Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, the Gossipy Biographer of Ancient Rome

Newly retranslated in a jaunty, colloquial way by Tom Holland, Suetonius’s Lives of The Caesars (also known as The Twelve Caesars) is an entertaining series of biographies of the first emperors of Rome. Suetonius, writing a couple of generations after the events he described, could be said to have invented the art of biography itself. From the ambitious Julius Caesar to the magisterial Augustus, from the tragic Tiberius to the tormented Caligula and Nero, to emperors such as Claudius and Vespasian who attempted to simply do the job, Suetonius illustrates how the character of its leaders can color the nature and future of a society.