Collected Papers on Suetonius

Tristan Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367560010
• eBook ISBN: 9781000400410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Ancient History

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 grammatical 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 biographies not only of emperors but also poets, and discovering new contemporary evidence for Jesus from one of Suetonius' first-century sources. Other writers discussed include Homer, Sophocles, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Curtius Rufus, Josephus, Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Juvenal, 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 students and researchers working on Suetonius. It also has broader significance for anyone studying Roman imperial history and culture, Latin literature, and classical historiography.

Part I
Illustrious Men

1 Pliny, Letters 5.10 and the Literary Career of Suetonius^*

The presumed chronology of Suetonius’ works has always been centrally important to their interpretation. For example, Wallace-Hadrill builds his view of the Lives of the Caesars as ultimately the work of a ‘scholar’ on the belief that Suetonius first cut his teeth on minor scholarship and his collection of literary Lives, the Illustrious Men, before making his transition to imperial biography. In his view, the Caesars bear the mark of an author still interested in the scholarly themes of the Illustrious Men, and this order of composition can be held to explain much about the unique form and content of the Lives of emperors.¹

However, the evidence for this view of the relationship between these two works has always been shaky, since the only firm date we have for Suetonius’ works is the dedication of at least part of the Caesars sometime in 119–22.² No one has yet been able to prove that the Illustrious Men came first; scholars such as Syme simply assume it on a priori grounds: ‘From that kind of erudite compilation, the transition seemed easy to biographies of emperors.’³ Wallace-Hadrill bases his own viewpoint about the three phases of Suetonius’ literary career on similar common sense:

The book [Illustrious Men] is the fruit of long years of scholarly study, and ought to follow the bulk of the less demanding philological and antiquarian essays. In its wake, Suetonius could approach the Caesars with a mind already stocked with information; and this is surely what he did, moving more or less directly from the lives of authors to Caesars.⁴

^* This chapter was first published in JRS 100 (2010), 140–62.

1 Wallace-Hadrill 1983, 43–66, 74–8, 92, 126–9, 132–3. The ancient Life of Virgil preserved by Donatus that is discussed in this chapter is generally accepted as that of Suetonius, with the exception of the interpolation at Vita Verg. 37–8, on which see Horsfall 1995, 3 with bibliography; cf. Power 2009, 302. All dates in this chapter are ad.

2 This is the period when Septicius Clarus was Prefect of the Praetorian Guard (SHA, Hadr. 9.5, 11.3), and when at least part, if not all, of the Caesars was dedicated to him, according to Lydus (Mag. 2.6). See Syme 1980b, 68–9 = RP 3.1283–5; Baldwin 1983, 39–41.

3 Syme 1980a, 110–11 = RP 3.1257; cf. id. 1958, 501.

4 Wallace-Hadrill 1983, 59; cf. ibid. 45: ‘it might be a fair guess that he learnt his trade, so to speak, on Greek words, and gradually progressed to the accumulated learning evident in the Caesars.’ For other speculations on the Illustrious Men as earlier than the Caesars based on a priori assumptions about the Caesars’ larger scale and omission of details reported in the Illustrious Men, see e.g. Macé 1900, 300–1; Della Corte 1956, 94–5 = Op. 9.261–2; Syme 1958, 501; 1980a, 110–11, 124 = RP 3.1257, 1270; Townend 1982b, 1051; Lindsay 1994, 464; 1995a, 77; Bradley 1998, 6, 10; 2012, 1409; Bennett 2001, 136; Pausch 2004, 88, 238–9, 246; Paratore 2007, 193, 334 n. 63.

This reconstruction is made especially plausible if we think that publications aided Suetonius’ rise through positions in the imperial service, and Wallace-Hadrill himself believes that Suetonius was promoted to his post ab epistulis sometime after Hadrian’s assumption of power in 117 because of the Illustrious Men.⁵

Nevertheless, the reconstruction is open to valid criticism. First, very little is known about Suetonius’ scholarly works, certainly not enough to characterize them all confidently as ‘less demanding’ than the two largely extant collections of Lives. Second, tangents between the two biographical collections, or between these and the scholarly works, could be explained in the opposite way too, that is, they represent the beginnings of Suetonius’ interests in these topics, rather than their culmination; or, at any rate, research on a subject does not necessarily indicate prior publication on it.⁶ The Illustrious Men could still have followed the Caesars.

In the first part of this paper, I wish to explore some allusions in a letter of Pliny the Younger written to Suetonius in either 105 or 106 (Letters 5.10) which establish that the composition of the Illustrious Men was well under way at that time. I shall then argue in the second part that Suetonius’ award of the ius trium liberorum no later than 110 was probably due to a publication, which – since he was recently working on the Illustrious Men – is most likely that work. Finally, the paper’s third part will draw an important implication from the discovery of this new date of the Illustrious Men for Suetonius’ next publication, the Caesars: the latter may now have appeared in their entirety by 122, contrary to the widely held scholarly belief that only the first two Caesars were dedicated to Septicius Clarus during his Praetorian prefecture.

Letters 5.10

Scholars have long speculated on the possibility that Pliny’s letter to the biographer Suetonius urging him to publish an unnamed work (Ep. 5.10) actually refers to his Illustrious Men.⁷ A possible allusion to Virgil in the letter may offer some help:

5 Wallace-Hadrill 1983, 7–8.

6 For this point, see Baldwin 1983, 383–4; Wardle 1994, 14–15; 1998a, 428–9.

7 See Macé 1900, 66–77; Rolfe 1913–14, 2.390; Sch.-Hos. 3.56; Ailloud 1931–2, 1.xiii; Rostagni 1944, viii–xi; Sanders 1944, 114; Paratore 1950, 739; Della Corte 1956, 94 = Op. 9.261; Brugnoli 1968a, 142–3; Cizek 1977, 14; McDermott 1971a, 93; 1980, 493 n. 39; Syme 1981, 115 = RP 3.1346; Shotter 1993, 6; Velaza 1993, 45; Stok 1994, 202; Herz.-Schm. 4.28; Lana 1998, 1031; Walsh 2006, xxvii, 331 (suggesting the whole Illustrious Men or perhaps only part of the collection). A different possibility was raised by Wallace-Hadrill (1983, 46–7), that the work mentioned by Pliny was in fact a compilation on Greek and Roman games – following Reifferscheid’s (1860, 461–5) reconstruction of that work; cf. Mellor 1999, 147–8. However, our fragments of Suetonius on that topic do not fit well with the context of Pliny’s letter. On Suetonius’ work on games, see below, p. 58. Sherwin-White 1966, 338 erroneously favours a volume of verse, but concedes that no such volume by Suetonius is known; cf. above, p. 4, n. 9. For more sceptical views of Letters 5.10 as evidence for Suetonius’ works, see e.g. Funaioli 1931, 598; Lindsay 1993, 15 n. 10.

C. Plinius Suetonio Tranquillo suo s.

libera tandem hendecasyllaborum meorum fidem, qui scripta tua communibus amicis spoponderunt. appellantur cotidie, efflagitantur, ac iam periculum est ne cogantur ad exhibendum formulam accipere. sum et ipse in edendo haesitator,⁸ tu tamen meam quoque cunctationem tarditatemque uicisti. proinde aut rumpe iam moras aut caue ne eosdem istos libellos, quos tibi hendecasyllabi nostri blanditiis elicere non possunt, conuicio scazontes extorqueant. perfectum opus absolutumque est, nec iam splendescit lima sed atteritur. patere me uidere titulum tuum, patere audire describi legi uenire uolumina Tranquilli mei. aequum est nos in amore tam mutuo eandem percipere ex te uoluptatem, qua tu perfrueris ex nobis. uale.

Gaius Plinius to his friend Suetonius Tranquillus, greetings.

Make good at last on the pledge of my hendecasyllables, which have promised your writings to our mutual friends. They are accosted every day, are met with demands, and are now in danger of being forced to comply with a legal instruction to produce it. I myself am also hesitant to publish, but you exceed my reluctance and lateness too. Therefore, either cease now your delays or take care that those very books of yours, which my hendecasyllables cannot elicit from you by flattery, are not wrenched out by abuse in scazons. The work is finished and complete, and no longer begins to shine from the file but is being worn away. Let me see your cover, and let me hear that my friend Tranquillus’ books are being copied, read, and sold. It is fair that in such shared fondness I take the same delight from you as you enjoy from me. Farewell.

(Plin. Ep. 5.10)

8 Gamberini 1983, 528 convincingly defends haesitator against the conjectures haesitantior or haesitabundus proposed by Syme 1980c, 426 = RP 3.1233.

The words emphasized above recall the first lines of the Georgics following the proem:

uere nouo, gelidus canis cum montibus humor

liquitur et Zephyro putris se glaeba resoluit,

depresso incipiat iam tum mihi taurus aratro

ingemere et sulco attritus splendescere uomer.

In early spring, when the icy liquid flows from the snowy mountains and the crumbling soil is softened by the western wind, let my bull then already begin to groan from the sunken plough, and my ploughshare begin to sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Editions and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Suetonius’ Early Life in Pliny’s Letters
• Part I Illustrious Men
• Part II Poetic Allusions
• Part III Textual Conjectures
• Part IV Suetonius and History
• Bibliography
• Index