D. Wardle - Böcker

Suetonius' Life of Julius Caesar (Vita Divi Iuli in the original Latin) deals with one of the best known of all Romans. His highly colourful account of Caesar's life begins a series of twelve Lives of Rome's first emperors (Caesars) and describes how Caesar was the gods' means of ending the Roman Republic and of introducing a new form of government. Suetonius presents a picture of a man who was driven in pursuit of power and honour, even initiating a bloody civil war to protect his own interests. Although Caesar was famously assassinated on the Ides of March 44 BC, his ultimate status was that of a god, Divus Iulius, as which he is celebrated by Suetonius. Wardle's volume provides a new translation of the Life with a full introduction and commentary on the events it describes. The volume discusses both the historical and the historiographical aspects of the Life, what we believe happened and what Suetonius says happened; it relates Suetonius' distinctive approach to life-writing to other examples from Greek and Roman authors and shows how the Life is a carefully constructed literary artefact rather than the styleless conglomeration of facts it has often been considered to be. Suetonius' account makes use of material written by Caesar's contemporaries as he rose to pre-eminence and reflects how subsequent generations, living and writing under the system that Suetonius for one believed he initiated, themselves imagined Caesar.

Suetonius' Life of Augustus is the most commonly read ancient account of the life of Rome's first emperor, presenting a mass of historical and biographical detail about both his public and personal lives. This volume provides the first large-scale commentary on Suetonius' work in English, drawing out what is unique about Suetonius' information, discussing how it relates to other ancient accounts, and assessing its historical reliability. The commentary is the first to be accessible to readers without any knowledge of Latin or Greek due to its use of English lemmata, while the new translation remains faithful to the original Latin. Accompanied by an introduction which investigates the career of Suetonius, the date of the Lives of the Caesars, the structure of the Life of Augustus, the various sources utilized by Suetonius, and the way in which the reader should approach this complex text, the commentary also looks to examine Suetonius' work not just as a repository of facts, but as a literary artefact carefully constructed by its author.