The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Rome’s first century of one-man rule, told emperor by emperor — by the man who read their private letters. Suetonius, secretary to Hadrian with the imperial archives at his desk, wrote a life of each Caesar from Julius to Domitian: ancestry, rise, and reign, then the man himself — his dinners and dress, his jokes, his cruelties, his last words. Unsqueamish and endlessly quotable, it is the source of much of what everyone “knows” about the emperors: the die cast at the Rubicon, Caligula’s horse, Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Read life by life beside the Latin.