I The invention of De viris illustribus

The modern invention of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus begins in fifteenth-century Italy, in the heady days of humanist manuscript hunting, with a significant discovery and a scurrilous rumour. The discovery was that of a manuscript containing previously unknown works of Latin literature, the minor works of Tacitus and Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus. The first reference to this manuscript dates to 1425, when the humanist scholar and book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini wrote to his friend Niccolò Niccoli that a monk from the monastery of Hersfeld in Germany had included a description of it in an inventory of books that he had sent him; the manuscript as a consequence has conventionally come to be known as the Hersfeldensis. Poggio evidently shared this inventory with other scholars of his day, since two of them seem to quote the same description of the manuscript.Footnote ³Whether Poggio was ever able to obtain the manuscript we do not know, but by late 1455 it was apparently in Rome, as we may deduce from a detailed description made in that year by the papal secretary Pier Candido Decembrio.Footnote ⁴The similarity of his description to those in the earlier inventories makes it very likely that Decembrio’s manuscript was the one that the monk of Hersfeld had included in the list that he had sent to Poggio 30 years previously. The original manuscript, unfortunately, seems soon to have been broken up and is now lost; apart from a few pages of the original Agricola, its contents are known only from copies made in Italy in the latter part of the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁵

How the Hersfeldensis reached Rome is uncertain, but it is widely assumed that it was brought back by a man named Enoch of Ascoli, who had been sent by Pope Nicholas V on a manuscript-hunting mission to northern France and Germany. Our evidence for this is a marginal note included by Giovanni Pontano in the copy that he made of Tacitus’ Germania and Dialogus and Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus in Naples in March 1460. The entire passage is worth translating.

And here we have the scurrilous rumour. Sicco Polenton was an early humanist scholar who spent his career in Padua. His magnum opus, and the work to which Pontano refers in his note, was his Scriptorum illustrium Latinae linguae libri XVIII, which he first published in 1426 and in an expanded and revised version in 1437. Pontano does not explain why Polenton would have burnt Suetonius’ treatise on orators and poets, but the implication of his remarks is that he had plagiarised it and then destroyed the evidence of his theft. As Friedrich Ritschl pointed out in 1845, however, a comparison of Polenton’s work with what we know of Suetonius’ work provides no evidence that Polenton had any access to the latter, and scholars have generally dismissed Pontano’s story ever since.Footnote ⁸

Yet the matter remains mysterious. For one thing, Polenton does in fact refer to Suetonius’ De viris illustribus. Although in his account of Suetonius’ works he mentions only the lives of the Caesars, he cites Suetonius’ views on the origins of poetry near the start of Book 2: ‘Tranquillus, however, who was also called Suetonius, when he was speaking about poets in that book which he wrote on illustrious men, reports that priests were responsible for the invention of poetry’. Polenton’s statement is a fair summary of a somewhat longer passage that Isidore presents as a verbatim quotation from Suetonius, and Ullman, in his edition of Polenton’s treatise, accordingly identified Isidore as Polenton’s source.Footnote ⁹Yet Isidore writes only ‘so says Tranquillus’, without identifying any specific work. How did Polenton come to specify the work as De viris illustribus? Given the complete lack of evidence, we can only speculate; it may have been nothing more than a guess. The origin of Pontano’s allegation that Polenton burned the sections on orators and poets is also obscure. Although Pontano may have invented it himself, as many scholars seem to assume, it is not easy to discern a motive, since, as far as I can determine, he otherwise had no particular interest in Polenton or his work.Footnote ¹⁰It is more likely that Polenton’s local rivals and enemies in Padua spread the rumour to discredit him and that the rumour somehow reached Pontano.

Whatever lies behind the note that Pontano made in his copy of De grammaticis et rhetoribus, it provides clear evidence that Italian scholars of the mid-fifteenth century assumed that Suetonius had written a work De viris illustribus and that it consisted of several books, each dealing with a different category of literature. Later scholars, accepting that assumption, gradually came to attribute to this putative work more and more extant material. By far the most important contribution was that of Joseph Justus Scaliger, in his ground-breaking edition of Jerome’s Chronicle of 1606. As I discuss in more detail in Part II, Jerome based his work on a chronicle composed several decades previously by Eusebius. Jerome translated Eusebius’ Greek chronicle into Latin, added additional material on Roman history and culture and extended the work down to his own day. Scaliger was the first to attribute Jerome’s notices on Roman men of letters, mostly poets but also a few orators and historians, to Suetonius. He for the most part offered no arguments to support his attributions, but simply annotated particular entries with the comment ‘Jerome from Suetonius’ (‘Hieronymus a Suetonio’), or the like; very occasionally he was more specific, as in his entry on Cornificius: ‘Jerome from Suetonius on distinguished poets’ (‘Hieronymus a Suetonio de claris poetis’). It was only in his entry on Terence that he offered any discussion. Jerome’s notice describes how Terence, prior to the first staging of Andria, read it to Caecilius Statius and won the latter’s admiration. Scaliger realised that this anecdote also appears in the life of Terence preserved in the commentary of Donatus, where it is explicitly identified as the work of Suetonius, and went on to confirm that identification on the basis of its style.Footnote ¹¹

Despite the implications of Scaliger’s hypothesis for reconstructing Suetonius’ De viris illustribus, it was almost two and a half centuries before anyone developed it further. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a sudden flurry of activity among German scholars that quickly established the key assumptions about the work that to a large extent are still accepted today. The initial impetus for this renewed interest was L. Tross’s publication in 1841 of Pontano’s manuscript of Tacitus’ Germania and Dialogus and Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus, including Pontano’s marginal note about Polenton’s destruction of Suetonius’ lives of orators and poets. Two years later, Friedrich Ritschl published a paper in Rheinisches Museum that began with textual comments on Tross’s edition but soon shifted, via an analysis of Pontano’s story, to a study of De viris illustribus. Ritschl proposed two fundamental hypotheses. First, following Pontano, he concluded that the work comprised several books, each dealing with a different genre of literary activity. Second, presumably following Scaliger, he affirmed that the descriptors that Jerome used in the notices in his Chronicle indicate the book in which Suetonius treated the author. He further advanced a number of arguments to support the proposition that Suetonius’ De viris illustribus constituted Jerome’s main, or even only, source of information about Roman writers. Ritschl concluded his paper by returning to Pontano’s story about Polenton, proposing that it would be possible to test its veracity by comparing Polenton’s work with what, thanks to Jerome, we know about the content of Suetonius’ work. The original publication ended with this proposal, but Ritschl was soon able to act on it by tracking down a copy of Polenton’s work. He then republished his paper in 1845 in an extended version that included the results of his examination of Polenton’s treatise; as I have already noted, he concluded that it offered very little support for Pontano’s allegation.

Just three years after Ritschl published the expanded version of his paper, Karl Friedrich Hermann in Göttingen published a booklet in which he excerpted all the notices about Roman writers in Jerome’s Chronicle and annotated them with relevant extracts from other Latin sources in order to assess their value as sources of information. Hermann noted in passing Ritschl’s arguments about Suetonius as the source of Jerome’s notices, which he seemed to accept, but he did not discuss the question himself.Footnote ¹²Whereas Hermann was more interested in the historical value of Jerome’s notices than in their source, the opposite was true of Theodor Mommsen, who in 1850 published a detailed and comprehensive analysis of all the sources that Jerome used in his Chronicle. Mommsen concluded that, in addition to Eusebius, Jerome utilised a range of other sources, including Suetonius’ De viris illustribus, a Latin history De origine gentis Romanae from Janus to the death of Romulus, a detailed history of Rome from the death of Pompey to the battle of Actium and a chronicle of the city of Rome. Like Ritschl, he accepted the hypothesis that Jerome’s descriptors indicate the different categories of writers treated by Suetonius, which he identified as grammatici, rhetores, orators, poets and historians, and was the first to draw up detailed lists allotting Jerome’s entries to different books on that basis. He also floated the idea, without arguing it, that Suetonius may have treated poets in two books, one on poetry proper (epic, lyric, satire) and one on drama (comedy, tragedy, mime). Lastly, he identified a handful of notices as having a non-Suetonian origin.Footnote ¹³

The work of Ritschl, Hermann and Mommsen laid the foundations for two reconstructions of De viris illustribus that appeared within two years of each other and that to this day remain the only comprehensive editions available. The earlier of these is that of the Swiss scholar Karl Ludwig Roth, which he published in Reference Roth1858 as part of his Teubner edition of Suetonius’ complete extant remains. Roth enthusiastically endorsed the hypothesis that all the notices about Roman writers in Jerome’s Chronicle derive from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus and took a maximalist view of its contents: although allowing that we can be certain only of books on poets, orators and historians, in addition to grammatici and rhetores, he saw no reason why Suetonius would have deprived jurisconsults and especially philosophers of the honour of inclusion.Footnote ¹⁴He nevertheless remained fairly conservative in assigning actual fragments to specific books. In his reconstruction of De viris illustribus he followed Mommsen closely, positing books on orators, poets and historians (in the same order as Mommsen) and assigning them notices from Jerome (more or less exactly as Mommsen had assigned them). At the same time, he also expanded on Mommsen (whose concern after all was not Suetonius but Jerome) by including various lives preserved in manuscripts: those of the elder Pliny, Terence, Horace and Lucan, whose Suetonian origin had long been proposed, as well a life of the orator Crispus found in the scholia to Juvenal, which Otto Jahn had attributed to Suetonius in his Reference Jahn1851 edition of Juvenal.Footnote ¹⁵Roth concluded his collection of material with a grab-bag of notices that do not clearly fit any of these books.Footnote ¹⁶

Roth’s reconstruction of De viris illustribus was soon overshadowed by the version that August Reifferscheid published in Reference Reifferscheid1860 as part of his massive edition of the fragments of Suetonius. If Roth restrained his tendency towards a maximalist view of Suetonius’ treatise, Reifferscheid, in contrast, tended to indulge it. To the five groups of writers accepted by Mommsen and Roth (grammatici and rhetores, orators, poets, historians), he added a sixth, philosophers. He was also the first to argue explicitly that each book opened with a general account of the history of the genre in question, as do the extant accounts of grammatici and rhetores. He further insisted on a point, implicit in Mommsen’s analysis, that Suetonius included biographies only of Roman (i.e. Latin) writers, although he compensated for this limitation by arguing that Jerome derived his notices about men of letters who were active in Rome but wrote in Greek from the prefaces of the individual sections. With this more expansive approach, Reifferscheid was able to assign virtually all Jerome’s notices about Roman men of letters to specific parts of Suetonius’ treatise. Reifferscheid accepted the same set of extant lives as Roth had (Terence, Horace, Lucan, Crispus and Pliny), but for good measure included in an appendix other lives of poets preserved in manuscript. In its general contours, Reifferscheid’s version of De viris illustribus, although supported by a much more extensive apparatus of analysis and annotation, is largely the same as Roth’s. It differs chiefly in being much more decisive in dispensing with Roth’s grab-bag of stray notices from Jerome and finding an appropriate home for each.Footnote ¹⁷

Since Reifferscheid, research on Suetonius’ De viris illustribus has focused almost exclusively on two topics. One is De grammaticis et rhetoribus, of which there have been numerous editions and many studies, culminating in the work of Robert Kaster, whose 1995 edition with an extensive introduction and commentary is now the starting point for all work on that text.Footnote ¹⁸The other topic is the lives of the poets, and in particular the question which of the extant lives derive from Suetonius and to what extent they reflect a Suetonian original.Footnote ¹⁹In 1944, Augusto Rostagni published a new edition of Suetonius’ De poetis that largely followed the reconstruction of Roth and Reifferscheid but expanded it to include Donatus’ life of Virgil, which the earlier editors had been reluctant to include, and a very brief life of Tibullus found in manuscripts. As Reifferscheid had done, Rostagni supplemented his reconstruction with an appendix in which he included a number of other lives.Footnote ²⁰His volume prompted a detailed re-examination of the subject by his younger colleague Ettore Paratore. Paratore did not discuss the material in Rostagni’s edition that had already been accepted as Suetonian by Roth and Reifferscheid (the notices from Jerome, the lives of Terence, Horace and Lucan), but instead focused exclusively on the two lives that Rostagni had added (Donatus’ life of Virgil and the life of Tibullus) and those that he had included in his appendix. Paratore concluded that both Donatus’ life of Virgil and the life of Persius are Suetonian in origin, although heavily interpolated, but that the life of Tibullus is a medieval compilation.Footnote ²¹Two other scholars, Karl Bayer and Heinrich Naumann, examined the Donatan life of Virgil in particular; Naumann, in a series of publications spanning some 50 years, made a strong case, now widely accepted, that it is almost entirely the work of Suetonius.Footnote ²²Most recently, Markus Stachon has published an extensive and very thorough edition of the texts relevant to De poetis, including all the lives for which a Suetonian origin has been proposed (Terence, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Persius and Lucan) together with all the notices from Jerome, along with extensive commentary. Stachon has also revived Mommsen’s hypothesis that Suetonius devoted not one but two books to the biographies of poets, organised by genre. His volume will no doubt be the indispensable starting point for work on Suetonius’ De poetis for many years to come.Footnote ²³

Although this work on the lives of poets has expanded the number of extant lives that are now thought to have a Suetonian origin, the current understanding of De viris illustribus as a whole remains essentially that of Roth and Reifferscheid. I note here two key examples of its continued dominance. The first is J. C. Rolfe’s edition in the second volume of the Loeb Suetonius, which remains by far the most accessible version of De viris illustribus.Footnote ²⁴The Loeb version of De viris illustribus is effectively that of Reifferscheid, with some updates to the section on poets. It enumerates, but does not print, the notices from Jerome as Reifferscheid had allotted them to various books and prints the lives of Terence, Virgil, Horace and Lucan, the lives of Tibullus and Persius (with the proviso that they are probably not Suetonian) and the lives of Crispus and the elder Pliny. The other key example is the 1983 monograph of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, which remains a touchstone for work on Suetonius. In a characteristically insightful discussion of De viris illustribus, Wallace-Hadrill analyses Suetonius’ coverage of the various categories of writers that he included in his work (poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammatici and rhetores) and points out that while his selection may seem to us idiosyncratic, it coheres well with what we know of his predilections from his other works. Although Wallace-Hadrill highlights the many uncertainties in the accepted reconstruction of the work, it was not his purpose to undertake a re-evaluation of it, and the version of De viris illustribus that he analyses remains effectively that of Roth and Reifferscheid.Footnote ²⁵

II Was De viris illustribus a compendious work?

How firm are the foundations of Roth’s and Reifferscheid’s reconstruction of De viris illustribus? As we will see, the fundamental hypothesis, that Suetonius wrote lives of notable Roman men of letters organised in series by area of achievement, seems well grounded. Some of the ancillary hypotheses, however, which played a crucial role in shaping received ideas about the nature of De viris illustribus, are more problematic.

In this part I reexamine the assumption that Suetonius planned and published his series of lives as a compendious work under the title De viris illustribus. As we have seen, this assumption goes back to the fifteenth century, when Pontano came across the newly rediscovered treatise of Suetonius De grammaticis et rhetoribus and confidently identified it as a part of a larger work; so confident was he in this identification that he entitled his own copy of the treatise C. Suetonii Tranquilli de viris illustribus incipit: De grammaticis. There is no other evidence, however, that the original Hersfeldensis identified De grammaticis et rhetoribus as an extract from a larger work: neither the other fifteenth-century copies of the text nor the early descriptions of the original manuscript do so. Pontano’s identification of the treatise as a part of De viris illustribus, which he believed had also contained books De poetis and De oratoribus, was almost certainly his own conjecture, presumably based on his recollection of a comment made by Jerome in the preface to his own De viris illustribus.Footnote ²⁶

To a large extent, it is still Jerome on whom we rely for the assumption that Suetonius wrote a compendious work entitled De viris illustribus, and so we must review his evidence with some care. Jerome’s De viris illustribus is a series of biographical sketches, 135 in all, of Christian writers in chronological order, beginning with Peter and extending down to Jerome’s own day. All are short, many only a single sentence, but even the longest are no more than a page or so. Jerome wrote the work in 392/393 c.e., as he indicates in the preface addressed to his friend Dexter, who, he declares, has encouraged him ‘to follow Tranquillus and arrange the writers of the church into an order and do for our [i.e. Christian] writers what that man did in enumerating the illustrious men of pagan literature [in enumerandis gentilium litterarum uiris fecit inlustribus], namely, to set out for you briefly all those who, from the passion of Christ down to the fourteenth year of Emperor Theodosius, published something memorable concerning the sacred scriptures’.Footnote ²⁷Jerome goes on to cite other writers who also served as precedents for his work: ‘among the Greeks, indeed, the Peripatetic Hermippus, Antigonus of Carystus, the learned Satyrus and, by far the most learned of all, the musician Aristoxenus did the same thing; among the Latins, however, Varro, Santra, Nepos, Hyginus and Tranquillus, to whose example you wish to challenge me’. It is likely enough that Jerome, rather than being familiar with the works of all these writers at first hand, instead found their names in his sources, quite possibly, as some scholars have suggested, in Suetonius’ preface to his own series of lives.Footnote ²⁸All these men are known to have written biographies and at least two of them series of short biographies grouped by area of achievement.Footnote ²⁹

Jerome also mentions his own De viris illustribus in a letter that he wrote to Augustine. Around the year 398 someone had given Augustine a copy of Jerome’s work that lacked a title; when Augustine inquired about it, his contact told him that the title was Epitaphium. This struck him as inappropriate, so he asked Jerome about it in a letter that for the most part concerned more important doctrinal matters.Footnote ³⁰It was only after several years that his letter reached Jerome, however, and it was not until late in 404 that Jerome responded. Augustine, he wrote, should surely have figured this out on his own. ‘For you have read that both the Greeks and the Latins who have described the lives of illustrious men never entitled this work Epitaphium, but On Illustrious Men [De viris illustribus] — that is to say, on generals, philosophers, orators, historians, poets, writers of epic, writers of tragedy, writers of comedy … Therefore this book ought to be called On Illustrious Men or more properly On Ecclesiastical Writers’. Here we have explicit evidence that Jerome associated his own work with others that similarly comprised series of biographies of men renowned in various fields, especially literary. It would be rash, however, to assume that he here indicates the specific contents of Suetonius’ work.Footnote ³¹

As I noted in Part I, another work of Jerome also played a vital role in the modern invention of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus, and that is his Chronicle. Jerome produced this work over a dozen years before he wrote his own De viris illustribus, around 380, when he was living in Constantinople. Its core was a Latin translation of the Greek Χρονικοὶ Κανόνες, Chronological Tables, completed by Eusebius in 325/326, but as Jerome explains in his preface, the final product was a hybrid. ‘Know that I have done the duty in part of a translator and in part of a writer, because I have both rendered the Greek very faithfully and have added a certain amount of material that seemed to me to have been omitted, especially in Roman history…. And so, from Ninus and Abraham down to the capture of Troy it is pure Greek translation; from Troy down to the twentieth year of Constantine, I have at times added, at times mixed in many things that I have very carefully excerpted from Tranquillus and the other illustrious historians [plurima, quae de Tranquillo et ceteris illustribus historicis curiosissime excerpsi]; from the above-mentioned year of Constantine down to the consulships of the two Augusti, Valens’ sixth and Valentinian’s second, it is completely my own’.Footnote ³²Jerome’s Chronicle, which follows the format of Eusebius’ original, is a very complex work: not a text in the ordinary sense of the word, but, as the Greek title indicates, a table, with different chronological schemes, drawn from the main civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world, extending across the page. In the midst of them are notices of various historical events and figures, including a number of writers.Footnote ³³As we have already seen, scholars since Ritschl, and indeed Scaliger, have almost universally accepted the hypothesis that Jerome derived his notices about Roman literary figures from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus, and it is on the basis of these notices that modern reconstructions of the work’s specific content are largely built. I discuss this topic in more detail in Part III. Here I note only that Jerome does not specify which works of Suetonius he used or provide any indication of their titles. Consequently, crucial as his Chronicle is for reconstructing the contents of De viris illustribus, it sheds no light whatsoever on its original form.

Apart from Jerome, only two sources refer to a work of Suetonius with a title similar to De viris illustribus. The most important of these is the entry on Suetonius in the Suda. This consists mostly of a catalogue of Suetonius’ works, of which the last is Στέμμα Ῥωμαίων ἀνδρῶν ἐπισήμων, ‘Stemma of Notable Roman Men’.Footnote ³⁴Since ἐπίσημος is a reasonable translation of illustris, it is likely that this refers to the same work that Jerome knew. The other is the life of the elder Pliny found in some manuscripts of his Natural History, a few of which, dating to the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, give it the title Vita Plinii ex catalogo virorum illustrium Tranquilli. This life was also incorporated by Vincent of Beauvais (Vincentius Bellovacensis, c. 1184/1194–c. 1264) into his Speculum Historiale, the fourth and final part of his massive compilation Speculum Maius; Vincent similarly titles it Tranquillus Suetonius in catalogo virorum illustrium.Footnote ³⁵Although other sources attribute to Suetonius material that would fit well in a work of the sort described by Jerome, most importantly the lives of Terence and Horace preserved in the manuscript tradition, they do not cite any particular work by title.Footnote ³⁶

From this evidence we can deduce that by the end of the fourth century a work of Suetonius was in circulation under the title De viris illustribus. Jerome indicates that it consisted of relatively short lives of notable men of letters, probably grouped in series by area of achievement; the limited evidence from other sources provides some confirmation. What we cannot deduce from this evidence, however, is that Suetonius himself planned these series of lives as a single compendious work under the general title De viris illustribus. It is worth stressing that Jerome provides not only the fullest evidence for such a work, but also the earliest. No prior writer refers to it at all. Much has been made of a comment by Pliny, who in a letter written around 105–106 c.e. urges Suetonius finally to publish a work in more than one book (istos libellos) on which Suetonius has been working for so long that, in Pliny’s view, further polishing would be positively detrimental. As I discuss in more detail below, there is some reason to think that Pliny is here hinting at a work that included lives of poets, but even if we accept those arguments his comment provides no evidence for a compendious work De viris illustribus.Footnote ³⁷There is also a suggestion that Juvenal was familiar with Suetonius’ De viris illustribus. In Satire 7, Juvenal laments the difficulties of writers and intellectuals seeking reliable and supportive patronage, whom he discusses group by group: poets (7.36–97), historians (98–104), orators (105–49), rhetores (150–214) and grammatici (215–43). Some 50 years ago, Gavin Townend proposed that Juvenal was here following, in reverse order, the structure of Suetonius’ work. Although Townend’s proposal is intriguing and has garnered significant scholarly support, it should be obvious that any attempt to use Juvenal’s poem as evidence for Suetonius’ De viris illustribus constitutes a serious petitio principii.Footnote ³⁸

The evidence thus allows for a hypothesis alternative to the one adopted by Pontano and all subsequent scholars, that the work known to Jerome and following generations as De viris illustribus was not published in that form by Suetonius himself, but was instead a collection of separate works that some later editor or copyist had compiled and given an overarching title. Such compilations are well attested. To take an especially pertinent example, the two major historical works of Tacitus that we now distinguish as the Annals and the Histories were at some point combined into a single work whose 30 books were numbered consecutively. That was apparently the form in which Jerome knew Tacitus’ work, as we may infer from his reference to ‘Cornelius Tacitus, who set down in thirty books the lives of the Caesars after Augustus up to Domitian’.Footnote ³⁹It is entirely plausible that the form in which Jerome knew Suetonius’ literary lives, an omnibus edition under the title De viris illustribus, was likewise the work of a later editor rather than the original author.

If we adopt this alternative hypothesis, we can reconsider individual series of lives without the constraints of interpreting them as parts of a larger work. This has long been a problem with De grammaticis et rhetoribus. As I noted above, the manuscript tradition of that text provides no hint of its being an extract from a larger work. If it had always and only existed as one book within a larger multi-book work, it is difficult to imagine how it came to be so completely separated from the rest. Moreover, its subject matter, teachers of grammatica and rhetorica, hardly fits with the established tradition of serial biographies, which, as Jerome observed in his letter to Augustine, typically concerned generals, philosophers, orators, historians and poets; there are no precedents for writing the lives of grammatici and rhetores.Footnote ⁴⁰Several scholars have accordingly argued that Suetonius wrote De grammaticis et rhetoribus as a separate work, perhaps years after De viris illustribus.Footnote ⁴¹If we dispense with the assumption of a compendious De viris illustribus, however, there is much less to explain; De grammaticis et rhetoribus becomes simply another in a series of similar works.

Likewise, scholars have long proposed that the work to which Pliny refers in the letter that I cited above was De viris illustribus. It was clearly something substantial that comprised more than one volume, and De viris illustribus seems to fit the bill best. Moreover, scholars have identified allusions in the letter to Catullus and Virgil’s Georgics. Pliny even employs phrasing similar to that in the Donatan life of Virgil, which, they argue, may indicate that he was deliberately evoking the hypothetical Suetonian original of that life. Taken together, these allusions suggest that Pliny, in writing this letter, had in mind Suetonius’ lives of poets.Footnote ⁴²Yet even if we grant the allusions, they need refer only to the lives of the poets, not a compendious De viris illustribus. Although Pliny is clear that the work in question comprised more than one book, the hypothesis advanced by Mommsen and more recently Stachon, that the lives of poets took up two books, would easily account for the plural. A work in at least two volumes, comprising the lives of some 30 poets from Livius Andronicus to Lucan, of which some at least must have been fairly substantial (judging from the Donatan life of Virgil), would certainly have been sufficient to account for Pliny’s enthusiasm.Footnote ⁴³

Rather than publishing all his lives of literary men together as one multi-volume work, Suetonius may well have produced the various series over a period of years. Although scholars have generally assumed that it was only after publishing De viris illustribus that he turned to De vita Caesarum, we should perhaps consider the alternative possibility that Suetonius continued to publish series of literary lives after he began publishing his imperial lives. Such an overlap would account for the connections between the different types of lives even more effectively than the assumption that he had retained his research files from his earlier project when writing the lives of the Caesars.Footnote ⁴⁴

III Was De viris illustribus a work of Latin literary history?

Dispensing with the hypothesis that Suetonius published his various series of literary lives as one compendious work also allows us to reconsider their parameters and focuses. Scholars since Ritschl have typically characterised De viris illustribus as a contribution to Latin literary history. Mommsen, for example, noted that Suetonius’ De viris illustribus was Jerome’s source for his numerous notices concerning ‘Roman literary history’. Roth, similarly, was willing to believe that ‘the entire corpus of Latin literature was comprised in the seven or eight books of Suetonius’ history’.Footnote ⁴⁵Although the characterization of De viris illustribus as a work of Latin literary history is not unreasonable, it led in practice to two corollaries that are more dubious: first, that all the men whose lives Suetonius included in his series were writers in the strict sense, i.e. men whose literary or intellectual achievements were embodied primarily in texts that they themselves composed, and second, that they all wrote in Latin. These assumptions resulted in a number of arbitrary conclusions about whose lives the series could and could not have included. Mommsen, for example, asserted that Jerome’s notice on the younger Cato could not derive from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus on the grounds that Cato was not a writer.Footnote ⁴⁶Reifferscheid, assuming that Suetonius wrote lives only of Latin writers, assigned to the prefaces of the various books all references to those who wrote in Greek.Footnote ⁴⁷Neither of these assumptions, however, is well supported by the evidence.

Although we can be reasonably confident that Suetonius grouped his lives into separate series according to area of achievement, it is important to be aware that we have almost no secure information about how he defined those areas. Apart from De grammaticis et rhetoribus, there is no explicit evidence at all for the titles of the individual series. Although Pontano accepted the story that two other books, de oratoribus and de poetis, had been destroyed by Polenton, the evidence for these books, if indeed any ever existed, is now lost. Otherwise, the titles and contents of all the other series that have been posited as parts of De viris illustribus have been inferred solely from material in Jerome’s Chronicle. It is accordingly important to consider that material in more detail.

As noted above, scholars since Scaliger have accepted the hypothesis that Jerome derived his notices about Roman literary figures from Suetonius’ De viris illustribus. There is much to support this hypothesis. For one thing, we know that, at least by the time Jerome was working on his own De viris illustribus, he was familiar with Suetonius’ work.Footnote ⁴⁸Moreover, Jerome’s notices conform in a range of ways with what we know of Suetonius’ work from other sources. For example, as Ritschl pointed out, Jerome does not mention a single grammaticus or rhetor who does not also appear in Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus, and in some cases we can identify similarities in content and wording between Jerome’s notice and the Suetonian biography.Footnote ⁴⁹There are similar parallels with the extant lives of poets attributed to Suetonius.Footnote ⁵⁰Lastly, as Mommsen noted, Jerome largely ceases to include notices about non-Christian Latin writers after the end of the first century c.e, the point at which Suetonius is likely to have ended his series of lives; he did not even include a notice about Suetonius himself.Footnote ⁵¹Thus, while we cannot be certain that every notice about a Roman writer in Jerome’s Chronicle derives from a corresponding life by Suetonius, it is a reasonable working assumption that Suetonius’ literary lives were his primary source.

Jerome’s notices about Roman men of letters generally include a name, a toponym or other reference to place of origin, and a brief descriptor indicating the area in which he achieved his fame. Most of them mark the date of the writer’s birth, death or floruit, and a few include other details. The following are illustrative examples: ‘the comic writer Turpilius dies at Sinuessa as quite an old man’; ‘the poet Titus Lucretius is born’; ‘Lucius Pomponius of Bologna, a writer of Atellan farces, is considered distinguished’.Footnote ⁵²It is on the generic descriptors that scholars interested in reconstructing the contents of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus have especially relied. Ritschl first advanced the proposition, back in 1843, that these descriptors constitute an indication of the specific book in which that life appeared, a proposition that has been widely accepted ever since. As Stachon succinctly puts it, ‘if Naevius, the author of an epic poem entitled Bellum Punicum, is referred to by Jerome … as Naevius comicus, this suggests that this poet was probably treated by Suetonius in the category comici’.Footnote ⁵³For all these reasons, Jerome’s notices in his Chronicle about Roman men of letters constitute the single most important body of evidence for scholars attempting to reconstruct the contents and titles of Suetonius’ individual series of lives.

The process of moving from Jerome’s work to that of Suetonius, however, is far less straightforward than most scholars have cared to admit. First, Jerome was highly selective in choosing the material from Suetonius that he incorporated into his Chronicle. As scholars have long pointed out, of the twenty grammatici whose biographies appear in De grammaticis et rhetoribus, Jerome noted only five; he ignored all those prior to the Augustan scholars M. Verrius Flaccus and C. Julius Hyginus, and did not include all their contemporaries and successors. Similarly, of the sixteen rhetors who appear in the index to De grammaticis et rhetoribus, Jerome included only nine.Footnote ⁵⁴Accordingly, the absence of a notice about a particular figure in the Chronicle is not necessarily an indication that Suetonius did not include a biography of that person in De viris illustribus. For example, the fact that Jerome has no entry for either Tibullus or Propertius has not prevented scholars from Reifferscheid onwards from assuming that Suetonius wrote biographies of them; as we have seen, Rostagni proposed that the extant life of Tibullus derives from Suetonius.Footnote ⁵⁵Conversely, the existence of a notice in Jerome’s Chronicle is not necessarily proof that Suetonius composed a corresponding life. Few scholars, for example, have suggested that Suetonius wrote lives of the jurist Servius Sulpicius or Augustus’ physician Artorius, despite the fact that Jerome includes entries on them.Footnote ⁵⁶

Most importantly, Jerome’s descriptors do not by any means provide a sure guide to the categories that Suetonius used in composing his series of lives. For example, in addition to poeta,Footnote ⁵⁷Jerome also uses the descriptors scriptor lyricus, satyrarum scriptor, tragoediarum scriptor, comicus/comoediarum scriptor, scriptor togatorum, Atellanorum scriptor and mimorum scriptor/mimografus.Footnote ⁵⁸No one assumes, and for good reason, that Suetonius dedicated an entire series to each of these genres; yet that then raises the unanswerable question of how he did group them. Another example: in addition to the fifteen or so men whom Jerome describes as orator, he includes three others whom he describes as declamator. No one to my knowledge has suggested that Suetonius devoted a series to declamatores in distinction to oratores, but if that is so, what are we to do with the three declamatores? As it happens, we know that one of them appeared in the series De rhetoribus. In this instance, accordingly, we have clear evidence that Jerome did not in fact always derive his descriptor from the title of the book in which he found the biography.Footnote ⁵⁹Lastly, it is worth noting that Jerome provides no descriptor at all for either Cicero or Virgil, each of whom receives several notices in the Chronicle. Since it defies belief that Suetonius would not have included lives of these two in his books on orators and poets, we must assume that the absence of a descriptor in these two cases is indicative of nothing more than the fact that Jerome felt that it was superfluous to point out that Cicero was an orator and Virgil a poet. Although in these two cases that is a perfectly reasonable assumption, it seems much less likely in the case of the orator Passienus, of whom Jerome says only that he was killed through the deceit of his heir, or the poet P. Terentius Varro of Atax, of whom he says only that he studied Greek literature with great zeal.Footnote ⁶⁰My point here is that Jerome’s descriptors are by no means a transparent guide to Suetonius’ categories and that anyone who uses them to reconstruct the titles and contents of Suetonius’ original series of lives must constantly make decisions about what is and is not significant, what is and is not plausible.

Keeping in mind both the importance of the material in Jerome’s Chronicle and its limitations as a guide to the content and titles of Suetonius’ original series of lives, we may return to the two problematic assumptions that I identified at the start of this part: that all the men whose lives Suetonius included in his series were writers in the strict sense and that they all wrote in Latin. The only explicit evidence for the latter is the title recorded in the Suda, Στέμμα Ῥωμαίων ἀνδρῶν ἐπισήμων, ‘stemma of illustrious Roman men’. Yet quite apart from questions concerning the origin and accuracy of this title, we may reasonably ask whether Ῥωμαῖος in a Byzantine Greek context necessarily means ‘Latin-speaking’.Footnote ⁶¹Jerome, who presumably was more familiar with Suetonius’ work than any other surviving source, never says that it was limited to Latin writers, but only that it dealt with non-Christian, ‘pagan’ (gentilis) men of letters. Jerome’s own collection of lives, we may note, included writers in both Greek and Latin. The same is true of Suetonius’ predecessor Nepos, whose own work De viris illustribus, in at least sixteen books, seems to have included a pair of books for each category that he discussed, one on Roman figures and another on Greek (or more broadly non-Roman).Footnote ⁶²It is true that the extant De grammaticis et rhetoribus is limited to men who taught Latin (although some, such as Sex. Clodius, taught Greek as well) and that the evidence for De poetis suggests that it was similarly limited to Latin poets. Yet if Suetonius published his sets of biographies serially, as I have suggested, we need not assume that he rigidly applied the same criteria for inclusion to each set.Footnote ⁶³

The assumption that all of Suetonius’ subjects were writers, in the strict sense of men whose literary or intellectual achievements were embodied primarily in texts that they themselves composed and published, is even less defensible. It is true that Jerome, in his own De viris illustribus, focused on writers in the strict sense; as he later wrote to Augustine, ‘this book ought to be called On Illustrious Men or more properly On Ecclesiastical Writers’.Footnote ⁶⁴Yet the fact that he proposed ‘on writers’ as a suitable alternative title for his own work does not entail that it was equally suitable for Suetonius’ work. On the contrary, although some of the grammatici and rhetores covered by Suetonius were also writers in the strict sense, their defining quality, the thing that they had in common and that qualified them for inclusion in Suetonius’ work, was that they were teachers; their achievement lay in their practice.Footnote ⁶⁵If for the sake of argument we suppose that in other books as well Suetonius defined his subjects not so much as writers but as practitioners of particular literary arts, we open up possibilities for new approaches. For although poets and historians are by definition writers in the strict sense, that is not true of either orators or philosophers. We may explore some of the implications of this argument by considering in more detail Suetonius’ lives of philosophers.

IV Did Suetonius write De philosophis?

Most of the nineteenth-century German scholars who interested themselves in the reconstruction of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus rejected the possibility that it included a book De philosophis. Ritschl argued that there are too few relevant notices in Jerome to justify positing such a book, Mommsen postulated other sources for the few notices that do exist, and even Roth, despite his maximalist inclinations, chose not to include such a book in his reconstruction.Footnote ⁶⁶Reifferscheid alone posited a book devoted to philosophers, yet was willing to assign to it only three lives: those of M. Terentius Varro, Nigidius Figulus and Seneca.Footnote ⁶⁷It is worth noting, however, that of these three Jerome designates only Varro as philosophus; Nigidius he describes instead as Pythagoricus et magus, and he allots no descriptor at all to Seneca. Reifferscheid offered no justification for including these two men, although it is easy enough to come up with reasons why he did so. Since Jerome designates another man as philosophus Pythagoricus, it is reasonable to assume that Pythagoricus on its own, as we find in the entry on Nigidius Figulus, implies philosophus. As for Seneca, we may suppose that Jerome deemed it just as unnecessary to identify Seneca as a philosopher as it was to identify Cicero as an orator or Virgil as a poet. It was during Jerome’s lifetime that the alleged correspondence between the philosopher Seneca and the apostle Paul began to circulate among educated Christians; Jerome himself, who included Seneca in his De viris illustribus for that very reason, played a part in promoting it.Footnote ⁶⁸

The problem for reconstructing a book De philosophis is not Reifferscheid’s inclusion of men who lack the descriptor philosophus, but his exclusion of those who have it. Anyone who takes his reconstruction as a guide to a Suetonian book De philosophis will immediately be struck by the meagreness of the postulated remains; Reifferscheid himself justified this by pointing out that philosophy was a genre in which Roman literature produced very few notable writers.Footnote ⁶⁹In fact, there are significantly more notices in Jerome’s Chronicle for men designated philosophus than for men designated historicus. In the period from the late second century b.c.e. to the end of the first century c.e., Jerome includes notices of ten men whom he designates philosophus: M. Terentius Varro (philosophus et poeta), M. Porcius Cato (stoicus philosophus), Sextus (Pythagoricus philosophus), Athenodorus of Tarsus (stoicus philosophus), Sotion of Alexandria, Cornutus, T. Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Apollonius of Tyana (all philosophus) and Euphrates (stoicus philosophus).Footnote ⁷⁰In addition, he notes two men whom he describes as Pythagoricus et magus: Nigidius Figulus, as noted above, and Anaxilaus of Larissa.Footnote ⁷¹Reifferscheid and his predecessors, however, excluded the vast majority of these men on the grounds that they were Greek, or wrote in Greek, or did not write at all. That is, they were constrained by the assumption that if Suetonius wrote lives of philosophers, he did so as a contribution to Latin literary history. Yet if we assume that Suetonius’ purpose was rather to profile men who were notable in Rome as practitioners of philosophy, the full list of names from Jerome makes more sense.Footnote ⁷²

Although we cannot know how Suetonius might have handled these lives, we may suppose that in his selection and arrangement of material he would have highlighted the same sorts of themes that are so prominent in the extant literary lives: the reception and gradual integration of Greek literary and intellectual culture at Rome, the social location of his subjects and their interactions with the Roman elite, and as always telling details that provide sparkle and colour. These themes were to some extent inherent in his subject, since the reception in Rome of philosophy, a quintessentially Greek form of intellectual activity, was a protracted and often contentious process. In the interests of brevity, I will here consider only a few of the lesser-known figures. Jerome’s ‘Sextus’ is almost certainly Q. Sextius, whom the younger Seneca mentions several times with great admiration. Evidently a man of good family, Sextius rejected Caesar’s offer of adlection into the senate, evidently preferring to avoid owing any favours and becoming entangled in a political career. Seneca regarded him as in practice a true Stoic, ‘although he denies it’, and wrote that he ‘philosophises in the Greek language but with Roman values’. Sextius was notable for founding his own philosophical school, even though it was short-lived.Footnote ⁷³Seneca may well have been introduced to the work of Sextius by his teacher Sotion, who inspired him to abstain from animal flesh for a period in his youth, until his father, disturbed by the association of dietary fads with foreign superstitions, persuaded him to abandon the practice. In any case, Seneca notes that Sotion drew his arguments against the consumption of meat not only from Pythagorean tradition but also from the teachings of Sextius. Jerome indicates that Sotion was originally from Alexandria, making him one of the many Greek intellectuals who found employment in Rome.Footnote ⁷⁴

Also from the Greek east were two men active in Rome during the reign of Augustus. Anaxilaus of Larisa, we learn from Jerome, was expelled from Rome and Italy by Augustus in 28 b.c.e. The elder Pliny often cites an Anaxilaus, presumably the same man, as one of his authorities for the astonishing properties of various natural substances; at dinner parties, for example, he knew how to heat a cup of sulphur in such a way as to cast a ghastly pall over the guests. Anaxilaus apparently compiled a whole book of such party tricks entitled Paignia. Although we have no evidence concerning the reason for his expulsion, it may have been connected with Agrippa’s earlier expulsion of astrologers and goētes from Rome.Footnote ⁷⁵In contrast, the Stoic Athenodorus of Tarsus was a teacher of Octavian, who perhaps brought him with him to Rome when he came to claim his inheritance; at any rate, he was there as early as 44 b.c.e. He apparently remained in Rome for many years as the emperor’s trusted advisor. Dio Cassius, for examples, records an anecdote that he was at one point brought into Augustus’ room in a covered litter, burst out with a sword and asked whether he was not worried that someone might thus enter and kill him; Augustus, instead of being angry, thanked him for the lesson. At last, in his old age, Athenodorus returned to his home town as Augustus’ representative to set its affairs in order.Footnote ⁷⁶

If such minor figures as these could have provided Suetonius with so much material of the sort that he favoured, we can imagine what he might have done with such figures as Varro, Nigidius Figulus and Musonius Rufus. There is thus ample scope for reimagining a book De philosophis as a typically Suetonian production, once we pry it free from the fixed notion of De viris illustribus as a work of Latin literary history.

V Conclusion

I began this paper by tracing the scholarly invention of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus from the rediscovery of De grammaticis et rhetoribus in the fifteenth century down to the present. The crucial work was done by nineteenth-century German scholars over a period of less than twenty years, from Ritschl’s paper of 1843 to Reifferscheid’s edition of 1860. Although much important work has been done since, it has for the most part elaborated on particular aspects, refining our understanding of the treatise on grammatici and rhetores and expanding the evidence for the lives of poets. In its essentials, however, our overall picture of De viris illustribus has undergone little change since 1860. And for good reason: as I have demonstrated, much of the nineteenth-century German reconstruction is well grounded in the evidence. The trope of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ is in this case very apt.

Yet even the best scholars have their blind spots. I have also tried to identify elements in the scholarly invention of De viris illustribus where unexamined assumptions have become accepted as matters of fact. The assumption that Suetonius planned and published his series of literary lives as one compendious work is a case in point. I have argued that since the earliest evidence for such a work dates only to the late fourth century, more than two and a half centuries after Suetonius’ death, it is entirely possible that he never regarded his various series of lives as constituting a single work at all, and that the omnibus edition of Suetonius’ literary biographies that Jerome and other readers in late antiquity knew under the title De viris illustribus was the work of a later compiler.Footnote ⁷⁷On that hypothesis, we might well imagine that Suetonius wrote his series of literary lives over a period of years, perhaps overlapping with his work on De vita Caesarum.

Once we call into question the assumption that Suetonius planned his series of literary lives as a single work, we are freed from the need to interpret the individual series in terms of the putative whole. I have in particular reconsidered the traditional characterisation of De viris illustribus as a work of Latin literary history. Although the evidence supports the hypothesis that all his series of lives concerned men who were notable as practitioners of different literary arts, each series may well have had its own particular parameters and principles. There is no decisive reason to think that in all cases Suetonius was limited to men whose fame rested on texts that they themselves composed and published or men whose major contributions were in the Latin language. I have argued that in the case of a possible book De philosophis the opposite may well have been true. If we approach the extant evidence for such a book on the assumption that Suetonius conceived of it not as a survey of Latin writers on philosophy but as a documentation of cultural and political aspects of the development of philosophy in Rome, comparable to what he does in De grammaticis et rhetoribus, we can make a case that he would have had good reason to include Greeks resident in Rome, Romans who wrote in Greek and men who practised as well as wrote philosophy.

In recent decades, it has become widely recognised that the once-popular characterisation of De vita Caesarum as a work of Roman political history is inappropriate and misleading.Footnote ⁷⁸It is time to recognise that the long-accepted characterisation of De viris illustribus as a compendious work of Latin literary history is equally inappropriate. Suetonius was no more interested in literary history in the modern sense than he was in political history. His interests, as well as his approach, are remarkably consistent throughout all his lives, and the more we rid ourselves of a priori assumptions about the nature of the lives that made up the collection De viris illustribus known to Jerome, the more clearly we can see that.