About the Book
Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus, the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to bedchamber - their intrigues, their loves and their deaths.
Himself a court official, he quotes from a variety of sources, from the official and private documents as well as from old anecdotes, gossip, songs and jokes, giving an unparalleled oblique view of his subjects. Long familiar to students of classics, he found a new audience as the main source for Robert Graves' novels and the subsequent television series I, Claudius.
About the Author
Gaius Suetonius
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was born in the province of Africa, in Hippo Regius, modern Annaba in northeast Algeria. His father Suetonius Laetus was a rich man and belonged to the equestrian order, the second rank of the Roman elite (after the senators). In 69, the year of the civil war that is known as the "year of the four emperors", Laetus was serving as a military tribune in the Thirteenth Legion Gemina. The author of the Lives of the Twelve Caesars tells this in his Life of Otho, and adds that his father had been present when Otho decided to commit suicide after his army had been defeated at Cremona by the legions of his rival Vitellius (text).
From this simple piece of information, we can deduce a couple of things. In the first place, that Laetus was probably born in 49 or 50, because a military tribune was usually nineteen or twenty years old. Under normal circumstances, the tribuneship marked the beginning of a career, but for Laetus, it was the end: as an officer of the defeated Otho, the only thing he could do was retire, grateful to the gods that he had survived. Other officers were less fortunate: they were executed. Assuming that Laetus came from Hippo Regius and returned in the summer of 69, his son Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus cannot have been conceived before the winter of 69/70 and cannot have been born before the autumn of 70. If he was Laetus' second child, he was born even later - although a date after, say, 73 is unlikely.
