SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS, GAIUS, Roman his torian, lived during the end of the ist and the first half of the 2nd century A.D. He was the contemporary of Tacitus and the younger Pliny, and his literary work seems to have been chiefly done in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian (A.D. 98-138). His father was mili tary tribune in the XIIIth legion, and he himself began life as a teacher of rhetoric and an advocate. To us he is known as the biographer of the twelve Caesars (including Julius) down to Domitian. As Hadrian's private secretary (magister epistolarum), he must have had access to the Imperial archives, e.g., the trans actions of the senate. He was a correspondent of the younger Pliny, who as governor of Bithynia took Suetonius with him. Hadrian's biographer, Aelius Spartianus, tells us that Suetonius was deprived of his private secretaryship because he had not been sufficiently observant of court etiquette towards the em peror's wife during Hadrian's absence in Britain.
The Lives of the Caesars is rather a chronicle than a history. It gives no general picture of the period. It is the emperor who is always before us, yet the portrait is drawn without real insight.
The personal anecdotes are very amusing; but the author panders too much to a taste for gossip. None the less he is next to Tacitus and Dio Cassius the chief (sometimes the only) authority. The language is clear and simple. Of his De viris illustribus, the lives of Terence and Horace, fragments of those of Lucan and the elder Pliny and the greater part of the chapter on grammarians and rhetoricians, are extant. Other works by him (now lost)
were: Prata ( = X€1.1.4CopEs =patch-work), in ten books, a kind of encyclopaedia; the Roman Year, Roman Institutions and Cus toms, Children's Games among the Greeks, Roman Public Spec tacles, On the Kings, On Cicero's Republic.
Editio princeps, 1470 ; editions by great scholars: Erasmus, Isaac Casaubon, J. G. Graevius, P. Burmann ; the best complete annotated edition is still that of C. G. Baumgarten-Crusius (1816) ; recent edi tions by H. T. Peck (New York, 1889) ; Leo Preud'homme (1906) ; M. Ihm (1907) of the De viris illustribus, R. P. Robinson, (Paris 1925). Editions of separate lives: Augustus, by E. S. Shuckburgh (with useful introduction, 1896) ; Claudius, by H. Smilda (1896) Julius Caesar, by Butler and Cary (Oxford 1927) ; Vespasian, by Braith waite (Oxford 1927). The best editions of the text are by C. L. Roth (1886), and A. Reifferscheid (not including the Lives, 186o). On the De viris illustribus, see G. Kortze in Dissert. philolog. halenses (i9oo), vol. xiv.; and, above all, A. Mace, Essai sur Suet one (1900), with an exhaustive bibliography. There are English translations by Philemon Holland (reprinted in the Tudor Translations, two), by Thomson and Forester (in Bohn's Classical Library) , and by Page and Rouse in the Loeb series (1912).