Suetonius (c.69–c.150 CE,) fully Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, was a Roman biographer and antiquarian. His surviving works include Lives of the Caesars, covering Julius Caesar and the Roman emperors who followed him, up to Domitian.
Born in Hippo Regius, a small north African town in Numidia, in modern-day Algeria, Suetonius served as a court official under the emperor Hadrian before turning to writing. Suetonius is best known for his collection of biographies that secured him lasting fame.
De virisillustribus (“Concerning Illustrious Men”) is a collection of short biographies of celebrated Roman poets, orators, historians, grammarians and rhetoricians, and perhaps philosophers. Nearly all that is known about the lives of Rome’s eminent authors stems from this work, which survives only in one section and in the preface and five lives from another section. For example, the lives of Horace, Lucan, Terence, and Virgil are known by writers who derived their facts from Suetonius.
De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars) concerns Julius Caesar and the first 11 Roman emperors up to Domitian. This work is mainly responsible for that vivid picture of Roman society and its morally and politically decadent leaders that dominated historical thought until modified in modern times by the discovery of nonliterary evidence. The biographies are organized not chronologically but by topics: the emperor’s family background, career before accession, public actions, private life, appearance, personality, and death.
Suetonius’s works provide valuable insights into the lives and personalities of these historical figures and the social and political climate of ancient Rome. Despite some criticism of his accuracy and sensationalism, Suetonius remains an essential source of information for historians and scholars of classical studies.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Suetonius
Let us add this one more night to our lives.
—Suetonius
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