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WAS THERE A SUETONIUS AUCTUS?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2026

Pauline Duchêne
Pauline Duchêne*
Affiliation:
Paris Nanterre University
*
p.duchene@parisnanterre.fr
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Abstract

This article takes up the question of the possible existence of an ‘Auctus’ version of Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum: D. Rohrbacher raised legitimate doubts in an article published in 2009 about divergences between quotations in Servius and Suetonius’ text; yet nobody has given them proper attention. This article therefore reviews all occurrences at stake, trying to understand where the divergences may come from, then confronts another discrepancy between Suetonius, Aurelius Victor and the Epitome de Caesaribus on the one hand, and Jerome and Eutropius on the other. It concludes that the hypothesis of a Suetonius Auctus is not necessary to explain these differences, which rather help us better understand how ancient scholars could work.

Keywords

SuetoniusServiusJeromeancient scholarshipbiographyAugustusKaisergeschichte

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Type
Research Article
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , December 2025 , pp. 877 - 883
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

In 1884, the German scholar A. Cohn published a book about the common sources of the Historia Augusta, Aurelius Victor’s Liber de Caesaribus and the Epitome de Caesaribus,Footnote 1 showing that these works used the now-lost imperial Lives by Marius MaximusFootnote 2 and, for the emperors of the first century, included elements absent from Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum, though quite close to their content, as if someone had added them later to the original text. He named this expanded Suetonius ‘Suetonius Auctus’ on the model of the Servius Auctus.

This idea was interesting but ill-timed, for during the exact same year another German scholar, A. Enmann, published a lengthy paper on exactly the same topic,Footnote 3 drawing the same conclusions about Marius Maximus but arguing that the other source was a lost series of imperial biographies by an anonymous author; he called it Kaisergeschichte, ‘History of the Caesars’. His hypothesis was afterwards considered more convincing than Cohn’s,Footnote 4 whose Suetonius Auctus was not discarded but identified with the Kaisergeschichte,Footnote 5 with sometimes the mention of a ‘Suetonian tradition’.Footnote 6 This led D. Rohrbacher, in an article published in 2009,Footnote 7 to reconsider Cohn’s thesis, asking why the author of a work which probably began with a compendium would have added information to, or modified, a text he intended to reduce.

To my knowledge, nobody seems to have followed or refuted Rohrbacher’s arguments.Footnote 8 Yet the divergences they are based upon cannot be denied and should be addressed, not only because they tell us how Suetonius and the De uita Caesarum were received during Late Antiquity, but also because they give us a glimpse at how ancient scholars worked. Did someone, at some point, ‘complete’ Suetonius’ text? Let us review Cohn’s examples in view of what is known of Suetonius’ works and the way in which history was written in antiquity.

1. OCTAVIAN’S MANY NAMES

Cohn’s and Rohrbacher’s conclusions about the existence of a Suetonius Auctus are mainly based on three passages by Servius, which nominally quote Suetonius, but give information that is not found in the De uita Caesarum. Two of them deal with the names which Octavian successively took:

Serv. on Verg. Aen. 1.292: nam adulans populus Romanus Octauiano tria obtulit nomina, utrum uellet Quirinus an Caesar an Augustus uocari. ille, ne unum eligendo partem laederet quae aliud offerre cupiebat, diuerso tempore omnibus usus est, et primo Quirinus dictus est, inde Caesar, postea quod et obtinuit, Augustus, sicut Suetonius probat.Footnote 9

Serv. on Verg. G. 3.27: ut etiam in primo Aeneidis diximus, Suetonius Tranquillus hoc de Augusto memorat, quodam tempore tres partes populi, consentiente senatu, obtulisse ei tria nomina Quirini, Augusti, Caesaris. ille, ne ullum eligendo alias offenderet partes, primo Quirinus est dictus, inde Caesar, post in nomine permansit Augustus.Footnote 10

Both passages explicitly mention Suetonius and, in addition to the same sequence of names, present clear verbal parallels, which can be explained by the fact that Servius reuses here for the Georgics what he had already written about the Aeneid. Footnote 11 Though the first text does not give any indication about the work, the phrase hoc de Augusto memorat in the second text seems to refer to the Augustus. Yet the names in the corresponding passage are not exactly the same: Suet. Aug. 7.1–2 does indeed mention Caesar and Augustus, but gives ‘Thurinus’Footnote 12 instead of ‘Quirinus’ for the first name. It seems therefore that, at some point of the transmission, the series was modified.

Servius is commenting here on lines in which Virgil is referring to Augustus by calling him Quirinus. In the first passage, the name is paired with Remus, so it is obvious that it is used for Romulus:Footnote 13 since Virgil (Aen. 1.286) has just mentioned Caesar, and Jove is here talking about Rome’s future glory, ‘Romulus’ and ‘Remus’ allude to Augustus and someone very close to him, Agrippa according to Servius. In the second passage, the reference to the Princeps is more obvious, for Augustus is called ‘Caesar’ ten lines earlier (G. 3.16), and Servius states that it is impossible to understand ‘Romulus’ here, since the mythical king never heard of the Indians, showing that the common association of Quirinus was with Romulus, not with Augustus. None the less, Servius seems to see Augustus in Quirinus quite automatically, even when this explanation is not widely accepted:Footnote 14 it gives the impression that he is drawing on a widespread tradition, which can explain Suetonius’ insistence about Thurinus, as if he wanted to refute some other claim: he hesitates about the origin of the cognomen, but its existence is proved first by an allusion to Octavian’s correspondence with Mark Antony, then by a small statue bearing an almost-erased inscription that he gave as a gift to Hadrian, the emperor’s decision to revere it among his Lares implicitly functioning as an imperial acknowledgement (Suet. Aug. 7.1–2).

However, Servius is not completely to be blamed, because Suetonius also explains that there was a proposal to call Octavian Romulus before the name Augustus was considered more appropriate (Aug. 7.2); if Servius or his source remembered that Octavian initially bore an ancient name and refused to use Romulus, he may have replaced Thurinus with Quirinus, Romulus’ ‘ancient name’. Indeed, the corresponding passage in John Lydus explains how the error occurred: after dealing with the subject, John goes on with an explanation of the meaning of augustus, just like Suetonius,Footnote 15 and yet gives the wrong name Quirinus instead of Thurinus, completely omitting Suetonius’ discussion in favour of the latter. This means that an intermediary source cut out Suetonius’ arguments and only gave the three names, thus inducing later writers to replace Thurinus with Quirinus, since the corresponding development was not available anymore. As a consequence, a Suetonius Auctus is not needed to explain the difference.

2. THE BRIGHTNESS OF AUGUSTUS’ EYES

There is another problem about Servius’ quotations of Suetonius: sometimes he is mentioned as the source of the initial information, but his name actually does not seem to apply to all the elements of the anecdote. The third passage of Cohn’s and Rohrbacher’s main argument is a good example of this (Serv. on Verg. Aen. 8.680):

naturaliter enim Augustus igneos oculos habuisse dicitur, adeo ut obtutum eius nemo contra aspectare posset, denique quidam eques Romanus interrogatus ab eo cur se uiso auerteret faciem dixerit: ‘quia fulmen oculorum tuorum ferre non possum’, sicut ait Suetonius.Footnote 16

The same anecdote, with very similar wording, can also be found in the Epitome de Caesaribus (1.20):

fuit mitis, gratus, ciuilis animi et lepidi, corpore toto pulcher sed oculis magis. quorum aciem clarissimorum siderum modo uibrans, libenter accipiebat cedi ab intendentibus tamquam solis radiis aspectui suo. a cuius facie dum quidam miles oculos auerteret et interrogaretur ab eo cur ita faceret, respondit: ‘quia fulmen oculorum tuorum ferre non possum.’ Footnote 17

The similarities between the two texts leave no doubt that Servius and the anonymous author of the Epitome de Caesaribus are using the same source,Footnote 18 and, though it is only Servius who names Suetonius, the sentence preceding the anecdote in the Epitome is typical of the way in which the biographer introduces his physical portraits of the emperors.Footnote 19 However, though Suetonius does mention the peculiar brightness of Augustus’ eyes, what he says is quite different (Aug. 79.2):

oculos habuit claros ac nitidos—quibus etiam existimari uolebat inesse quiddam diuini uigoris gaudebatque si qui sibi acrius contuenti quasi ad fulgorem solis uultum summitteret, …Footnote 20

The main elements of the anecdote are present—Augustus looking at someone and this person averting their face, as if blinded by sunbeams—but the context is not the same, for Servius and the Epitome de Caesaribus are very detailed about the circumstances, whereas Suetonius speaks quite generally and explains that the emperor wanted to give the impression of already having a divine aura, a detail clearly alluded to in the later texts: while the Epitome de Caesaribus maintains the idea that such reactions were willingly sought by Augustus, Aurelius Victor states as a fact the impossibility of looking him in the eye.

It seems therefore that Suetonius provided a common basis (hence Servius’ mention), to which details were added afterwards. This is a classic case of inuentio, the rhetorical means to write a more lively and persuasive narrative by inserting elements that could be consistent with the original story.Footnote 21 Here, to convince the reader that Augustus’ eyes did have something divine, rather than that he wanted people to think they had, someone transformed the emperor’s pleasure that an individual did not dare to look at him directly into a detailed anecdote, with precise circumstances and an answer reported in direct speech. Indeed, a passage of John Lydus, brought forward by Cohn in his discussion, also builds upon an anecdote in Suetonius’ Augustus, even though it does not mention Suetonius explicitly: whereas the Suetonian text only mentions a pun about a tragic drama of his own which he eventually decided to destroy (Aug. 85.2), John Lydus has a complete story, supposedly taking place during young Octavian’s youth and involving Cicero (Lydus, Mens. 3.39). The orator is even presented as his teacher, a piece of information that would definitely have been in the De uita Caesarum, if this really had been the case. Here too someone used the Augustus as a basis for an ‘improved’ story.

Rohrbacher’s argument in favour of a Suetonius Auctus instead of Enmann’s Kaisergeschichte in these passages is that the latter is supposed to have abbreviated, not expanded, Suetonius in its first chapters.Footnote 22 However, for this to be true, the way in which ancient texts were epitomized needs to correspond to our modern conception, and the example of Octavian’s many names demonstrated that we should be very careful about that.Footnote 23 Indeed, the treatment of Augustus’ diplomacy by Aurelius Victor and the Epitome de Caesaribus is quite revealing of the transformations historical material could undergo down the centuries. Both works drastically sum up the numbers of Augustus’ conquests,Footnote 24 but the Epitome (1.10–12), whose text is closer to Suetonius’,Footnote 25 then builds on the emperor’s hatred of useless wars, adding a long passage in indirect speech that reuses direct quotations appearing at Suet. Aug. 25.4 and an allusion to Augustus’ reaction at the news of the Varian disaster, which Suetonius only mentioned when dealing with his setbacks (Aug. 23.2). Such handling of the Suetonian material shows that epitomes could very well rearrange their sources in order to expand a peculiar topic that seemed to deserve more interest.Footnote 26

There is therefore no need to suppose the existence of a Suetonius Auctus to explain the additional details about the brightness of Augustus’ eyes or the destruction of his tragedy. The anecdotes suppose not just a supplementation but a longer work which used Suetonius as a source, and quite typically arranged and developed its material. This corresponds better to the Kaisergeschichte or to Stover and Woudhuysen’s hypothesis that Aurelius Victor actually wrote Historiae.Footnote 27

3. SUETONIAN QUOTATIONS?

Cohn’s other examples show that scholars favouring the interpretation of a Suetonius Auctus are often too quick to see evidence where another explanation is more likely. He used, for instance, a scholium on Juv. 10.92 that reads Tiberius nam Nero secessum elegerat, de qua insula Augustus ἀπραγόπολιν dixit, quod ibi esset otii locus, sicut ait Suetonius,Footnote 28 whereas Suet. Aug. 98.4 has uicinam Capreis insulam Apragopolim appellabat a desidia secedentium illuc e comitatu suo:Footnote 29 it is obvious that the scholiast only paraphrases Suetonius’ explanation of the name, confusing Capri with what was initially an island close to it.

Cohn also tends to ignore the fact that Suetonius did not write only the De uita Caesarum. For instance, when John Lydus quotes Suetonius ἐν τοῖς περὶ Αὐγούστου, ‘in what he says about Augustus’, for an anecdote about how the emperor was outraged at seeing Roman citizens attending public games without the traditional toga (Lydus, Mag. 1.12), he may very well not have in mind Suetonius’ Augustus. Indeed, the corresponding passage in the biography, Aug. 40.5, is more general and has the emperor quote Virgil. However, we should not forget that Suetonius also wrote a De genere uestium, which definitely included coverage of the togaFootnote 30 and probably contained a more detailed version of this anecdote.Footnote 31

Another question is how much of the content supposedly proving the existence of a Suetonius Auctus is actually by Suetonius, for other sources could very well be mixed up with Suetonian material, as illustrated by another of Cohn’s examples: when Eutropius wrote about Cappadocia, very close verbal parallels show that he was relying on Suetonius;Footnote 32 yet the following passage about how the town of Mazaca changed its name into Caesarea is nowhere to be found in the De uita Caesarum, which means that Eutropius used another source.Footnote 33 A last example in Cohn can be explained in the same way: both the Epitome de Caesaribus (1.28) and John Lydus (Mag. 2.3) say that the people, on hearing the news of Augustus’ death, declared that it would have been better if he had never been born or had never died, an opinion which is definitely not in Suetonius but appears in Livy about Marius and in Aurelius Victor and the Historia Augusta about Septimius Severus.Footnote 34 It seems therefore that this was quite a common statement about great men which the author of the Epitome de Caesaribus either found in his source or added in his text, followed afterward by John Lydus. Here too this is a standard writing practice in ancient historiography,Footnote 35 whose explanation does not require a Suetonius Auctus.

As a consequence, instead of proving the existence of a supplemented version of Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum, the passages in Cohn’s and Rohrbacher’s discussions are actually more revealing of how later writers worked: even when mentioning earlier authors as an authority, they only kept what mostly interested them, like Servius’ and John Lydus’ source, who omitted Suetonius’ point about the name Thurinus, inducing a confusion with the name Quirinus—rather ironically the tradition Suetonius was probably fighting at Aug. 7. They could also combine them with other works, like Eutropius about Cappadocia and the town of Mazaca, or use them as a basis for their own narrative developments, carelessly resorting to inuentio, as for Augustus’ eyes or his destroyed tragedy. Sometimes ‘floating narrative blocks’, such as the popular wish that some great man had either never been born or never died, could be added in the mix. In all these cases, we do not need to suppose the existence of a Suetonius Auctus in order to explain the differences with the De uita Caesarum.

These passages have also another common characteristic, since, apart from one, they all deal with Augustus: his names, his eyes, his tragedy, the nickname he gave to an island, his attachment to the traditional toga, reactions at his death. This is a confirmation of Wallace-Hadrill’s hypothesis that Suetonius may have ‘specialized’ in the history of the beginning of the Empire,Footnote 36 and this may explain why only his name appears in passages that actually also use other sources: as an ‘Augustan expert’, he may have been the most powerful reference. Indeed, there seems to have been ‘automatic reference associations’ in the minds of later authors, for Orosius (7.9) mentions him along with Tacitus when he reports the number of victims who died when Jerusalem was taken, a piece of information Suetonius never gives.Footnote 37 This is also a good indication of how much Suetonius was esteemed in Late Antiquity.

Footnotes

*

This article greatly benefitted from the discussions of the 2021 online Suetonius workshop. Many thanks to all participants for their remarks, especially to the organizer Phoebe Garrett, who also took the time to correct my English. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for CQ, whose comments and suggestions helped improve this article. All remaining errors are, of course, mine.

References

1 A. Cohn, Quibus ex fontibus S. Aurelii Victoris et libri de Caesaribus et Epitomes undecim capita priora fluxerint (Berlin, 1884). At that time the Epitome de Caesaribus was thought to be also by Aurelius Victor.

2 On this third-century biographer, cf. A.R. Birley, ‘Marius Maximus the biographer’, ANRW 2.34.3 (1997), 2679–757.

3 A. Enmann, ‘Die verlorene Geschichte der römischen Kaisers und das Buch De uiris illustribus urbis Romae’, Quellenstudien. Philologus Supplementband 4 (1884), 335–501. A first version of Enmann’s paper had been published a year before, in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung.

4 Cf. e.g. T.J. Barnes, ‘The lost Kaisergeschichte and the Latin biographical tradition’, Bonner Historia Augusta Colloquium (1968–9), 13–43.

5 Cf. e.g. M. Festy, Pseudo-Aurélius Victor. Livre des Césars (Paris, 1999), 64 n. 18, on 1.20: ‘la source de l’Épitomé est le Suetonius auctus, autrement dit la Kaisergeschichte d’Enmann’. For a sceptical but useful presentation of this debated question, see J.A. Stover and G. Woudhuysen, The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor (Edinburgh, 2023), 218–34. Stover and Woudhuysen’s thesis is that the Kaisergeschichte is actually a lost historical work by Aurelius Victor, of which the Liber de Caesaribus is only an abbreviated version.

6 Cf. e.g. G. Bonamente, ‘Minor Latin historians of the fourth century ad’, in G. Marasco (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century (Leiden, 2003), 86–124, at 109: ‘dominant presence of the Suetonian tradition, eventually auctus’.

7 D. Rohrbacher, ‘Enmann’s ”Kaisergeschichte” from Augustus to Domitian’, Latomus 68 (2009), 709–19.

8 Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5) mention Rohrbacher’s paper only at 224 n. 179, with regard to his suggestion that Jerome and Eutropius had a common source that was not the Kaisergeschichte, even though they deal with the example of Augustus’ eyes (see below) at 360–1.

9 ‘Indeed, as a means of adulation, the Roman people offered Octavian three names, asking if he wanted to be called Quirinus, Caesar, or Augustus. Octavian, so as not to offend, by choosing one, the division which desired to propose him another, used all of them at different times and was first addressed as Quirinus, then Caesar and afterwards, the name he also retained, Augustus, as Suetonius demonstrates.’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of D. Vallat and M. Béjuis-Vallat, Servius. Commentaire sur l’Énéide de Virgile. Livre 1 [Paris, 2023].) (All translations are mine.)

10 ‘Indeed, as I already said in the first book of the Aeneid, Suetonius Tranquillus records about Augustus that, at some point, the three divisions of the people, with the agreement of the Senate, proposed to give him three names: Quirinus, Caesar, Augustus. Octavian, so as not to offend, by choosing one, the other divisions, was first addressed as Quirinus, then as Caesar and afterwards retained the name Augustus.’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of G. Thilo, Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii [Leipzig, 1887].)

11 The small differences between the two passages indicate that Servius is not copying his earlier commentary. Just after the passage about Aen. 1.292, Servius also refers to Verg. G. 3.27, along with his mention of Suetonius, as another proof for Augustus being called Quirinus, so both passages serve as additional evidence, each for the other, of Servius’ interpretation.

12 For the probable origin of this cognomen and why and when Octavian used it, cf. T. Luke, ‘Cultivating the memory of Octavianus Thurinus’, Journal of Ancient History 3 (2015), 242–66. R.A. Kaster, Studies on the Text of Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum (Oxford, 2016), 90 does not comment on the alternative ‘Quirinus’ in Servius, nor do Vallat and Béjuis-Vallat (n. 9), 439–40 n. 901, who consider Quirinus an alternative for Romulus and, though referring to Suet. Aug. 7.2, do not note that the Suetonian passage says Thurinus instead of Quirinus.

13 For the association Quirinus–Romulus, see G. Radke, ‘Quirinus. Eine kritische Überprüfung der Überlieferung und ein Versuch’, ANRW 2.17.1 (1981), 276–99 and D. Porte, ‘Romulus–Quirinus, prince et dieu, dieu des princes. Étude sur le personnage de Quirinus et sur son évolution, des origines à Auguste’, ANRW 2.17.1 (1981), 300–42.

14 Cf. the many alternative explanations mentioned at Serv. on Verg. Aen. 1.292.

15 Compare Lydus, Mens. 4.72 with Suet. Aug. 7.2.

16 ‘For Augustus is said to have had eyes naturally as bright as fire, to the point that nobody could directly look at his gaze, and eventually, when asked by him why he turned his face away from him at his sight, some Roman knight answered: ”Because I cannot stand the brilliance of your eyes”, as Suetonius says.’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of G. Ramires, Servius. Commentaire sur l’Énéide de Virgile. Livre VIII [Paris, 2022].)

17 ‘He was kind, popular, with a civil and witty mind, a body beautiful in all its parts, but especially the eyes. Indeed, as he cast their sharp light like the brightest stars, he gladly accepted that those who looked at him would recede at his sight, as in front of sunbeams. And when a soldier averted his gaze from his face and was asked by him why he did that, he answered: ”Because I cannot stand the brilliance of your eyes”.’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of M. Festy, Pseudo-Aurélius Victor. Abrégé des Césars [Paris, 1999].)

18 The word miles in the Epitome de Caesaribus instead of eques in Servius can be easily explained by a lapse of memory on the part of one of the two authors, both words being phonetically quite close.

19 Cf. e.g. Suet. Ner. 51. On this being probably an innovation of Suetonius, cf. T. Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2012), 128–9.

20 ‘He had fair and bright eyes, in which he wanted to be thought there was some divine strength, and he liked it if someone, when he gazed quite intently, averted his face, as if looking at the brilliance of the sun, …’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of R.A. Kaster, C. Suetoni Tranquilli De uita Caesarum libri VIII et De grammaticis et rhetoribus liber [Oxford, 2016].)

21 Cf. Rhet. Her. 1.3 and Cic. Inu. rhet. 1.9. Cf. also T.P. Wiseman, ‘Practice and theory in ancient historiography’, Historia 66 (1981), 375–93, at 388–90 and A.J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London, 1988), 87–93.

22 Rohrbacher (n. 7), 715.

23 For a very clear and useful overview of epitomizing practices in ancient times, cf. Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5), 44–71.

24 Of the eleven names at Suet. Aug. 21.1, only four remain in Aur. Vict. Caes. 1.7 and Epitome de Caesaribus 1.9.

25 Compare Suet. Aug. 21.2 with Epitome de Caesaribus 1.10.

26 For other examples of epitomes developing, instead of shortening, their source, cf. Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5), 68 (Lactantius, Nepotianus) and 70 (Xiphilinus), and more generally on epitomes adapting the content of their source to their own purpose, 59–69.

27 Cf. Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5). Their discussion is quite convincing, though the consequences they draw for later Latin literature sometimes seem a bit far-fetched (e.g. Marius Maximus is called a ‘bogus author’ at 255). It can also explain the many passages in Victor and Eutropius to which Rohrbacher (n. 7), 719 n. 43 refers as non-Suetonian, since Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5), 228–32 think that Eutropius used Victor’s lost Historiae.

28 ‘For Tiberius Nero had chosen the island for his retreat. Augustus called it “city of doing nothing”, for it was a place of leisure, as Suetonius says.’ (The Latin text is cited from the edition of P. Wessner, Scholia in Iuuenalem uetustiora [Leipzig, 1931].)

29 ‘He called the island near Capri ”Apragopolis” out of the laziness of those who left his company to go there.’

30 See the fragments cited at Serv. on Verg. Aen. 7.612 and John Malalas, Chronicon 2.8. On the Suetonian fragments, see now P. Duchêne and P. Garrett (edd.), Suetonius: The Fragments (Liverpool, 2025).

31 David Wardle and Phoebe Garrett suggested to me that it could also be the case of Augustus’ eyes, for which the De uitiis corporalibus, mentioned twice by Servius (on Verg. Aen. 7.627 and on Verg. Ecl. 3.8), would be a good candidate. Plin. HN 11.143 reports that Augustus had eyes whose colour was between green and blue and which were so big that their white was very apparent, and that he could not stand it if someone looked at him with too much attention (diligentius). The story is similar, except for Augustus’ reaction (in the Natural History he gets angry, iracunde ferebat) and for the fact that the peculiarity is presented as a flaw, not as something admirable: Pliny says that the white of Augustus’ eyes was super hominem, but, given the context, this is an indication of size, not an allusion to some divine quality. I therefore still think that the basis for the version in Servius and the Epitome de Caesaribus was more likely Suetonius’ Augustus, but I am none the less grateful for the suggestion.

32 Compare Eutr. 7.1 with Suet. Tib. 37.4.

33 For other examples of supplementation of their original source by epitomes, see Stover and Woudhousen (n. 5), 67. The story of how Mazaca changed its name also appears at Fest. 11.4 (confusing Tiberius with Claudius) and Lydus, Mag. 3.57, without the verbal parallels. Stover and Woudhuysen (n. 5), 361 argue that supplementation is the explanation for the differences in the anecdote about Augustus’ eyes.

34 Cf. Sen. QNat. 5.18.4 (with the correction de C. Maior to de C. Mario justified in P. Jal, Tite-Live. Histoire romaine. Livre LXV. Fragments [Paris, 1979], 255–6), who mentions Livy as his source, and Aur. Vict. Caes. 20.6 and HA Seu. 18.7.

35 Cf. e.g. P. Duchêne, ‘Un curieux cas de citations flottantes entre Suétone et Cassius Dion’, RAÉL 4 (2018), 159–69.

36 Cf. A. Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius, the Scholar and his Caesars (New Haven and London, 1983), 50–66.

37 In fact, the correct author is Eusebius (Chron. 187a). The passage in Tacitus is Hist. 5.13.