Table Of ContentCollected Papers on Suetonius
‘There can be no question about the standing of [Power’s] scholarship and
the contribution that he has made to Suetonian studies. Power is, I think,
unique among modern Suetonians in that he works not just on the imperial
Lives but on De viris illustribus and other “minor” works. His knowledge
of Suetonian scholarship is encyclopaedic and it is demonstrated excellently
throughout the work … there is no likely competition to this volume from
any living scholar.’
– David Wardle, University of Cape Town
This collection of essays by a leading authority on Suetonius, one of our
most significant historical sources for the early Roman Empire, provides
an in-depth examination of his works, whose literary value has in the past
been overlooked.
Although Suetonius is well known for his Lives of emperors such as
Caligula and Nero, he is rarely studied in his own right, aside from gram-
matical or textual commentaries. This is the first volume by an expert on
the author to make him accessible to a wider audience, looking at his bi-
ographies not only of emperors but also poets, and discovering new con-
temporary evidence for Jesus from one of Suetonius’ first-century sources.
Other writers discussed include Homer, Sophocles, Catullus, Virgil, Hor-
ace, Curtius Rufus, Josephus, Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Juve-
nal, and Cassius Dio. The book contains thirty-two papers in all, eleven
of which are new, which examine Suetonius’ neglected historical value and
literary skills, and offer textual conjectures on both the Illustrious Men
and Lives of the Caesars. It also has a new introduction and represents over
a dozen years of research on an essential Latin source for Roman history.
Collected Papers on Suetonius provides an invaluable resource for stu-
dents and researchers working on Suetonius. It also has broader significance
for anyone studying Roman imperial history and culture, Latin literature,
and classical historiography.
Tristan Power has taught Classics at Columbia University and is the co-
editor of Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives (2014). He has
also published on the Roman poet Catullus.
Collected Papers on Suetonius
Tristan Power
First published 2021
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9780367555658 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367560010 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003096030 (ebk)
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Matri meae
Contents
Preface ix
Editions and Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Suetonius’ Early Life in Pliny’s Letters 1
PART I
Illustrious Men 15
1 Pliny, Letters 5.10 and the Literary Career of Suetonius 17
2 Two Acrostics by Late Republican Poets in Suetonius 46
3 Calvus’ Poetry in Suetonius and Pliny, Letters 5.3 53
4 Horace and the Gladiators Bithus and Bacchius 57
5 Juvenal, Satires 3.74 and Suetonius 60
6 The Orator Memmius in Suetonius 65
7 The Sister of Passienus Crispus 71
8 Suetonius and the Date of Curtius Rufus 78
PART II
Poetic Allusions 83
9 Poetry and Fiction in Suetonius’ Illustrious Men 85
10 Caesar and Sophocles’ Electra 107
11 Pyrrhus and Priam in Suetonius’ Tiberius 110
12 Claudius’ Homeric Quotation 114
13 Galba, Onesimus, and Servitude 119
viii Contents
14 Priam and Pompey in Suetonius’ Galba 122
15 Galba and Priam in Tacitus’ Histories 128
16 The Servants’ Taunt: Homer and Suetonius’ Galba 133
PART III
Textual Conjectures 139
17 Suetonius, De grammaticis 13.1 141
18 Suetonius, Iul. 49.2 and Galb. 20.1 144
19 Augustus’ Mime of Life (Suetonius, Aug. 99.1) 146
20 Nero in Furs (Suet. Ner. 29) 151
21 Oedipal Nero: The Farewell Kiss 156
22 Suetonius, Galba 1: Beginning or Ending? 165
23 Vespasian’s Sexual Iliad 171
24 Helvidius Priscus in Suetonius, Domitian 10.3 174
PART IV
Suetonius and History 177
25 Suetonius’ Tacitus 179
26 The Disgrace of Suetonius 201
27 Caligula and the Bludgeoned Priest 206
28 The Conspirator against Caligula 210
29 Jesus’ Flight into Egypt in Suetonius 213
30 Nero’s Cannibal (Suetonius, Nero 37.2) 229
31 Nero’s Amazons, Sporus, and Alexander 234
32 Vitellius and the Baker and Cook 239
Bibliography 243
Index 283
Preface
Suetonius is the most central author to our knowledge of Roman history not
to have many resources for readers. This book collects eleven new papers on
the biographer, together with twenty-one others that previously appeared
in print but have since been revised, for a total of thirty-two chapters. It
begins with a new introduction on his literary persona, as reflected in the
letters on his early life from Pliny the Younger, and contains everything that
I have written on Suetonius to date – besides what is already in the volume
Suetonius the Biographer, where I provide an overview of the subject in my
introduction.1 All of the papers in the present book take a rather textual
approach, examining specific passages of Suetonius’ Lives that discuss Ro-
man literature or history, with a detailed and at times grammatical focus
on his writing style, and on the manuscript variants and emendations that
form part of the basis of our modern editions of his works. Through such
close readings, I present a reevaluation of Suetonius as a sophisticated and
engaging biographer who often evokes poetry to underscore his moralistic
points, rather than simply the derivative, unoriginal reporter of his sources
that he was once thought.2 Paradoxically, it is this literary side of Suetonius
that is often the key to assessing his historical value, so that questions of
history in his Lives are often inseparable from considerations of his style,
sources, text, and literary embellishments, including previously undiscov-
ered uses of the poets Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil.
To one of the first modern scholars of Suetonius in English, Gavin Townend,
Suetonius was ‘a conscientious, sensible and accurate reporter of the sources
at his disposal … the chance of a reliable version of the literary tradition
1 Power 2014b. For a modern biography of Pliny the Younger, see Gibson 2020.
2 On the interdependence of literary and textual studies in Latin literature, see e.g. Hunter
and Oakley 2016; Kraggerud 2017, 4–5; on the main competing approaches to Suetonius
as either too historical or too literary, Power 2014b, 18. A similar disparity is reflected
in the scholarship of Livy; see Vasaly 2015, 31–2, 152 nn. 35–8 with bibliography; for
a more balanced perspective on this historian, see Oakley 1997–2005, 1.16–19. For the
purpose of literary allusion in Tacitus, see Ash 2007, 24–6; in Plutarchan biography,
Pelling 2020.
