What Is Interesting and Notable About Suetonius
My Review of the New Tom Holland Lives of the Caesars
Sometimes an editor sends you a perfect assignment. Out of the email blue yonder came a message from Matthew Schmitz, editor of Compact Magazine. He and I met years ago in a bar in New York City, where in conversation he figured out that I had written the profile of Fr. Reginald Foster that appeared in the New Criterion (non-paywalled version here). He loved it. Now he has founded his own magazine and thought I should write about Tom Holland’s new translation of Suetonius.
I had no business saying yes. I have five kids at home under ten whom we homeschool. I run a labor-intensive small business that is just now on the threshold of an expansion of activity that is requiring a tremendous amount of planning and forethought. We don’t make enough money to make our lives easier in almost any practical way, which means we are constantly swamped in laundry, dishes, cars that break down, and the like. But Schmitz wanted not only to hear about the Holland translation, but wanted to hear me “explaining what is interesting and notable about Suetonius’s work.”
I couldn’t say no to an assignment like this. I’ve read Suetonius for thirty years. His entirely human focus – he was not interested in politics or philosophies but just in people – made him a favorite of Fr. Foster. We crisscrossed Rome reading Suetonius. The Forum and the Palatine to me are memories of reading The Lives of the Caesars. I’m interested in biography in general, so I returned to them again and again in later years. Now I had a chance to read them start to finish, all in one swoop and quickly, comparing Holland’s translation to the Loeb and the Graves translation and the Latin.
The results were published in Compact on Monday. It contains lots of things that are interesting and notable about Suetonius. Here’s how it starts:
A Thessalian warlock meets the ghost of dead Julius Caesar alone in the pathless waste. A cloud of flying ants swarm an emperor and drag him down to hell. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus bolt open of their own accord and summon Nero. Caligula stands before the ocean at night and it swells into a giant luminescent phantom and begins to speak. This isn’t Amazon Prime sexing up Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the Age of TikTok: It’s the original source, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, the hallucinatory second-century A.D. collection of biographies of Julius Caesar and his first eleven successors. Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History, the world’s most popular history podcast, has done us all a service with his new translation. It shines a spotlight on an under-read and underappreciated classic.
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