Second Caesar: Suetonius and Augustus

¶ … Second Caesar: Suetonius and Augustus What's immediately interesting about Suetonius' rehearsal of the life of Augustus is the speed with which this otherwise expansive writer treats the protracted period of civil turmoil that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar and ended the Roman Republic. While the imperial birth crisis dragged on for 14 years -- nearly a third of Augustus' life -- and spanned the Roman world, Suetonius spends less than 11 relatively terse paragraphs lingering on the details.

As it is, a reader who takes The Twelve Caesars as an encyclopedic source on the era may come away thinking of the "five civil wars" that Augustus fought in order to secure the imperium as something of a running battle that broke out immediately after the death of Caesar and quickly installed a near-adolescent on the throne, or left with a confused idea of where to place the Augustan triumvirate in the chronology.

Given Suetonius' reputation for "astringent" equipoise (viii), it is difficult to read the apparent elision as deliberately pro-Augustan suppression of a painful phase of Roman history. However, modern interpretations of the emperor as an extraordinarily cunning political animal are still impossible to reconcile with baldfaced assertions like "When the people would have forced a dictatorship upon him he fell on his knee and, throwing back his gown to expose his naked breast, implored their silence" (76).

Does the author really believe that this highly sentimental scene actually took place, or is he simply reporting a pious legend that accumulated around Augustus during a century of state worship? Of course, as an informed historian, Suetonius is within his rights to portray his subject in admirable terms if the evidence warrants it.

In light of the cast of characters found in The Twelve Caesars, we would be more surprised if Augustus did not come off looking relatively honorable, sober, generous, and diligent in the company of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero. And besides, Suetonius had access to Augustus' personal correspondence and so had a better glimpse into the character of the man himself -- habitual grammatical lapses and all -- than we do. His vices and eccentricities are here along with his virtues.

So where is the coherent coverage of the civil wars? It may simply have been a casualty of Suetonius' "grammatical" biographical approach, which organizes its material along thematic and not chronological lines and so can mislead modern readers looking for a more straightforward year-to-year narrative. Significantly, the wars are the first of the "subject headings" (49) into which Suetonius dissects Augustus and his imperial career, and thus arguably the most important.

It is only by accident that this section of the text follows immediately on the prefatory discussion of Augustus' upbringing and early career, just as it would in a chronological narrative. After this, it is easy for the casual reader to go on to the discussion of the foreign wars as the first major event in a relatively youthful.