Lives of the Caesars
A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biography of the twelve Caesars, bringing to life a portrait of the first Roman emperors in stunning detail
The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biography invites us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than that by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in AD 121.
Placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius injected flesh and blood into their stories, which continue to inform how we understand the drama of power today. Their shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; and we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms, resulting in a series of biographies mediated through the lives of the Caesars themselves.
That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius, and now award-winning author and translator Tom Holland brings us even closer in a new, spellbinding translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of the Caesars and of how they inevitably informed what happened across the vast expanse of empire, The Lives of the Caesars is an astonishing, immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.
Review: Tom Holland is a master populariser of the ancients ... his new translation of Suetonius [is] a peerlessly enjoyable introduction to the earlier imperial Romans. [It] remind[s] us that the monsters who, astoundingly, achieve power in 21st-century democracies had forebears in the ancient world who matched them folly for folly, whim for whim, vanity for vanity -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times *
A gossipy, often racy biography of 12 rulers of the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, written by the historian Suetonius in AD 121. Holland's beautifully fluent translation is compulsively readable throughout -- Jake Kerridge * Telegraph *
Powerful ... Suetonius's biographies of the rulers of Rome, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, are rich in character and telling detail - as emerges with clarity from Tom Holland's excellent new translation from the Latin. Holland conveys ... the distinctive Roman character of the biographies [and] confronts us with a text from a culture quite different from our own -- Roy Gibson * Times Literary Supplement *