Tristan Power - Böcker

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 writing on Roman courtesans to his imperial portraits of the Caesars.Beginning with an introduction that assesses the originality of Suetonius as a writer and situates the essays within the context of debates and controversies over his biographical form, the collection addresses the issues surrounding his style, themes, and early influence on literature in three parts. The first part discusses formal features of Suetonian biography, such as his literary techniques, manners of citation and quotation, and devices of allusion and closure. The middle section is devoted to readings of the individual Lives, treating several topics - from Suetonius' decision to begin his collection with Julius Caesar, to fictional elements in his death scene of the emperor Caligula, to the theme of solitude in his Life of Domitian. The last part examines the ways in which Suetonius transgresses the boundaries of ancient biography by looking at his influence on epistolographers, antiquarians, commentators, and later biographers. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to know why Suetonius' Lives are such a unique and powerful medium for the stories of ancient Rome, and how they became the primary model for later biography.

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.Beginning with an introduction that assesses the originality of Suetonius as a writer and situates the essays within the context of debates and controversies over his biographical form, the collection addresses the issues surrounding his style, themes, and early influence on literature in three parts. The first part discusses formal features of Suetonian biography, such as his literary techniques, manners of citation and quotation, and devices of allusion and closure. The middle section is devoted to readings of the individual Lives, treating several topics - from Suetonius' decision to begin his collection with Julius Caesar, to fictional elements in his death scene of the emperor Caligula, and to the theme of solitude in his Life of Domitian. The last part examines the ways in which Suetonius transgresses the boundaries of ancient biography by looking at his influence on epistolographers, antiquarians, commentators, and later biographers. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to know why Suetonius' Lives are such a unique and powerful medium for the stories of ancient Rome, and how they became the primary model for later biography.

This collection of essays by a leading authority on Suetonius, one of our most significant historical sources for the early Roman Empire, provides an in-depth examination of his works, whose literary value has in the past been overlooked.Although Suetonius is well known for his Lives of emperors such as Caligula and Nero, he is rarely studied in his own right, aside from grammatical or textual commentaries. This is the first volume by an expert on the author to make him accessible to a wider audience, looking at his biographies not only of emperors but also poets, and discovering new contemporary evidence for Jesus from one of Suetonius’ first-century sources. Other writers discussed include Homer, Sophocles, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Curtius Rufus, Josephus, Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Cassius Dio. The book contains thirty-two papers in all, eleven of which are new, which examine Suetonius’ neglected historical value and literary skills, and offer textual conjectures on both the Illustrious Men and Lives of the Caesars. It also has a new introduction and represents over a dozen years of research on an essential Latin source for Roman history.Collected Papers on Suetonius provides an invaluable resource for students and researchers working on Suetonius. It also has broader significance for anyone studying Roman imperial history and culture, Latin literature, and classical historiography.