The Suetonian times, they are a-changing. The upward curve in interest and respect largely dates from the important books of Baldwin and Wallace-Hadrill in 1983, and new boosts include D. Wardle's heavy-duty commentary on Augustus (2014); R. Kaster's OCT of the de uita Caesarum is in press, together with a companion volume of Studies; and now there is this excellent collection of essays, springing from a Manchester conference of 2008. These essays take for granted that there is more merit – and simply just more – to Suetonius than used to be thought, and concentrate on what that ‘more’ might be.
P.'s introduction makes a reasonable case for ‘the originality of Suetonius’, concentrating on the opportunities offered by what D. Hurley goes on to call ‘Suetonius’ rubric sandwich’, fitting the characteristic category-organisation between more linear beginnings and ends. C. Damon sees Suetonius as a ‘ventriloquist’, both in the way that he characterises figures through their direct speech (‘the emperors get all the good lines’) and, less predictably, in cases where other people speak the emperors’ words, with various degrees of humiliation. P. then treats the endings of the imperial Lives and finds some elaborate recalls of earlier passages, many of them in earlier Lives.
J. Henderson asks ‘was Suetonius’ Julius a Caesar?’, and his answer is a subtle yes-and-no: Julius is partly programmatic and partly a false start. R. Langlands introduces further qualifications of the easy view that Julius is the don't-try-this-at-home example, Augustus the go-thou-and-do-likewise. Here Augustus is the man who puts immense energy into his own exemplarity, especially in the moral sphere, but ironically serves also as a model of wife-stealing, and besides has an uncontrollable daughter and granddaughter. E. Gunderson also probes the exemplarity of Augustus. Each of the later emperors ‘has his own way of failing to be Augustus’, and Tiberius in particular is a study in failed and off-key exemplification; but equally each emperor becomes in turn a new model, just as the word exemplar itself is ambiguous between models and modelled.
Hurley's second paper treats the ‘Rhetorics of Assassination’, especially in the case of Gaius, where the sacrificial imagery traces how the all-powerful emperor, aspiring to divinity himself, is reduced to helpless victim. J. Tatum looks at the Life of Titus, the emperor who after Augustus comes out as best of the rest: yet how could that be, given his undenied saeuitia? Tatum's answer is that he recognised the needs of the job description and, consummate forger as he was, knew how to counterfeit the right behavioural mask. J.-M. Hulls shows how Domitian shows a non-performing princeps in a world of performance, or at least one whose performances are fatally off-key: the image of the ‘mirror’ is treated interestingly, with special interest in the emperor's insistence on a mirror that could enable him to see if any assassin was creeping up behind, so very different from the mirror for the reader's psychic self-examination that Plutarch favoured (Aem. 1). (Not everyone, though, will accept that a reference to Horace's bedroom mirrors carries an intertextual relation to a stoical passage of Seneca: sometimes a kinky mirror is just a kinky mirror.)
The two editors kick off the next section, moving away from the de uita Caesarum. G. lists and compares the literary uiri illustres who figure in Suetonius and in Pliny's letters. Pliny is more interested in talent, Suetonius in the social connections that gave the literary figures that important leg-up, but where both concur is in their comparative lack of interest in the period from Tiberius to Nero. P. argues that the intriguingly titled περὶ ἐπισήμων πορνῶν (maybe de feminis famosis, and written in Latin) was not the salacious and leering work it is usually assumed to be but ‘a scholarly treatise on the beloveds of Latin poetry’, extending to Roman poetry an interest that is previously more characteristic of Greek literary scholarship. T.P. Wiseman looks at what we know of the two books περὶ τῶν παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις θεωριῶν καὶ ἀγώνων (maybe de ludis scaenicis et circensibus). His intricate discussion makes it likely that these were the source for a note about pantomime in the late grammarian Diomedes, claiming that this popular dance form sprang from comedy when skilled performers broke away to specialise; nor, he adds, is there any reason to think that we know any better. Finally J. Wood moves the book forward to the Carolingian Empire, and places Einhard's Suetonian modelling of his Life of Charlemagne in a broader context, tracing a broader appreciation of Suetonius in Carolingian culture and its precursors. It is a strength of this piece to integrate the dating of particular early manuscripts with the more general study of reception.
There are no weak links in the essays, and the choice of material is a thought-provoking pointer to how those Suetonian times have changed. There is very little interest in the old question of his antecedents, and the gaze now looks forward to reception rather than backwards to origins: F. Leo's massively influential thesis of the debt to Alexandrian scholarship is mentioned only in passing, and indeed P.'s ‘originality’ chapter might more accurately have been described in terms of Suetonius’ ‘distinctiveness’. Still, throughout the volume the differences from other biographers are usually assumed rather than traced; Plutarch gets a fair amount of space, Nepos and Tacitus’ Agricola very little, and Diogenes Laertius does not figure in the indexes at all. That move to reception could also have been taken further, and a separate chapter on the Historia Augusta would have been welcome. Just as Einhard exploited the exemplary qualities of the Augustus, are there features to which those HA imitators were sensitive but Suetonian scholarship (that ‘litany of disappointments’, p. 163) has missed?
Still, so much about the volume is good. One specially welcome feature is the shared assumption that the Lives must be read together as a coherent series: to put it crudely (too crudely, as Langlands in particular shows), Augustus shows how to get most things right and Julius how he got some crucial things wrong, and the rubrics then enable us to track how their successors did or did not fit either model. Henderson in particular brings out how the Lives combine to track what it is, or gradually becomes, to be a ‘Caesar’, showing too how the rubrics also invite interest in what is individual as well as generic in each case: Julius’ own individuality is not just a matter of narrative inevitability, as the only one who grew up in the mayhem of the late Republic, but itself programmatic, a unicum to herald the (qualified) uniqueness of each. This whole approach certainly encourages a higher estimate of the shorter later Lives as well. As Hurley argues, there may still be some inconcinnities as they are squeezed into the ‘sandwich’, but P.'s insistence on a degree of artfulness is persuasive too: some of the claimed verbal echoes may be a stretch, but the cumulative case for narrative patterning is still overwhelming.
Few concessions are made to the undergraduate or graduate student readership that the book presumably envisages. There is plenty of untranslated French, German and Italian, though Latin and Greek are usually translated except in Henderson's essay. This in particular gives the reader few breaks as it relentlessly tracks verbal patterns across Lives – but I sense here a Hendersonian riff on the arid, file-card-mentality Suetonius that has so often been assumed in modern scholarship.
The volume as a whole is certainly an important further step in dismantling that caricature, and all readers and browsers will learn a lot.
