534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club.
That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.
Normal is a relative term. So it used to be considered perfectly normal to go down to the Westminster pit in London and to watch a monkey fighting a dog called Puss.
And people used to think it's actually a perfectly reasonable and a normal way to behave. But of course, now people would consider that slightly alarming.
And high phone bills were also once considered normal. But luckily, we now have Mint Mobile.
And with Mint Mobile, you can leave your overpriced phone plan behind. They have premium plans that start at only $15 a month.
No matter what you consider normal, don't overpay for it. Tap now to shop data plans or visit mintmobile.com slash history.
That is mintmobile.com slash history. Upfront payment of $45 for three month, five gigabyte plan required, equivalent to $15 a month.
New customer offer for first three months only, and then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.
See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is brought to you by Polestar.
Now for a quick break from the past, let's focus on the future. Making the switch to electric doesn't have to mean leaving your dream car in the past.
And when it comes to electric driving, Polestar 3 is setting the new standard.

Polestar 3 drives like a sports car and has the spacious comfort of an SUV.

With Polestar 3, you can truly have it all.

And did we mention the range of up to 350 miles per charge? Discover why this SUV is the future of electric driving when you test drive.

Book your test drive at polestar.com.

This podcast is brought to you by this SUV is the future of electric driving when you test more when you quote RV insurance at Progressive.com today. Progressive Casualty Insurance, to dig a hole the size of his body, and to collect such fragments of marble as could be found, and to bring water and firewood ready for the disposal of what would very soon be his corpse.
And as these things were being done, so he wept, and cried repeatedly, that I should die a mere artisan. When, during the delay caused by these preparations, a letter was brought to his freedman by courier, he snatched it and learned by reading it that the Senate had proclaimed him a public enemy and ordered a search made for him so that he might be punished according to the ancestral fashion.
And when, after asking what this punishment might be, he learned that a man sentenced to it would be stripped naked, have his neck put in a fork, and then be beaten to death with rods. So terror-stricken was he that he grabbed two daggers he had brought with him and tested the blades of both, after which, on the grounds that the fatal hour had not yet arrived, he put them away again.
But then came the horseman, who had been commissioned to bring him back alive, closing in upon him. When he heard their approach, he said in a shaking voice, quoting Homer, the thundering of swift-footed horses echoes in my ears.
Whereupon, with the assistance of his secretary, Epaphroditus, he slit his throat. Although still on the margins of consciousness, when a centurion came bursting in, and pretending to have come with the aim of helping him, held a cloak up to staunch his wound, he only muttered, too late, and such loyalty.
With these words, he died, and so fixedly did his eyeballs bulge from their sockets that onlookers were filled with horror and dread. So that tremendous passage is describing the death of Nero on the 9th of June, 68.
It was written by the Roman scholar Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus in his great collection of biographies, The Lives of the Caesars, the 12 Caesars, depending what you call it. And I'm delighted to say that that was translated by a top amateur translator.
And that gifted young amateur, Tom, is yourself,

because this is your new translation of Suetonius

coming out in Penguin Classics on the 13th of February.

Very exciting.

Thanks, Dominique.

It is, and I believe it's available for pre-order.

So everyone, fill your boots.

Yeah.

So The Lives of the Caesars, as you said,

I mean, they are probably,

along with the biographies written by Plutarch,

the most celebrated of all the biographies

that we've received from the ancient world.

at the end. of the Caesars, as you said.
I mean, they are probably, along with the biographies written by Plutarch, the most celebrated of all the biographies that we've received from the ancient world. And these, I think, are without doubt the most glamorous, the most scabrous, occasionally the most shocking.
And as you said, they describe the lives of 12 Caesars, and they range from the life of Julius Caesar, who was born in 100 BC, up to the Emperor Domitian, who died in AD 96. So that's covering two centuries, probably the most dramatic, the most spectacular two centuries in all of Roman history.
And these are rulers who, in succession, were the most powerful men in the Roman Empire. So we're at the heart of power.
Yeah. So let's just run through very quickly for those people who don't know.
We kick off with Julius Caesar, crosses the Rubicon, sort of topples the Republic, but famously is not the first emperor, as everybody thinks. So he's the one we kick off with.
Then it's Augustus, the first emperor, arguably the greatest politician in Western history, who establishes the template for what follows. Then we have Tiberius.
We will be doing an episode about Tiberius, won't we? We will. And how would you describe him in a sentence? Grizzled, experienced general who misbehaves on the island of Capri.
Or does he? Right. We'll be exploring that in our next episode.
And he is then succeeded by Caligula. Mad.
Yeah. We'll be doing an episode on him.
Yeah. Claudius, we'll be doing an episode on him and then Nero, who we've just been hearing about.
With Nero's death, the family of Augustus comes to an end. You then have a year of bloodshed and civil war, AD 69, when four emperors in succession rule.
So that is Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian. And again, Suetonius describes the lives of all four men.
It's Vespasian who establishes himself as emperor. He establishes a new dynasty and is succeeded by his two sons in turn.
So first Titus and then Domitian. And we begin, Julius Caesar, as you said, is born into a Rome that is still a republic.
And Domitian is an emperor who demands that the Romans call him Dominus, master. So that is essentially kind of the evolution from a republican system to a much more autocratic system.
So the fascination of these stories is both that they describe the evolution of Rome, so from Republic to Empire. But the other element of it is the extraordinary vividness and richness

of the lives that it describes and the details. So many of the things that people best know,

that people immediately reach for about the Roman emperors, particularly the sex and violence,

many of these things come from these biographies, don't they? So we mentioned Tiberius. So Tiberius, when he's in retirement, unbelievable sexual depravity, or is it, on the island of Capri, or Nero, or Caligula.
I mean, these stories all come from Suetonius by and large, don't they? Or Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or Caesar being murdered. And in fact, the assassination of Caligula in his own palace, the murder of Vitalius in AD 69, I mean, kind of being sliced up like sashimi on the steps leading up from the Forum to the capital.
He's completely fascinated by how emperors meet their deaths. But important to emphasize as well that he's fascinated essentially in pretty much everything.
I mean, there is almost no detail that he doesn't explore. So we see the Caesars rather as we might kind of contemporary politicians in a political context.
So we see them, you know, wrestling with, I don't know, PR scandals or funding shortfalls or foreign policy crises. And we're shown their tastes, their foibles, the eccentricities that they indulge in.
And we see them eat, we see them drink, we see them get married, we see them get divorced, we see them make jokes, take exercise or not take exercise, urinate, laugh at someone breaking wind, tying up their sandals. I mean, all these kind of details.
And I think that it's not just that it brings the Caesars alive, but it brings ancient Rome alive. Well, you made this point in your introduction.
For people who are hesitating whether or not to buy your translation, I have to say, it obviously pains me to say this, especially to say it publicly, but it's prefaced by a brilliant introduction by you. Oh, you're very kind, Dominic, where you explain all the context and whatnot.
And you make the point that the pharaohs of Egypt or the great rulers of Persia, these people are just names, really. It's very hard for us to get a sense of their personalities.
But thanks to Suetonius, you have a real sense. You know what Augustus had, his appearance of modesty and simplicity.
You know the tastes that Nero had, what clothes he wore, all of these kind of details that allow them to speak to us as flesh and blood, three-dimensional characters in a way that's not really the case with any other people, or very few other people from the ancient world. Yeah.
And so it's often kind of assumed that our interest in ancient Rome over and above, say, that of Egypt or Persia or whatever, is maybe because of Eurocentrism or whatever. But I truly think that it is simply because these rulers live more vividly than any other rulers in antiquity.
And this is largely down to Suetonius. And you said that Suetonius is interested in violence.
He is also, of course, massively interested in sex. And I would say that probably of all the things that Suetonius is known for, that is what he is probably, well, I mean, you might say almost most notorious for.
And the details that you get about the sex lives of the Caesars, I mean, it was capable of making the Romans themselves slightly go pale. So we have a poem that was written in the late fourth century, admittedly a time when the Roman elites were starting to become Christian.
And this is by the poet Claudian. And he wrote about the early Caesars, the Caesars recorded in Suetonius, his biographers.
And he wrote, the stains of the crimes committed by the men of old. So that's the first Caesars, the 12 Caesars, will endure for all time.
Condemnation will never be lacking of the monstrous deeds perpetrated by the House of Caesar, Nero's unspeakable depravities, and those vile cliffs of Capri, the lair of an aged pervert. And that aged pervert, as you've suggested already, is Tiberius, who retires there and gets up to supposedly unspeakable things.
And of course, we have mentioned Suetonius quite recently, because we did a series on Charlemagne. And Einhard, the great biographer of Charlemagne, is very influenced by Suetonius and models his biography of Charlemagne on that of Augustus.
So there's the sense in the Middle Ages that if you want to learn about how to exercise power, you do go to Suetonius, you read these biographies. But in the Middle Ages as well, there are people who are reading these lives to be titillated and shocked, as well as to be inspired.
And the most notorious example of someone who is influenced by what he reads in Suetonius to a repellent degree is a figure called Gilles de Ray, who in the 15th century is fighting the English in the Hundred Years' War, actually alongside Joan of Arc, it said. And he has read Suetonius and he reads about all these hideous crimes that Tiberius is supposed to have perpetrated against young children and ends up becoming a child killer

and is hanged for this in 1440. That's a kind of reflection of the strange ambivalence of Suetonius' reputation.
He's writing models for kings, but he's simultaneously inspiring unspeakable crimes. This is a tension that runs throughout the Renaissance when he's a huge business.
So you will get medallions, pictures, portraits, coins of the 12 Caesars throughout the Renaissance going into the Enlightenment. But at the same time, if you think of the Enlightenment, I mean, we did an episode on the Marquis de Sade.
The Marquis de Sade, of course, has a copy of Suetonius in his library. And Dominic, we also did a series on public schools in the Victorian period.
We did indeed. And the thing that I've always thought is mad about that is that Suetonius is a school text for school boys at rugby under the muscularly Christian Dr.
Arnold. And these boys are being given texts of Suetonius where the more dirty passages has asterisks.

But of course, if they end up reading Latin very fluently, their privilege is that they can go and get the full Latin copy and read these disgusting accounts.

So essentially, Dr. Arnold is training them to read about beastliness.

There's quite a lot of beastliness in your translation, isn't there?

Because obviously the first thing I did when I saw your translation

was to check for all the beastly bits.

And they're very much present and correct.

You haven't gone for the asterisks.

Though I have to say,

if there are people listening to this podcast

with 10-year-old children who love the Romans,

this probably is not the ideal book

because there's some quite pungent behaviour,

isn't there?

I think it's fair to say.

Suetonius contains probably the most revolting passages in the whole of ancient literature. And I would guess if I'd say the single most revolting sentence, stuff that we don't want to repeat on this podcast.
But having said that, I would say that obviously today, throughout the 20th century, in fact, we've tended to pride ourselves on not being prudish in a kind of Victorian manner. You know, we don't put in the asterisks.
I mean, I haven't in this translation. And there's a sense in which the themes of sex and violence in Suetonius have kind of come into their own in popular culture in the 20th century.
And that's highlighted by the identity of the man who translated the previous edition of Suetonius' Lives for Penguin Classics,

who's none other than Robert Graves.

So the author of I, Claudius.

Yes.

So Robert Graves obviously turned the raw material from the Twelve Caesars

into his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

And I, Claudius then became a BBC TV series in the 1970s, hugely successful. And the appeal the appeal of it i guess both in i claudius and actually in suetonius's original it's it's got a little bit of the soap opera about it hasn't it the sex and the violence the narrative twists the melodrama because it is a family certainly the first few lives are a family melodrama the family of augustus and the crazy things that happen yeah you have the have the figure of Augustus, who's the kind of patriarch.
You have a murderous competition to succeed him. In the figure of Livia, Augustus's wife, as reworked by Robert Graves, you have the kind of the ultimate homicidal matriarch.
And you have Claudius, who survives the terrifying reigns of Tiberius and Caligula, and it ends with him as emperor.

So he seems to be triumphant. But in the final pages of the novel and the final episode of the series, you have the encroaching shadow of the reign of Nero as it comes.
And there are so many elements of that that then feeds into TV drama through the 80s and later. So in the United States, the soap opera dynasty with Joan Collins.
You've said it in the American way, Tom. You've absolutely shamed yourself.
Yeah, lots of shoulder pads and kind of lip gloss. It's all set in, I think, in Denver, isn't it? Yeah.
Very clearly modelled on I, Claudius. But then in the late 90s, going into the early 21st century, there's a series that is even more influential and even more obviously influenced by I Claudius, very overtly so, in fact, and that's The Sopranos.
So there is an episode in which Tony Soprano sits on the bleachers at a baseball game and discusses Augustus and says of his reign, it was the longest time of peace in Rome's history. He was a fair leader and all his people loved him for that.
Yeah, he identifies with him, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. Although actually, Tony Soprano's mother is called Livia as Tiberius as was.
So there's a slight element in which he's Tiberius as well as Augustus. And it works brilliantly because, of course, the power of the Caesars is founded on muscle on intimidation and if you think of augustus as a kind of godfather figure with a family i mean that maps on very well onto what's happening with the sopranos and then the sopranos in turn of course influences i don't know game of thrones or whatever and although game Game of Thrones is clearly drawing on specific episodes

in medieval history,

the overarching idea

of a wrestling for power

with poison and incest

and dynastic feuding.

Again, the wellsprings for this,

I think, are I, Claudius.

And I always wondered,

so that Jack Gleeson,

the actor who played Joffrey,

the kind of Caligula type king.

I mean, he looks like Caligula. If you've ever seen the kind of portrait bust of Caligula? I always wondered whether that was kind of deliberate.
So to go to this thing about it being a drama, you make this point at some length. You talk about this in your introduction to the new translation.
And also to pick up your point about Augustus being the godfather, you make the point that Augustus from the very beginning, arguably his greatest political skill, is that he's brilliant at playing lots of different parts and he has lots of different kind of masks and personas and you describe him as rome's greatest actor and there's this very very famous scene which is from suetonius where augustus is on his deathbed and he has himself all kind of primped and whatnot he does his hair and he he has his jaw set straight and then he has all his friends in and he says to them do you think i played my part in the comedy of life well and then he says he quotes lines from a play if the play's been a good one clap your hands and let me leave the stage to the sound of your applause it's a brilliant brilliant ending yeah if if it really happened i mean who knows whether it happened or whether it's a folk tale that was told about Augustus. But even if it didn't happen, I mean, it's telling that that story should have been told about him.
It seems appropriate and fitting. So this idea of the Caesars as actors, that kind of runs through Suetonius, doesn't it? They're playing parts on a stage.
Yeah. And again, it's why Augustus is the exemplar.
So Augustus, in a way, is the kind of centre of the collection of biographies. It's by far the longest, the most sophisticated, the most complex of the biographies.
And one of the ways in which it sets the template is that, as you said, Augustus is the model of how to be a Caesar because he is also the model of how to be an actor. And his ability to play all the roles that a Caesar has to play is kind of portrayed by Suetonius as being key to his success.
So this is evident in, well, kind of in the range of names that he has throughout his life. So he begins as Gaius Octavius.
Then he's adopted as Julius Caesar's heir. So he becomes Julius Caesar.
Then he's given the name Augustus. Suetonius tells us that when he stamps official documents, Augustus uses a seal that is decorated with a sphinx, so very practiced at telling riddles.
And over the course of his life, he picks up masks and then lays them down as circumstances require. So as a young man, it's his mission to avenge his murdered adoptive father, Julius Caesar, and he consciously practices terrorism to do that.
He makes his name one that would chill even the highest ranking noblemen in Rome. So Suetonius describes one incident.
It is claimed by some authors that on the Ides of March, so that's the anniversary of Caesar's murder, he selected 300 senators and knights from among those who had surrendered and had them butchered like sacrificial animals on an altar dedicated to Julius Caesar. So Suetonius is upfront about that, even though he greatly admires Augustus.
But ultimately, the reason that he admires Augustus isn't because he is a kind of murderous vigilante, wiping out the assassins of his adoptive father, but because having done that, he gives the Roman people what they have not had for many decades, namely peace. And he lives so long that he comes to serve the Romans as their father.
And Suetonius sees this as an achievement that is genuinely, literally more than human. The word Augustus means more than human, kind of halfway to the divine.
And when he comes to the end of his biography, Suetonius writes, perhaps it will not be off topic to include here an account of everything that happened prior to his birth, Augustus' birth, on the actual day of his nativity and then subsequent to it, which serves to portend his future greatness and to offer the hope of good fortune without end. And it's in the reign of Augustus that Jesus is born.
And the echo of the stories that are told by Christians about the nativity of Jesus and about the prophecies that were told about his coming are very, very redolent of the stories that Suetonius gives about the birth of Augustus. And I think it's a crucial part of the biographies that even though you were getting details about urination and farts and all that kind of stuff, you are also getting a sense that this extraordinary drama, these extraordinary lives exist in the context of the supernatural.
When Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, a mysterious spirit blows a trumpet. The ghost of Caesar is seen on kind of lonely paths.
Omens and portents shadow the lives of the Caesars right the way through. And that too is a part of the story.
And that's what makes Augustus's achievement as an actor who stands on the stage of the world. He's also standing on the stage of the heavens and his death will become a god.
That thing about Augustus as an actor, this is also a brilliant kind of primer in politics, in how politics works. And politics as, I mean, it's something that actually, you know, Donald Trump instinctively knows and Keir Starmer doesn't, which is that politics is about performance and about display and ritual and so on.
And show business, I guess, to an extent. And Suetonius is brilliant on politics as show business.
That runs right through the 12 biographies, doesn't it? Absolutely. And it highlights something that makes the Caesars distinctive among the autocrats of antiquity, which is that they are expected to put themselves up before the mass of the people.
They are expected to stage entertainments and shows and gladiatorial combats, which means that if they are unpopular, they will be booed. So it's a constant process of testing your popularity.
And that, I think, is why Suetonius is so interested in things like gladiatorial combats, the details of beast hunts and things like that. It's not just the show itself.
It's the fact that being able to put on a show, it's a crucial part of what it is to be a good emperor. And obviously, Augustus establishes the template for what it is to be a good emperor.
And to some extent, I guess you could argue the story of Soutonius' book

is the story of people struggling to fill his shoes.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

Definitely the case of Tiberius, I guess, with Caligula and Claudius,

the initial successors.

They're all part of his family.

I mean, this is the remarkable thing, isn't it?

It's a kind of monarchy in all but name.

At first, purely for dynastic reasons, not because they've won power. Well, Tiberius is a very accomplished man.
The others are not so accomplished. But as long as that family endures, which it does to the time of Nero, the line of succession is kind of, it kind of makes some sense.
But when Nero is killed, and then you have the year of the four emperors, and then the rise of the Flavian dynasty, how do they see themselves in terms of their succession? I mean, they're still trying to become Augustus, aren't they? Yeah. So as you said, I think Augustus is at the heart of it.
And then the emperors who belong to his family, the house of Caesar, they're kind of, you know, the next ring. And then on the outer ring, you have the biographies of figures who provide a different perspective on the course of Roman history.
So if you look backwards from Augustus, you have the first of the 12 Caesars, who, as you said, isn't an emperor at all, and that's Julius Caesar. And that serves as a reminder to the reader that there is a world that is less claustrophobic than that of the autocracy introduced by Augustus, because Caesar is operating in a republic.
With the lives of the emperors, there's the sense that the emperor

is at the heart of the state. Julius Caesar is a man of incredible accomplishment, but he is just one of a multitude of power players.
In a very chaotic, very chaotic world. Yeah, in the drama of his age.
And Suetonius judges him by the standards of that age. So he He really admires Julius Caesar.

He recognises that Caesar is an extraordinary genius, a great general, a great orator, a great writer. He's a brilliant at urban planning.
I mean, drawing up calendars is almost nothing he can't do. And also he's a man of great mercy.
He pardons his defeated enemies. But in the buildup to his account of the murder of Caesar in the Ides of March, he judges the reckoning must still be that Caesar abused his position of power and deserved to be slain.
So that's the kind of fascinating perspective that the reader can then take into the lives of the subsequent Caesars. Yeah.
Given that they're autocrats, Julius Caesar kind of wasn't. Right.
Exactly. So that's one thing that frames the life of Augustus and the emperors who belong to the house of Caesar.
But then the other thing is what succeeds him. So when Nero dies, he's succeeded by this guy called Galba, who, like Julius Caesar, is a man from a kind of ancient Republican dynasty.
He's a reminder of an age that preceded the coming to power of Augustus. But the thing is, he has no conceivable link to the divine family of the first emperor.
He sees his power because he has the armies and the backing that enable him to do it. And it's because of that, that he doesn't really have sufficient authority to maintain his rule and therefore his life.
As a Caesar, if you're unable to rule, then you're going to die. So Galba is succeeded by Otho, by Vitellius, by Vespasian.
Vespasian survives, founds this dynasty, succeeded by his sons Titus and Domitian. And you have six biographies following Nero in all.
And I think all of these, in comparison to the biographies of the emperors who are succeeding Augustus, they kind of feel a bit slight, a bit attenuated. And these emperors are less terrible than Caligula or Nero, but they're also kind of less awesome.
So the family of Augustus, the family of Julius Caesar, they claim descent from Venus, the goddess Venus. The house of Vespasian, they have descent from a bailiff.
And that essentially is telling you about the diminished character of the age. The sense that an emperor is properly part of a kind of almost a mythological world has pretty much gone.
And when Domitian dies, Domitian is assassinated, and he's not assassinated as Caesar was by his peers, by his senators, but by Friedman in a kind of squalid scuffle in the palace. His memory is completely erased, except of course it isn't erased because Suetonius is telling us this in his biography.
But he ends Domitian's biography and therefore all the lives of the Caesars with this passage. Even Domitian himself, they say, when he dreamed that a hump of gold sprouted out of his back, interpreted this as a sure sign that the Republic was destined to enjoy

happier and more prosperous times once he had gone. And sure enough, thanks to the measured and moderate behavior displayed by the emperors who followed him, so it rapidly came to pass.
So here is a further sense in which the terrifying age of crime and bloodshed and sexual extravagance is fading away because Suetonius is situating himself in an age of measured and moderate emperors. Yeah.
This is the age in which he is writing. So a slightly quieter age, I guess, but without the excitement and the histrionics of the first Caesars.
Yes. now by the way listeners who are interested in those first Caesars, we have three episodes to come on Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius.

And obviously, if you're a member of the Restus History Club,

you can hear those straight after this.

But we will be back after the break to hear about Suetonius himself,

because this is a fascinating story about the man who wrote these biographies,

and actually the man from whom we derive so much of our understanding of the early roman empire so we'll be back after the break this podcast is supported by progressive a leader in rv insurance rvs are for sharing adventures with family friends and even your pets so if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride you'll want progressive rv insurance they protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to one thousand dollars in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible

pet owner who loves to travel. See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at Progressive.com today.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms. As a boy, I obtained a small bust of Augustus, an old bronze which had the name Thurinus, inscribed on it in letters of iron, albeit almost faded away.
I made a gift of this statuette to the emperor, who now keeps it in his private chamber as an object of reverence.

So this comes from Suetonius' biography of Augustus.

And Suetonius is, of course, talking about himself.

And it's a very rare glimpse of the author himself.

You know, he's telling you a little detail about the statue that he gave to the emperor,

as we will discover the emperor is Hadrian.

So Tom, unpack this a little bit for us. Yeah, I think it's rare, it's precious, and it's fascinating because it kind of highlights, I suppose, two things.
Firstly, Suetonius' methods. So this is in the context of a debate that Suetonius is having with kind of unnamed critics about whether the name Therinus had been one of the

names adopted by Augustus. Suetonius thinks it was, his critics think that it wasn't.
And he's offering the fact that this bust existed with the word Therinus on it as evidence. And it demonstrates the way in which Suetonius is a proper scholar.
He does his research, he compiles evidence. But it's also fascinating because it illustrates that he knows what he's talking about when he discusses the Caesars and the court of the Caesars, because he is clearly very close to the emperor.
If he can give to Hadrian a portrait bust that he's found, that suggests a real degree of intimacy. It's evident both from Suetonius' biographies, but also from all the evidence that we have from the Roman world that power in antiquity in the Roman Empire depends on proximity to Caesar.
Suetonius clearly has that. He is a man who's operating at the absolute heart of the imperial administration.
He knows what he is talking about. So what else do we know about him? So do we have any sense, for example, of when he might have been born or where his family came from? So there are other details that are scattered through the lives of the Caesar.
So we know that his grandfather had watched Caligula when he built the great bridge of boats and rode across the Bay of Naples to and fro on a chariot.

We know that his father had been with Otho in the civil war that Otho had fought against Vitellius. His army gets defeated.
Otho commits suicide. Suetonius' father had been in Otho's camp when that happened.
And he personally bears witness to the campaign of taxation that Domitian and the Flavians generally, the family of Domitian, had conducted against the Judeans. So Vespasian and Titus had conquered Judea and had then imposed a tax on the Judeans, which required them to pay money that had previously gone to the temple in Jerusalem to the restoration of the Temple of Jupiter in the heart of Rome.
And of course, there were Judeans who tried to get out of this. And Suetonius describes Domitian's determination not to let these tax evaders get away with it.
And he writes, he gave no quarter to those who pretended not to be Judean in an attempt to avoid paying the tribute levied on their nation. Indeed, and this is the personal note, I remember as a young man being present in a very crowded court when an old man who was 90 years old had his penis inspected by a financial official to see if he had been circumcised.
Crikey. That's a strange memory.
Isn't it? I mean, incredible detail to have, kind of very vivid and strange. And people have kind of played with that to go backwards, say, well, if he was a young man then, then he was probably born round about the time of the death of Nero.
Yeah. Because that would place him as a very young man, you know, during the reign of Domitian and Domitian's campaign against the tax evaders and so on and so forth.
And he's from North Africa. Is that right? What his family are from North Africa originally? That seems to be the implication of an inscription that was found in 1952 in the ruins of a city called Hippo Regius.
So that's actually the city which, in due course, St. Augustine would become the bishop of.
Oh, right. Yeah.
And it suggests that Suetonius' family had originally come from there. But, I mean, if so, there's no evidence really of any kind of particular stake in North Africa from Suetonius' writing.
His focus is very much on Italy and Rome. And that seems to have been where he grew up.
And we also know from the letters of Pliny the Younger, the guy who gives us two brilliant accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroys Pompeii and Herculaneum, that Suetonius is part of Pliny the Younger's set. It's a kind of a literary set.
It's a set in which Pliny the Younger will advance kind of able younger people like Suetonius who could benefit from his patronage. And we know actually that Pliny the Younger seems to have obtained a post for Suetonius in Britain, which Suetonius then turned down.
And there is an intriguing detail that in 1973 in Vindolanda, so the fort just south of what would become Hadrian's Wall, there was a letter found there detailing the contents of a trunk that had been sent by someone called Tranquilus. And that, of course, is one of Suetonius' names.
And the great scholar Anthony Burley, who'd actually excavated at Vindolanda, he kind of pondered whether this had actually been Suetonius' kit. So he wrote, is it possible that Suetonius had had a box of his gear, including blankets, dining outfits and vests sent ahead to Britain? I mean, it'd be wonderful to think that he had.
But luckily for Suetonius, he doesn't end up in the north of England. In Vindolanda.
He ends up working very closely in the Imperial Archive. Is that right? So in Rome, in the libraries in Rome.
Yeah. So first the Imperial Archive, then the Roman libraries.
And then under Hadrian, he becomes what was called the Abepistulus, which essentially is his kind of senior secretary, the guy who handles his correspondence. And that means that there is no letter that comes to Hadrian or goes from Hadrian that Suetonius has not handled.
And it means that for the term of his office, he is one of the most important functionaries in the whole of the empire. And this must explain his ready access to all the historical documents that he is citing in the biographies.

And he probably obtained this not from Pliny the Younger, because by this point Pliny seems to have died, but by another patron who's a guy called Septicius Clarus, who is the dedicatee of the lives of the Caesars and who has become the chief of the Praetorians. So probably the most significant imperial servant in the whole of the empire because he's responsible for the emperor's security.
But this is a problem, isn't it, in the long run? Because in 122, so this is the thing about going to Britain, you should basically never go to Britain because Suetonius and Septicius Clarus gone to Britain as well with Hadrian. Yes, of course, because Hadrian is travelling and so the court goes with him.
Right. So both the captain of the Praetorians and the chief secretary, they all have to go.
Something terrible happens in Britain and they're sacked. Yes.
Have they been rude to Hadrian's wife? Is that it? No, they seem to have been involved in some mysterious way in a kind of sex scandal. So there's a later life of Hadrian that says that they had at that time behaved in the company of Hadrian's wife Sabina in their association with her in a more informal manner than respect for a court household demanded.
So unclear, but I mean, it clearly highlights for Suetonius the fact that getting on the wrong side of an emperor and his wife and being embroiled in their intimate relationship is not a good thing. It won't be that bad a scandal because they're not executed.
No, but he's dismissed. And so he seems to retire to his villa.
And basically that's the last we know of him. But presumably he uses his time to maybe write the lives of the Caesars.
Yeah. And so there's not a huge amount to go on there, but there's enough, I think, to make you kind of see the attitudes that he seems to have brought to the writing of these biographies.
So he's a scholar. He has a kind of very deep kind of interest in a broad range of subjects.
He has a lack of military experience. He doesn't seem to have served with the army and his knowledge of military affairs and the lives isn't brilliant.
Clearly very familiar with libraries and archives. He understands how power works at the heart of the Roman state and he knows what it is to be the victim of the anger of a Caesar.
And of course, as we said, he knows that sex is something that can be weaponised, that can be kind of exploited and turned against people. So just on this issue of sex, this is the thing that will, when people first read the Lives of the Caesars, especially if they're young and they're sort of really into the Romans.
So I remember having this book when I was 13 or so, having it for Christmas. I went to my grandfather's house and I had it with me.
It's, you know, oh, very good. He's reading a Penguin classic.
And I can remember sitting there reading through it and kind of going really red. Blimey.
Yeah, kind of. Oh, God.
I hope they don't find out. It's really, really strong stuff, some of it.
It really is, yes. Is Suetonius, do you think, peculiarly fascinated in it? Or is he typical? Does he tell us something about Roman society and culture more broadly? He has an almost kind of anthropological interest in sex that I think is quite unusual.
But Suetonius is interested in all kinds of subjects like that. So although Lives of the Caesar, it's not actually complete, we're missing the beginning of the life of Julius Caesar, but it's pretty much intact.
We have fragments of a few others of works, but we have a list of all the subjects that Suetonius tackled, and they're incredibly eclectic. So he writes a series of Lives of the Great Courtesans, for instance.
So that is a reflection, obviously, of his interest in sex. But he also writes about children's games, about the character of insults, about different styles of dress, about public spectacles.
And these are all themes that are evident in his Lives of the Caesars. And I think that that is because he assumes that there's no aspect of his subjects' lives so insignificant that it doesn't shed light on their nature.
and also that how an emperor relates, say, to public spectacles or to dress or whatever,

or to sex, that this situates him within the broader cultural context of Rome, that it highlights a man's moral character. And the Romans are a very moral people.
And Suetonius is actually, despite his prurient reputation, is a very moral writer. When he approves of behaviour, he says so.
And when he disapproves of it, he really lets you know. And you make the point in the introduction, don't you, that the Romans didn't have the distinction that we had between private and public.
So the idea we have, which is that you have a public face, but you also have a private life and you have a right to a private life, would have struck them as absolutely bizarre, absurd and meaningless. Because to them, the idea of privacy in and of itself was perverted and

sinister and weird. Yes.
So if you have a craving for privacy, it is assumed the only reason that you have that is because you are getting up to disgusting things. You are a sexual pervert.
That's why you would want to lead your life privately. At the same time, people are always studying how people conduct themselves sexually in public to look for signs, again, of kind of moral degeneracy.
So it means that every Roman has to tread a kind of a real tightrope between making it seem that he has something to hide and displaying behavior that might make him the object of venomous gossip. And if this is a challenge for the average Roman, then of course, it's even more of a challenge for a Caesar because how he presents himself to the world is kind of fundamental to how he will be understood by the world.
Right. And that brings us on to those characters that we'll be doing in the next three episodes, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius.
Because in each case, Suetonius makes a series of kind of punchy allegations about what we would call their private lives. And how much can we trust what Suetonius is telling us? So for example, about Caligula getting up to no good, or Tiberius's filthy habits.
Is this part of a kind of literary tradition? So in other words, it's just invented, it's propagandistic, it's political spin effectively. And how much do you think it's grounded in the reality of what must have been a very different kind of sexual culture to our own? We'll be exploring those questions in the episodes we're going to do on Tiberius and then Caligula.
And the thing that's, I think, very interesting about those two men and why they make such good paired biographies is that in a way they illustrate the two extremes of how the Romans would identify sexual depravity. So Tiberius is a man who ends up retiring to Capri.
It's an island. He's isolated.
And so it is assumed, I think, for entirely understandable reasons, once you understand how the Romans judged a great man's craving for privacy, that if he's on this island and he stays there for years, he must be getting up to no good. And from that, it's a very easy development to start imagining what he's been getting up to on his island.

What's the worst he could be doing? He's probably doing that.

And Caligula, of course, is the opposite extreme because even more than Nero, he is an emperor who's supposed to have made a point of kind of parading his deviancies and positively exalting in them. So this is a man who, according to Suetonius, sleeps with one of his sisters, pimps the others out, dresses up as a woman, completely shocking behavior for a Roman, goes to banquets and appraises the wives of his guests as though they're slaves.
And so again, this is shocking. And it's either meant to be shocking, i.e.
Caligula is intending it, or it's expressive of attitudes to Caligula that may have deeper roots. Again, we'll explore that when we come to the life of Caligula.
The fact that gossip is being reported of these emperors, the gossip itself may not be true, but the fact that the gossip is being reported does tell you quite a lot, maybe about the emperors, but definitely about the kind of the cultural context in which those emperors are functioning, I think.

Well, on that point about cultural context, obviously one problem that we have reading this is that our understanding of sexual morality, as it were, and in fact our understanding of sexuality more broadly, is completely at odds with the Romans' understanding.

So, for example, you make the point that they would have had no sense of the terms that we use, heterosexual and homosexual. That would have just seemed weird and baffling to them.
Is that right? Yeah. We touched on this in the episode we did on Hadrian and Antinous, actually.
But just to reiterate, the notion of there being heterosexual and homosexual conditions, instincts, inclinations, this is a modern categorisation. The Romans certainly had no sense of that whatsoever.
Of course, Suetonius may note that one emperor's tastes runs exclusively to women and another's runs exclusively to men, but he doesn't attach any kind of moral significance to it. He doesn't see it as fundamental to the identity of an emperor.
It's an interesting incidental detail. So Suetonius says of Claudius, he notes, he never slept with men, although his appetites when it came to women were voracious.
And then of Galba, he says, he preferred sex with males, although only with fully grown, well-muscled ones. And it's as though Suetonius is describing a preference that a man might have for blonde women or for brunettes.

Right.

It's on that level.

It's not fundamental to their identity.

And so that makes the kind of the sexual landscape that you see in Suetonius' lives, I think, very strange to us. And what makes it even stranger, and I think pretty unsettling, is that the sexual order that Suetonius is taking for granted in his biographies is founded on an assumption that all Romans take for granted.
Namely, a man in a position of power, so not just an emperor, but a free male Roman citizen, is not just entitled, but expected to exploit his inferiors in a sexual manner as he pleases. And obviously that is an absolute taboo to us.
That is Harvey Weinstein behavior. But the taboo for them is if that's turned on its head and somebody who is a powerful person allows himself to be exploited or yields to others in some way or debases himself.
Is that right? Right. Because that then reduces him in the eyes of kind of Roman convention to the level of a woman or a slave, which in the opinion of Roman men is by definition to be inferior.
And that's why of all the mud that can stick to a Roman's reputation, and there's a lot of mud being thrown around, absolutely the worst, the most damaging, the one that is hardest to kind of scrub clean is a charge that he has allowed himself to be used sexually like a woman. This is the single most damaging charge.
And it's really vividly illustrated by a kind of almost a throwaway anecdote in the life of Domitian, where Suetonius is describing the aftermath of a failed coup that Domitian has defeated. And in the wake of this, he's determined to smoke out all the conspirators.
He's in a mood for vengeance. And so he puts his known opponents, people he knows have been hostile to him, to torture.
And Suetonius gives a horrible description of it. This he did by jabbing burning splints into their genitals, a form of interrogation, Suetonius notes, never practiced before.
And of all the prominent people he accuses of having been involved in the conspiracy, he pardons only two. One of them is a senator who'd been serving as a tribune, and one of them is a centurion.
And Suetonius gives us the reason. These two men, to demonstrate all the more conclusively that they had taken no part in the conspiracy, provided evidence that they liked to be used sexually as women, and therefore were viewed as undeserving of attention, both by the man in command of them and by the soldiers under their own command.
In other words, they couldn't possibly have been part of a conspiracy because they're so debased, so effeminate, so unmanned that they have this sexual taste. And it's taken for granted and they get off scot-free.
That's unbelievable. But I'll tell you what, the interesting thing is that the life that kicks off the volume, the 12 Caesars, the first of the 12 lives is obviously that of Julius Caesar.
But this was a suspicion that was attached to Julius Caesar, was it not? Was it not claimed that as a young man, he'd gone off to Bithynia and the king of Bithynia had had his way with Julius Caesar. Everybody said, well, that shows that Julius Caesar is an absolute nothing and a weakling and he's a nobody.

Yeah, and this accusation follows him throughout his life.

And even after he's conquered Gaul and defeated Pompey

and made himself the master of the Roman world,

people are still sniggering about it behind his back.

What about that business with the king of Bithynia, eh?

Yeah, so Satonius specifically says that this was a lingering scandal and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts. And Caesar, of course, is a guy, I mean, he's endlessly sleeping around.
He's committing adultery left, right and centre, but nobody cares about that. It's this one supposed kind of fling.
One small slip when I was a young man and they judged me forever, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And I think that this, it's so strange to us.
It seems so alien to us, but the very alien quality of it focuses, I think, what is most fascinating about Suetonius's biographies and actually by extension Rome itself, which is this kind of of unsettling, fascinating fusion of the very alien and the very intimate. So on one level, this is a world of kind of a sexual morality that is completely terrifying, I think, to us.
It's a world in which one Caesar, so Nero is described by Suetonius as dressing up as a wild animal and then falling upon the genitals of men and women who had been fastened to stakes. I mean, it's so odd.
And then you have his description of Domitian sitting alone in a room, doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a well-sharpened pen. So very dark, macabre, fantastical images.
But then at the same time, you also have these unbelievably personal details. So he tells us Augustus had small yellow teeth and they had gaps between them.
Tiberius has a mullet. Oh man, I can't believe that.
Otho has splayed feet, wears a toupee. Vespasian, we're told, has an expression like a man straining for a shit.
It's that degree of kind of personal detail and utter strangeness that makes these stories, I just think, brilliant. They're endlessly readable and endlessly fascinating.
And so, as we said, in the next three episodes, we are going to dig in, dig deep into three of them. And they are two of the most notorious of all the Caesars.
So Tiberius on his island on Capri, getting up to no good or not, and Caligula. I mean, Caligula is one of the great biographies in all history.
I mean, one of the most fascinating lives in all history, let alone Roman history. And then we'll also look at the Caesar who inspired I, Claudius, the book and the series, and that is, of course, Claudius himself.
So if you want to listen to those episodes right now and you're not already a member of the Rest is History Club, just head to therestishistory.com and sign up. You get a host of unbelievable benefits.
You do. But you also get to listen to Tom's dissection of these extraordinary lives immediately.

But we will be back for the rest of you on Thursday

with the sordid, or not, life of Tiberius.

Tom, thank you so much.

That was an absolute tour de force.

Great fun.

And we'll see you next time.

Bye-bye.