The Worst First Citizen

In his telling of the Life of Nero, Suetonius crafted an image of an archetypical tyrant that he then used throughout his other Lives. The princeps was Rome\u27s premier citizen--as such, they needed to perform all aspects of citizenship as well as possible, especially in regards to successfully performing masculinity. Therefore, to be a good emperor was to embody male virtue; to be a bad emperor was to be effeminate and lack virtue. Suetonius crafted a rhetorical trope of the unmanly tyrant using his portrayal of Nero. This is seen most clearly in Nero 29, where Nero was sexually passive to a freedman, had public intercourse, and performed oral sex, among other improprieties. This trope was then used in the Lives of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Domitian to cast them as unqualified and tyrannical