Suetonius the Biographer Studies in Roman Lives

The biographer Suetonius is one of the most fascinating writers of ancient Rome, but he is rarely afforded serious critical attention. This volume of new essays focuses on the various aspects of Suetonius' work, from his lost writing on Roman courtesans to his imperial portraits of the Caesars.

Beginning with an introduction that assesses the originality of Suetonius as a writer and situates the essays within the context of debates and controversies over his biographical form, the collection addresses the issues surrounding his style, themes, and early influence on literature in three parts. The first part discusses formal features of Suetonian biography, such as his literary techniques, manners of citation and quotation, and devices of allusion and closure. The middle section is devoted to readings of the individual Lives, treating several topics - from Suetonius' decision to begin his collection with Julius Caesar, to fictional elements in his death scene of the emperor Caligula, to the theme of solitude in his Life of Domitian. The last part examines the ways in which Suetonius transgresses the boundaries of ancient biography by looking at his influence on epistolographers, antiquarians, commentators, and later biographers.

This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to know why Suetonius' Lives are such a unique and powerful medium for the stories of ancient Rome, and how they became the primary model for later biography.

Tristan Power has taught Classics at the University of Reading. His publications include a chapter on Suetonius' Illustrious Men in K. De Temmerman and K. Demoen (eds.), Telling Ancient Lives: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization in Greek and Latin Biography (forthcoming).

Roy K. Gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester. His publications include Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book 3 (2003) and (with R. Morello) Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction (2012).

List of Contributors
Editions and Abbreviations
Introduction: The Originality of Suetonius, Tristan Power
Part I: Formal Features
1. Suetonius' Rubric Sandwich, Donna W. Hurley
2. Suetonius the Ventriloquist, Cynthia Damon
3. The Endings of Suetonius' Caesars, Tristan Power
Part II: Reading the Lives
4. Was Suetonius' Julius a Caesar?, John Henderson
5. Exemplary Influences and Augustus' Pernicious Moral Legacy, Rebecca Langlands
6. E.g. Augustus: exemplum in the Augustus and Tiberius, Erik Gunderson
7. Rhetorics of Assassination: Ironic Reversal and the Emperor Gaius, Donna W. Hurley
8. Another Look at Suetonius' Titus, W. Jeffrey Tatum
9. The Mirror in the Text: Privacy, Performance, and the Power of Suetonius' Domitian, Jean-Michel Hulls
Part III: Biographical Thresholds
10. Suetonius and the uiri illustres of Pliny the Younger, Roy K. Gibson
11. Suetonius' Famous Courtesans, Tristan Power
12. Suetonius and the Origin of Pantomime, T. P. Wiseman
13. Suetonius and the De uita Caesarum in the Carolingian Empire, Jamie Wood
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index