Suetonius on the emperor

A study of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars as a gallery of portraits of Roman emperors. The object is to make sense of Suetonius' methods of depicting emperors as emperors and to ask what light is cast on contemporary perceptions of the role of the Emperor. In order to set the Caesars in context, the work is approached from three different angles, the literary, the social and the ideological.The first part looks at the literary background of the Lives. The question here is of how far the rubric method and the actual choice of rubrics can be accounted for in terms of literary tradition as opposed to the author's understanding of what was significant about an emperor. The second part considers the impact of the author's position in society on his presentation. An attempt is made to discover the viewpoint of one who was simultaneously an equestrian official and an antiquarian scholar. His view of society is related to his views of the emperor's place in society and his functions as an administrator. The last part examines the relationship between his representation of the emperor and the ideals desiderated in or attributed to autocratic rulers. Discussion centres on the use of virtues and vices as categories of estimation and on their relationship to official and theoretical 'ideologies'. Since it is argued that Suetonius shares the views of other Roman sources, discussion of individual virtues and vices ranges far beyond the Caesars.