The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete.

Few ancient books are as endlessly quotable as Suetonius's collective portrait of the men who ruled Rome, at once biography, history and scandal-sheet.

What it's about

The Lives of the Twelve Caesars gives us, one by one, Julius Caesar and the emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius, writing in the early second century with access to imperial archives, arranges each life not as a strict chronicle but by category, ancestry, public career, personal habits, appearance, vices and death, salting the record with anecdote, rumour, portent and pointed physical detail. The result is a vivid, unblinking gallery, from the shrewdness of Augustus to the monstrousness of Caligula and Nero.

Themes

Power and its corruptions are the great subject, along with the character of rulers, the workings of fortune and omen, and the intimate machinery of empire. Suetonius is fascinated by the private man behind the public office, and by how absolute power reveals and deforms those who hold it.

Why it still matters

This is one of our richest sources for the early Roman Empire and a foundational model for biography itself, imitated for centuries. Its blend of gravity and gossip still makes the Caesars startlingly present.

Who it's for

For readers of Roman history, lovers of biography, and anyone who wants the emperors served up with all their grandeur and squalor intact.