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Rome's most scandalous emperors
00:32:39
Historian and podcaster Tom Holland discusses Suetonius' enormously influential Lives of the Caesars and considers whether it counts as ancient fake news
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- [00:00]
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Tom Holland
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- [01:17]
Rob Attar
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine how cruel was Caligula? How depraved was Tiberius, and how monstrous was Nero? The dark reputations of these emperors owe a great deal to the Roman writer Suetonius, whose 121 AD text Lives of the Caesars offered intimate portraits of 12 rulers of Rome, from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Historian and Rest is History Podcaster Tom Holland has just produced a new translation of the Lives, and he spoke to Rob Attar about the profound influence of Suetonius work and whether it's an example of ancient fake news.
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Podcast Host
Tom, could you please begin by just quickly introducing Suetonius to our listeners?
- [02:13]
Tom Holland
So Suetonius is probably the most famous of all the ancient biographers. He is a Roman. He was the secretary to the Emperor Hadrian. He was a figure who was right at the heart of imperial power. He'd also worked as an archivist and a librarian in the Imperial palace. So he had access to all kinds of historical documents and he drew on these to write the biographies of what had come to be known as the twelve Caesars. Eleven emperors going from Augustus up to Domitian and before Augustus, the life of Julius Caesar, the adoptive father of Augustus. And these lives of the 12 Caesars have been massively massively influential in the way that people understand Roman history, the Roman Empire. And I would also say that it's probably of all the ancient classical texts, the most influential on modern culture, because it was the Lives of the Caesars that inspired Robert Graves, who had translated them for Penguin Classics before I did, to write I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which then in turn inspired the BBC drama series, which in turn inspired all kinds of US dramas ranging from Dynasty in the 80s, the Sopranos in the 90s and 2010s Game of Thrones. You could say that Suetonius is the godfather of the murderous dynastic drama.
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Podcast Host
And you're obviously a historian yourself. Do you see in Suetonius someone who's employing a similar craft to what you're doing, or is it really different going back 2,000 years?
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Tom Holland
Well, I mean, it's important to say that Suetonius isn't actually a historian. I mean, he is very clearly a biographer. He is not aiming to do what Tacitus, his great contemporary, is doing, which is to give a record not just of the lives of the emperors, but of the whole sweep of Roman history. But, of course, because the emperors are so important to our understanding of how the Roman world operated, it does offer you a sense of the Roman Empire in the first century BC and the first century ad, which is a period of convulsive change. It's the period where the Republic collapses. Augustus establishes an autocracy and then the process of evolution of that over the first century ad. So you have the family of Augustus, the. The emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. With Nero, the family of Augustus goes extinct. You then have a murderous bout of civil war in AD 69, the year of the four emperors. So that is Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. And Suetonius gives us lives of all four of those. And then Vespasian establishes his own dynasty and is succeeded by his eldest son, Titus, and then his youngest son, Domitian. And those three emperors as well are covered by Sueton.
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Podcast Host
So who was Suetonius writing for at the time? And did that shape the approach he took to the biographies?
- [05:21]
Tom Holland
Suetonius's range seems to have been very, very extensive. We have fragments of his other works, but lots of them have vanished completely. But we can get a sense from the writings that we know he wrote, I think a feeling that he is a man who is interested in what, I guess today we would call social anthropology. So customs, habits, the things that people do. So the books, aside from his biograph that we know he wrote. He wrote, for instance, a collection of the lives of the great courtesans. And sex is an obvious theme, notoriously, that runs throughout the 12 Caesars. But he also writes about children's games, he writes about the insults that people give one another, he writes about clothing, he writes about all kinds of aspects of social life. And all of these in turn inform his portraits of the various emperors. So we are told what they did as children, we're told their appearance, there are quotes from their letters. He talks about their sexual appetites, he talks about their appearance. And for Suetonius, this provides windows onto their character and the way that their rule is shaped. So there's a sense, I think, when you read the biographies, that Suetonius's interest in, let's call it social anthropology is absolutely coloring his portraits of those emperors. But the reason that he's doing that is because it enables him to situate the emperor more clearly and decisively than would otherwise be the case in the social context, the political context, the cultural context of the world that they are ruling.
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Podcast Host
Coming forward to yourself in more recent times, how did you go about the process of translating Suetonius and did you feel any kind of pressure of taking on such a famous and influential work?
- [07:13]
Tom Holland
Well, I was asked to do it because the translation that was done by Robert Graves many decades ago, it was felt that it was a bit old fashioned. And there are certain problems, I think, with the translation. So one of Graves is, I think, kind of quite strange choices is that, for instance, instead of using Roman military terms like centurion or tribune, he will call them, I don't know, sergeant major or colonel or whatever. So it gives a slight, I mean, unsurprisingly, since Graves fought in the First World War, it gives a slightly kind of post war 1930s flavor to it. And I'm sure that my translation in maybe 60 or 70 years will seem very 2000s, but I hope that I've been truer to the Latin text than Graves was. And one of the things, for instance, that I noticed when translating it that hadn't struck me before is a very kind of strange stylistic quirk of Suetonius's, which is that when he is writing about an individual emperor, he almost never mentions that emperor by name. So it's always third person. He did this, he did that. So it's a. The biography of Augustus. He might introduce Augustus by name at the beginning of the life, but from that point on, it is assumed that any third person verb will be referring to Augustus. And the effect is very powerful because by not drawing attention to the emperor's name, in a way, it becomes kind of omnipresent. It becomes the sense that this emperor is so significant that you don't even need to name him. Everything is revolving around him. And I hope that even in English, that is a stylistic effect that the reader will find quite striking. And I like to think that it's true to Suetonius's intentions.
- [09:02]
Podcast Host
Were there any difficult decisions you had to take during the translation?
- [09:06]
Tom Holland
Well, purely in terms of how to render Latin and indeed Greek, because there's quite a lot of Greek in it as well. The huge problem is always puns. There are puns, linguistic puns in Suetonius. And how you do that is always a challenge. One of those puns revolves around oral sex. And that touches on another kind of slightly more moral problem, which is that there are passages and sentences within Suetonius that are shocking. And these passages have always been shocking. So there's a tradition that in the 15th century, Gilles de Rais, who was a Frenchman fighting the English in the Hundred Years War, supposedly a companion of arms of Joan of Arc, that he was seduced by reading Suetonius into becoming a child killer. The Marquis de Sade is meant to have had a copy of Suetonius. In the Victorian period, you would get school copies of the Lives of the Caesars with large chunks, just marks with asterisks. And even though in the 20th century we might pride ourselves on being more permissive, less prone to being shocked, the fact remains that there are repellent passages in it. And the question of what you do with that was a moral consideration. But in the end, I decided that I'm trying to give as accurate and complete a rendering of Suetonius's language as I can. And so I have given it my best. But I'm just flagging that up that there are sections that are pretty hideous.
- [10:45]
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- [11:15]
Podcast Host
You on that point. There are some truly remarkable stories told about some of the Roman emperors and their debauchery, how Seriously, can we take these? And in a way, does it matter if they're true or not?
- [11:27]
Tom Holland
I mean, that's a wonderful question. Let's just focus on two of the emperors because in some ways the reputations for debauchery that they have reflect very different Roman cultural traditions. So the first of these is Tiberius, who at the end of his Life, he's about 70. He retires to the island of Capri and Suetonius gives completely shocking details of what he is supposed to have got up there. So child sex, paedophilia, brothels, all kinds of things going on. He is then succeeded by Caligula, perhaps the most notorious of all the Caesars. And Caligula, rather than retiring to a private island, stages his sexual depravities on the most public of stages, according to, to Suetonius. And the temptation is to take these accounts absolutely at face value, to assume that Tiberius was this hideous pervert and that Caligula was such a sexual terrorist that he was in fact insane. But I think there are different layers to which you can respond to that. One of these is to recognize the. The Roman understanding of what was shocking and scandalous about sexual behavior is not ours. So one of the things about Tiberius's retirement to Capri, he's the emperor. An emperor should not be retiring. A man on the public stage should not retreat into his own private space such as the Roman thinking. And the only conceivable reason in Roman's opinion for doing that is because the. The person doing it is an absolute pervert. And so you can see why Tiberius's retirement is framed by people who are hostile to him as clearly being a reflection of the fact that he wanted to do disgusting things that he couldn't do while he was in Rome, while he was leading a public life. The fact that Tiberius was a very old man and that it was given that statesmen who had attained a certain age were entitled to what the Romans called otium cum dignitate. Kind of basically a dignified retirement, a dignified leisure that's ignored because Tiberius is Emperor. He shouldn't be doing it. But you can see how these stories might have grown up. Likewise, I think what Caligula is doing is he is taking to the public stage and he is rubbing the noses of his enemies in the Senate in the brute fact of their impotence. Both Augustus, the first emperor, Tiberius, his heir, and Caligula's predecessor, had shown the Senate respect. Caligula has a different strategy. Caligula wants to demonstrate that he is The Master and that the Senate are a bunch of kind of lick spittles, nobodies. And I think that the sexual abuse that he submits senators and particularly their wives to is a way of demonstrating that very brutal, shocking. I mean, that's why Caligula is so hated. That's why he becomes such a notorious figure. But again, you can see that there is perhaps an element of strategic thinking there that Suetonius is not acknowledging, which isn't to deny that Caligula probably, I mean, he clearly wasn't a liberal or anything like that, he wasn't Justin Trudeau. But there was probably method behind the seeming madness. But, you know, that's part of the fascination of studying the lives of these emperors. There's the fascination and the shock appeal of the stories that you get. Then there's the fascination of working out exactly how and why Roman attitudes to sexuality were different to ours, which, you know, very profound. And then there's the possible kind of political context that unspoken and unacknowledged by Suetonius might nevertheless explain what is going.
- [15:31]
Podcast Host
Is there something similar going on with Nero, who's perhaps the other really notorious figure in the lives of the Caesars? Because there are some historians who have said that he's perhaps been unfairly viewed in more recent times because of how Suetonius has written about him. Do you think he gets an unfairly bad press from Suetonius?
- [15:49]
Tom Holland
No, because I think the red brings it on himself. Because again, I think as with Caligula, it's a deliberate political strategy. There are really two traditions in Roman politics that the emperors have inherited from the age of the Republic. Political careers in Rome are less about policy and more about vibe. There is the kind of the traditionalist approach. You show your respect for the traditions of the state, respect for the kind of the traditional elites, and then there are the populares, people who appeal over the heads of the traditional elites to the mass of the people. Augustus Tiberius Claudius are all essentially traditionalist in their approach to the Senate and to the inheritance of custom that they have received from the past. Caligula and Nero are both populares. They're people who scorn the Senate and who want to make themselves the darlings of the people. And because they're emperors, they have opportunities to do that in ways that in the Republic, not even the most flamboyant nobleman would have had. And I think that that's what Nero is doing. He is clearly the most tremendous showman in a way that is calculated to be shocking to his fellow Senators, emperors are not meant to tread the stage. They are not meant to play musical instruments. They are not meant to compete in the Olympics. But Nero does all that and he does it sufficiently well that people quite admire it. I mean, it's as though a US President were to, I don't know, star in an Oscar winning film, headline Glastonbury, win a race in Formula One. I mean, you might say, well, you know, people would ensure that he'd be able to win it. But I think it's still pretty impressive. He does it. And even the most shocking crime of his reign, which is the murder of his own mother, Nero very pointedly doesn't try and disguise that he draws attention to it. And I think the reason he's doing that is because murdering your mother is the kind of thing that a hero would do in Greek tragedy. Nero is casting himself as literally being Augustus. Augustus means someone who is midway between the heaven and earth. And Nero is essentially presenting himself to the Roman people and to the world beyond as a figure from mythology, as a figure who is a throwback to the ancient days of someone like Orestes, the notorious matricide. And this is a policy that undoubtedly brings collateral damage and explains why Nero's reputation is so bad in the wake of his death. And Suetonius is clearly drawing on those traditions. Suetonius is working for an imperial system that is founded on the ruins of Nero's reputation and career. So there's nothing for Suetonius in trying to redeem Nero's reputation, to kind of do a revisionist portrait. But again, I think as with Caligula, as with Tiberius, his portrait of Nero gives the historian enough clues to enable the historian to kind of work out probably what Nero was doing, what he was up to. But you've got to kind of read between the lines.
- [19:18]
Podcast Host
Are there many instances where we have other sources from the time that tend to either agree or disagree with Suetonius's portraits of these emperors?
- [19:27]
Tom Holland
With Caligula? Not really our main source for Caligula is Suetonius with the Life of Caesar. Obviously there are lots of sources for Caesar, often from contemporaries. The same with Augustus. Tiberius has the misfortune that we have pretty much the complete account that Tacitus gives us in his annals of Tiberius's rule. And Tacitus is just as negative towards Tiberius as Suetonius is, so that's why his reputation has been such a dark one. But there are other sources that give you a pretty different perspective and they tend to come from the provinces where Tiberius is widely admired. So again, there are kind of counter perspectives there. Tacitus gives us some details of the later life of Claudius and he also gives a very detailed account of the era of the four emperors for the life of Vespasian, of Titus, of Domitian. I mean, he is essentially our main source for their lives. So Suetonius is a very, very important source. He's not our only source, however, for most of the emperors, but he is for some of them.
- [20:36]
Podcast Host
You suggest in your introduction that these rulers are both kind of familiar and strange to us at the same time. And I wonder if you could perhaps elaborate on that point.
- [20:45]
Tom Holland
Well, I think they're familiar to us because Suetonius biographies gives us details about these individual emperors to a degree that we simply do not have for comparable imperial figures from Near Eastern and Mediterranean ancient history. So if you think of the pharaohs or the kings of Assyria or Babylon or Persia, these are autocrats ruling empires and civilizations that are just as sophisticated as the Roman Empire. But they are, compared to the portraits of Augustus or Nero or Vespasian, they seem anonymous. The whole point of royal iconography in Egypt or Persia is in a sense to anonymize the pharaoh or the great king. But with Suetonius, we know how the emperor's, how they had sex, how they go to the toilet, what they look like, the hairstyles, they wear, bodily blemishes. I mean, we know the most intimate details about them and that makes them seem vivid and alive and familiar to us, I think, in a way that is fairly unique from ancient history and explains, I think, why Imperial Rome tends to fascinate the general public in a way that other civilizations don't, because people can get a handle on these figures. They seem close at the same time. I mean, I hope that listeners will have had a sense of what I've been saying, that ancient Rome is a very alien civilization and the codes of behavior that govern not just the emperors but Romans generally are very remote from us, very different. And it's that kind of strange blend of the familiar and the weird that I think explains why Rome is so fascinating. There's a kind of science fiction quality to it. If you think of science fiction as being a blend of what is familiar to us and worlds that are utterly alien, that is what Reym gives us as well.
- [22:54]
Podcast Host
And of all the weird and wonderful stories contained within this book, are there any that particularly stood out to you?
- [23:01]
Tom Holland
One of the things that becomes very evident when you read the biographies in their entirety and all the Way through, is that even as Suetonius is clearly getting down into the archives, you know, he's burrowing down deep, he's quoting letters from Augustus and so on. At the same time, he's also very clearly situating the stories that he's giving us, the lives of the emperors, in a dimension in which the supernatural is very, very vivid and the emperors exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship to the realm of the gods and the supernatural. So I think one of the most dramatic and celebrated moments in Suetonius's lives, and it's an episode that I drew on for the very first work of history that I wrote, which was a book about the Roman republic called Rubicon, named after Caesar's famous crossing of the Rubicon. And Suetonius gives us the most dramatic account of that. The story of Caesar sent his legions ahead of him. He goes in secret and through the night from Ravenna up to the frontier. He stands on the bank, he hesitates, and Suetonius then tells us that a great ghostly figure is seen who snatches a trumpet and blows it. And this serves as the signal to Caesar that he should cross the river. You know, the dice are thrown, Rubicon is crossed, history changes. And the fact that there is this weird supernatural element and it's introduced exactly as though Suetonius is describing something completely everyday and diurnal is often written out of the story. I mean, I did not include that in my account of the crossing of the Rubicon, for instance, but I kind of think, looking back at it, perhaps now I should have done, because throughout all these stories, the sense that what is happening is being governed by fate, that the gods are always watching down, and that it is possible for mortals who can read these signs correctly to. To intuit what is going to happen is a really, really important part of the universe that Suetonius is giving us.
- [25:18]
Podcast Host
Having spent all this time reading about these 12 people through Suetonius, if you had a chance, through some miracle of technology, to interview one of them on, the rest is history, who would you most like to invite on?
- [25:30]
Tom Holland
I think Julius Caesar. Simply because his combination of an extraordinary life and piercing, ruthless intelligence would make him incomparably the most interesting guest to interview. But I think for my own selfish purposes, for wanting to understand how the Roman world ticked and how the course of Roman history was changed, I would choose Augustus, who is probably the most remarkable political operator, not just in Roman, but the whole of Western history, maybe world history, who knows? So those two. But I'd given it, you know, just for the rest of history, probably Julius Caesar.
- [26:06]
Podcast Host
And what's the first question you'd ask him?
- [26:08]
Tom Holland
I would ask him, were you surprised to be assassinated? That's how I would kick off. I'm assuming I'm talking to his ghost.
- [26:13]
Podcast Host
What do you think he'd say?
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Tom Holland
I think he'd probably say, it just seemed to me such an obvious thing for anyone to do that I just assumed they wouldn't do it.
- [26:21]
Podcast Host
In a similar vein, if you had the chance to live under One of these 12 rulers, which period of imperial Rome would you most like to live in?
- [26:28]
Tom Holland
I think the later reign of Augustus, an age of prosperity and peace relative to what had gone before and indeed.
- [26:36]
Rob Attar
What would come after that was Tom Holland, popular historian and co host of the podcast the Rest Is History. Tom's new translation of the Lives of the Caesars is out now, published by Penguin Classics, and you can read a written version of this interview in the March issue of BBC History magazine, which is published later this month. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.