around 70, and his father was a Roman knight, so he was born into a family that was involved in military and governmental activities. I think knowing when Suetonius lived is important for insight into the distance he had from some of these rulers. He was a child during Vespasian’s rule and a young man during Titus’ and Domitian’s, which probably had influence on what he says about them.

The book is organized into twelve biographies. Suetonius lets us know up front that he isn’t trying to give an exhaustive history of each person. (Good grief, in the case of Julius Caesar alone that would take hundreds of pages!) Rather, his goal is to sketch out each man, giving the highlights of his family background, followed by a brief history of his reign and military campaigns, ending with an extensive discussion of each man’s personal life and habits. This is the gossipy part! It’s also the value of Suetonius; this is no dry history. This is an up-close look at raw power and what unfettered access to wealth and military might can create. Spoiler: it’s not pretty.

In my note-taking, I summarized the most important things about each man in a few sentences. That’s mostly so that later, if I encounter them again, I can remember what I thought about each one. It also helped me to have a little bit of a timeline for their rules. Some of them were emperor for a much shorter time than I realized. I do think that was an effective way to read the book, to help differentiate between these men.

But I also had a few observations:

• The amount of intermarriage is shocking. Between marrying each other’s wives and nieces and cousins numerous times, killing uncles and step-sons, and adopting adult men to be successors, it is extremely difficult to keep track of who is actually related to whom. My edition (more on that in a sec) had a family tree for the Julio-Claudian line and I’m not really sure they should have bothered.

• It’s in the second part of each chapter that Suetonius really shines, and he’s a good writer. From the chapter on Caligula (Gaius Caesar): “The story so far has been of Caligula the emperor, the rest must be of Caligula the monster.” That is a heart-stopping sentence, I think, especially since we had just heard all about the disgusting excesses of Tiberius. Suetonius never flinches from salacious details or incredible gore.

• And that, interestingly, is what had me questioning this book as a choice for the reading list. There are points at which it is just very, very difficult to read what was going on in the palace. The wanton death, the sexual depravity, the lack of anything recognizably human…this is a dark book in many ways.

• I wanted to much to find the heroes in this book, and they just weren’t there. My husband asked, “Oh, is it, ‘this one is good, this one is bad,’ back and forth?” And the answer is that that is exactly what I wanted it to be, so much. I was exhausted for the poor people of Rome. Every time they thought they had gotten rid of a bad leader, the next one was worse. For example, the assassination of Caligula led to great celebrations…until Claudius was firmly in charge. He, too, was both cruel and cowardly, a deadly combination. I felt such compassion for the people, hoping in vain for a ruler who cared at least as much about the empire as he did about his own lusts. There were some who were less bad than others, like Titus, but there wasn’t much heroism to be found.

• Economics is the unsung star here, and I am dying to read an economic history of Rome now. Unchecked state spending created incredible problems that were definitely beyond Suetonius’ understanding. At one point he pointed happily to the rise in “value” of Roman real estate under Julius Caesar. That wasn’t increased value—that inflation was a direct reflection of the incredible levels of state spending. Over and over each emperor is forced to make decisions to keep the empire solvent that hurt the people of the empire, that breed distrust and stifle productivity.

• I wonder if devaluing the currency and devaluing citizenship go hand in hand. Julius Caesar, while a proud man and tough fighter, only took on the title “Father of the Fatherland” as a last and ultimate title. He had great respect for what it meant to be a citizen of Rome. It was important. But by the time Domitian acceded the throne, he embraced not only “Father of the Fatherland” but even “Master”—the term a slave used for his owner! How far the Roman people had fallen to be willing to refer to their emperor as their master as well.

There’s more, but I think you get the picture. One thing that I recognize this week especially is that the tight reading schedule doesn’t provide a lot of time for reflection and synthesizing material from other weeks. It only occurred to me yesterday to be surprised that Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations only a few years after Domitian was in power. What a completely different attitude he had!

I used the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Lives of the Caesars, translated by Catharine Edwards. I think she did a great job with the translation; I found it engaging and Suetonius’ own voice was evident in the prose. However, what I wouldn’t have given for more maps and a larger font size! What is WITH these book publishers being so miserly with maps? Also, the paper quality was terrible. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous but it seems to be very common for these books to have paper so thin that you can barely write on the page. Those Landmark editions (like I read Herodotus with) keep looking better and better. Finally, FOOT notes, people, footnotes! End notes are the biggest pain, constantly flipping back and forth. I flag my books like crazy but it’s still distracting.

Music this week was three symphonies from Mozart, 39, 40 and 41. How delightful, and how fun to listen to right behind Haydn. I loved Haydn, but he sounded perfectly stodgy next to the light artistry of Mozart! If you saw the movie Amadeus you might remember the criticism of Mozart—”Too many notes”—but wow, what he could do with them. (And I include this just because…you will want to go watch the whole thing now.)

As for art, we considered Caravaggio and Botticelli this week. And I did it! Sometimes you see something that you’ve seen, I don’t know, a hundred times before, but then this time it brings you up short. For me, it was this portrait of Simonetta Vespucci by Botticelli. There’s something that seems so fresh and current about her. Is it her skin? Her expression? I feel like she could have been friends with one of my own daughters. And yet, she’s ageless in her gaze. She was apparently the model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as well.

Onward to next week, where we leave Rome behind (for a moment) and take up selected Surahs in the Koran, and a few poems by Rumi. This should be interesting in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that we are jumping about 700 years into the future. The Koran is written around 800 AD. The music is also significantly different, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and religious songs from Tunisia. In art, we’ll consider Islamic architecture.

And that leads me to a little housekeeping note about the schedule. We leave tomorrow for a two-week trip to Japan! We are visiting my son and his wife, touring Kyoto and Osaka. This should be a very fun trip, mostly because my kids are awesome. Because of that, I’ll be doing this reading over the course of two weeks and probably posting my review in about two weeks as well. Since next week is Week 13 of the list, that’s the end of the first quarter and seems like a good time to take a moment to breathe.

How is the reading going for you? Have you read Suetonius before? And what did it lead you to read next? I’d love to know!