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The biographer Suetonius is one of the most fascinating writers of ancient Rome, but he is rarely afforded serious critical attention. This volume of new essays focuses on the various aspects of Suetonius' work, from his lost biographical writing on Roman courtesans to his imperial portraits of the Caesars.
List of contents
- List of Contributors
- Editions and Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Originality of Suetonius
- Part I: Formal Features
- 1: Donna W. Hurley: Suetonius' Rubric Sandwich
- 2: Cynthia Damon: Suetonius the Ventriloquist
- 3: Tristan Power: The Endings of Suetonius' Caesars
- Part II: Reading the Lives
- 4: John Henderson: Was Suetonius' Julius a Caesar?
- 5: Rebecca Langlands: Exemplary Influences and Augustus' Pernicious Moral Legacy
- 6: Erik Gunderson: E.g. Augustus: exemplum in the Augustus and Tiberius
- 7: Donna W. Hurley: Rhetorics of Assassination: Ironic Reversal and the Emperor Gaius
- 8: W. Jeffrey Tatum: Another Look at Suetonius' Titus
- 9: Jean-Michel Hulls: The Mirror in the Text: Privacy, Performance, and the Power of Suetonius' Domitian
- Part III: Biographical Thresholds
- 10: Roy K. Gibson: Suetonius and the uiri illustres of Pliny the Younger
- 11: Tristan Power: Suetonius' Famous Courtesans
- 12: T. P. Wiseman: Suetonius and the Origin of Pantomime
- 13: Jamie Wood: Suetonius and the De uita Caesarum in the Carolingian Empire
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
About the author
Tristan Power is Lecturer in Classics at Columbia University. His publications include a chapter on Suetonius in K. De Temmerman and K. Demoen (eds.), Writing Biography in Greece and Rome: Narrative Technique and Fictionalization (2016).
Roy K. Gibson is Professor of Latin at the University of Manchester. His publications include Ovid: Ars Amatoria Book 3 (2003) and (with R. Morello) Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger: An Introduction (2012).
Summary
The biographer Suetonius is one of the most fascinating writers of ancient Rome, but he is rarely afforded serious critical attention. This volume of new essays focuses on the various aspects of Suetonius' work, from his lost biographical writing on Roman courtesans to his imperial portraits of the Caesars.
Additional text
By offering scholarship on the DVC that employs a wide variety of approaches and includes successful forays beyond the DVC's borders, Suetonius the Biographer expands our awareness of the myriad of possibilites for future work on this under-estimated author. That there can be great care, artistry, and purpose to be explored in works that, to the casual reader, may seem at times to be compilations of mere data (however quirky) is something we are just beginning to appreciate in such authors as Pliny the Elder and Suetonius. Suetonius the Biographer piques one's appetite for the next modest spate of Suetonian monograph(s).
