Julius Caesar​ ‘invaded Britain in the hope of finding pearls’. Caesar Augustus ‘wore platform shoes, to make him seem taller than he was’. Tiberius ‘was left-handed, with joints so strong that he could push a finger right through a firm, ripe apple’. Caligula ‘never learned to swim’. Claudius ‘would never let anything come between him and food and wine’. Nero had a ‘voice that was reedy and indistinct’. Galba ‘suffered so badly from arthritis … that he could not bear to wear shoes for any length of time’. Otho ‘wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald’. Vitellius was ‘enormously tall’. Vespasian ‘did not let any fear of death stop him from cracking jokes’. Titus ‘was born … in a dark and tiny room in a shabby building near the Septizonium’. Domitian would ‘spend hours every day on his own, during which time he would do nothing but catch flies and stab them with a well-sharpened pen’.

Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to The Lives of the Caesars than the X-rated material. Which isn’t to say the sex crimes and scandals aren’t important: just as any account of the Clinton or Trump presidencies would be incomplete without mention of Monica Lewinsky, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll or Jeffrey Epstein, it tells you something about the principates of Tiberius and Caligula that the former retired to Capri to ‘devote himself in private to sexual activities’ and the latter is said to have ‘made a habit of committing incest with his sisters’. The Lives of the Caesars is a series of character studies, and kink is a part of character. But only a part. As he surveys the lives of the twelve men who held sway over the Mediterranean and its hinterland for the best part of 150 years, from Julius Caesar’s defeat of Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC to the death of Domitian in 96 AD, Suetonius documents, along with their sex lives, their other appetites, their ancestry, their physical appearance, how they dressed, their military records, their spending habits, their building projects, the games they put on, the speeches they made, their religious practices, their handling of the grain supply, their welfare provision, their dispensing of justice, their parties, their marriages, their friendships, their deaths – and any other interesting morsels of information or rumour he happens to have turned up in the course of his researches.

The effect is cumulative. Through a pile-up of detail, Suetonius explores the ways in which power was achieved (or seized), wielded, abused and lost by his subjects. He’s less interested in – or appears to have a weaker grasp of – wider historical currents than his contemporary Tacitus: no one would look to Suetonius for a structural account of the decline of the Roman republic, or the complicated dynamics that operated between the imperial frontiers and the metropole, or the ambiguous role of the Senate under the principate. As Tom Holland puts it in the introduction to his sparkling new translation, Suetonius ‘wrote the lives of the Caesars, not their lives and times’. He proceeds ‘not chronologically but ordered by theme’, as he says in his Life of Augustus, and what he provides in each case isn’t so much a continuous narrative account as a complex if partial portrait of a man: incomplete, tendentious, unreliable, at times self-contradictory – but whose biography isn’t?

Julius Caesar emerges from Suetonius’ portrait (as from other sources, including his own writings) as a man who liked to move fast and break things, who possessed both the means and the inclination to conquer swathes of territory, win decisive battles at every corner of the empire, overthrow the government in Rome and declare himself dictator for life in defiance of centuries of ideological commitment to republican rule. It’s one thing to know that Caesar did everything he did, another to feel that you understand what in his character enabled him to pull it off. The republic’s days were numbered anyway: as Mary Beard has put it, ‘How could you control and defend a vast empire, stretching from Spain to Syria, with a power structure and a system of military command developed to run nothing more than a small town?’ Caesar was only finishing what Sulla and others had started in the preceding decades. But the question still remains: why Caesar? Suetonius goes some way towards providing part of the answer. He had ‘unbelievable powers of endurance’, never rushed into anything blind – he didn’t invade Britain ‘until he had personally organised a survey of the ports, the passage and the approaches to the island’ – but also, once committed to an action, wouldn’t back out. He would attack when the enemy was least expecting, valued his own soldiers ‘neither for their moral character nor their social standing, but solely for their prowess as fighters’, and ‘whenever the outcome of a battle hung in the balance he would send away the horses, his own at their head’ so there was ‘no choice but to stand their ground’.

You can also see why there was a successful elite conspiracy to murder Caesar within five years of his assuming power. He was a supremely gifted general and administrator but a hopeless politician, making no pretence that he was anything but an autocrat. Whether out of principle or amour-propre, the Senate was never going to put up with it for long. Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, Octavian, later the emperor Augustus, was no less ruthless than his great-uncle, but he was a lot more patient. It took him seventeen years from Caesar’s murder to declare himself princeps (‘first citizen’), having consolidated his power and wealth through a series of strategic alliances and carefully picked battles. Like many of his successors he loved to play dice, but he also liked to control the stakes: Suetonius quotes letters in which Augustus describes giving his party guests cash to gamble with. Thousands of sesterces might be won and lost, but most of it was the emperor’s money anyway.

King in all but name, Augustus governed alone for more than four decades. ‘He seduced the army with bonuses,’ according to Tacitus (in Michael Grant’s translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians … War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed.’ Suetonius puts a more generous spin on it: ‘All classes of society regularly benefited from his generosity.’ He not only found Rome a city of brick and left it marble but oversaw the building of new aqueducts and put people in charge of them (among other novel local government arrangements), appointed night watches for fire prevention and dredged the Tiber to reduce the chances of flooding. If there were problems with the grain supply, Augustus ‘would hand out a ration to every man at a very cheap rate’; he also made the supply more reliable by dredging the canals that carried the floodwaters of the Nile to irrigate the wheat fields, having absorbed Egypt into the empire following his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra. After decades of strife, in other words, Augustus brought stability – at least to those who might have been in a position to cause him trouble.

Maintaining order depended not least on maintaining the appearance of order, which Augustus achieved in part by insisting on the continuity of his government with the traditional system he had in fact buried for good. It was a legal fiction that nobody believed but the majority were happy to go along with, and Augustus handled it deftly enough for everyone to feel their honour was satisfied. His insistence on appearances went so far as telling people what to wear:

He was an enthusiast as well for the ancient form of dress, and on one occasion, when he saw the crowd at a public assembly sporting dark cloaks, cried out in anger, ‘Behold the Romans, lords of the world, people of the toga!’ and tasked the aediles with maintaining a ban on cloaks in the Forum and its environs, and ensuring that everyone there wore a toga.

The quoted line, as Holland notes and as most of Suetonius’ second-century readers would have spotted for themselves, is actually taken from Virgil: ‘Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatam.’ Augustus presumably didn’t in fact say it: it seems unlikely, despite his many talents, that the emperor was given to casting his angry outbursts in hexameters. The implication of the anecdote, in any case, is that the strict enforcement of traditional dress codes was not only a means for him to impose conformity on his nominally fellow citizens and thereby exert control over them, but also a way to assert his – not only legitimate, but consummate – place in Roman history. The words in the Aeneid are spoken by Jupiter: a few lines later he foresees the coming of Augustus, whose empire will stretch from the Atlantic to the Middle East, and who will usher in an age of peace after bitter centuries of war.

One​ potentially destabilising consequence of the legal fiction that Augustus wasn’t a king was to complicate the question of succession, though it would have been complicated anyway since he had no biological sons. He adopted his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius, the children of his daughter, Julia, and his lieutenant Marcus Agrippa, but they both – like Agrippa – predeceased him. Tacitus suggests that Augustus’ third wife, Livia, may have had a ‘secret hand’ in their deaths, though Suetonius in this instance doesn’t stoop to repeating such unsubstantiated rumour. Augustus then adopted their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus (so named because he was born soon after his father’s death), and Livia’s son, Augustus’ stepson, Tiberius. Postumus was soon disinherited and exiled because of his ‘brutish and violent character’ (‘ingenium sordidum ac ferox’), which left Tiberius as Augustus’ sole male heir. Augustus died in 14 AD, aged 75, leaving a third of his estate to Livia and two-thirds to Tiberius.

Whether or not Tiberius’ inheritance included dominion over the empire wasn’t spelled out in so many words. There was no throne for him to claim. Acceding to the principate wasn’t a simple matter of, as it were, putting on his coronation toga and going in state to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (which Holland renders as ‘the Best and Greatest’, a perfectly accurate translation though it somehow loses some of the grandeur) on the Capitoline Hill to be crowned emperor. There is a moment of suspense here, or at least another way in which Suetonius disregards chronology as an organising principle. The Life of Augustus ends with the details of his will. The Life of Tiberius – who was already in his mid-fifties by the time he inherited – begins hundreds of years earlier, with the origins of the Claudian family in the earliest days of the city, and takes twenty paragraphs, out of a total of 76, to bring us through Tiberius’ ancestry, early and mid-life to the moment of Augustus’ death.

One of the most important official titles that the emperors held – and one of the most degraded from its original intent – was ‘tribune of the plebs’. It was among the honours that had been bestowed on Tiberius after Augustus adopted him, and he was able to use his tribunician powers to call a meeting of the Senate at which Augustus’ will was read aloud. (Postumus in the meantime had been murdered – on whose orders Suetonius won’t commit himself to say, though Tiberius seems the most likely candidate.) ‘Although he did not hesitate to take up the powers of a princeps,’ Suetonius writes, ‘for a long time he refused the actual title’ in a ‘quite shameless display of hypocrisy’. Tiberius’ so-called hypocrisy doesn’t seem so very different in essence from Augustus’ canny knack for having it both ways, the main difference being that the younger man was much less good at playing the game.

A key element of being a Roman emperor – as for any head of state or government before or since – was acting the role of princeps ‘on the most public of stages’, as Holland puts it. As well as the games and circuses they organised to entertain the masses – many of which Suetonius describes in exhaustive detail – they had to put on a continual performance of their own. And Tiberius was a far less persuasive or effective performer than his predecessor. (Think of the difference between Bush and Reagan, Major and Thatcher or Brown and Blair.) Even in that first speech to the Senate after Augustus’ death, his voice failed him and he had to hand over to his son Drusus to finish reading it for him. ‘It is commonly believed,’ Suetonius writes, that Augustus on his deathbed was overheard saying: ‘I pity the Roman people – doomed to be ground between such slow-moving jaws!’ As princeps, Tiberius had no business retiring to Capri for the last years of his life, regardless of what he may or may not have got up to there. The stories that Suetonius repeats about the emperor’s debaucheries on the island are sickening – including the oral and anal rape of sometimes very young children; on one occasion he broke the legs of two brothers who complained – but whether or not they are true (and there’s no particular reason to doubt them entirely), and whatever his moral failings, Tiberius’ political error was to have abandoned the capital for a life of seclusion. If he had been in Rome, visible to the people, they wouldn’t have been so inclined to circulate lurid stories about his private life. ‘In the opinion of the Romans,’ Holland writes, ‘privacy was something inherently unnatural.’

We can’t know for sure, as Suetonius acknowledges, what crimes were committed behind closed doors. He doesn’t take Tiberius’ ‘shocking deviancies’, which ‘strain the bounds of credibility’, as straightforward fact: they are hedged with qualifying phrases such as ‘he became notorious’ or ‘it is reported.’ The same goes for the sex lives of his other subjects: ‘everyone agrees that’ (‘constans opinio est’) Julius Caesar ‘had a prodigious sexual appetite’ and the ‘allegation’ that Augustus had a ‘rapacious sexual appetite’ was ‘one that did stick’.

Sometimes, though, Suetonius reveals his sources. When it comes to the question of Caligula’s birthplace, for instance, he quotes two ‘conflicting accounts’ before revealing that the ‘official records’, which he has checked, show that Caligula was born in Antium. As evidence that Augustus was given the name ‘Thurinus’ as a child, Suetonius cites a small bronze statue of the first emperor as a boy that had the name on it, which he himself acquired and gave to his benefactor, the emperor Hadrian, as a gift. He quotes from letters he has consulted in Augustus’ handwriting (the first emperor was apparently terrible at spelling) which he may have got access to through his role as Hadrian’s ab epistulis, managing the imperial correspondence. And even the gossip sometimes has a provenance: ‘When I was a boy … I used to hear … from my grandfather, who in turn had heard it from court insiders.’

It could be argued that the assiduousness Suetonius demonstrates when he does acknowledge his sources means we should be inclined to trust him at other times too. Or, on the contrary, it could mean that anything he doesn’t provide references for should be discounted. If it makes any difference, his friend Pliny the Younger recommended him to the emperor Trajan as ‘not only a very fine scholar but also a man of the highest integrity and distinction’.

No one would say that of Tiberius. The best that Suetonius can muster is that Augustus ‘must have weighed up Tiberius’ good and bad qualities, and decided that the good outweighed the bad’. Holland suggests that Suetonius was doing something similar with his sources – ‘drawing on two rival traditions, one laudatory and one venomously hostile’ – but not coming to a final decision. ‘Between the upstanding man of honour … and the grim old pervert,’ Holland writes, ‘reconciliation proves impossible.’ But both may be right even if they can’t be reconciled. Tiberius’ strict self-discipline while on campaign in Germania – ‘He took his food sitting directly on the bare ground, and would often spend the night without a tent’ – doesn’t give much indication of his later profligacy, though his cruelty, meanness and distaste for public life were already evident. It doesn’t seem to be the case, at least on Suetonius’ or Tacitus’ account, that power corrupted him, so much as it enabled him to give free rein to his corruption, which in turn loosened his grip on power. While he was away abusing children on Capri, he left Rome in the charge of Sejanus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who eventually made moves to seize power for himself. Tiberius got wind of the conspiracy and had it ruthlessly put down, but ‘felt no more secure or confident’ after it was suppressed, instead falling increasingly prey to paranoia. He died in 37, at the age of 77.

Tiberius’ successor, Caligula, was barely in power long enough to be corrupted by it: he was a horror from the get-go. His father, Germanicus, was Tiberius’ nephew and adopted son. He was with his legions in Germania when Augustus died: the troops apparently urged him ‘to assume the supreme responsibility for Rome’s affairs’. Instead ‘he put down the mutiny (whether this better demonstrated his filial duty or his steadiness of purpose, it is hard to say), then briskly set to defeating the enemy and winning himself a triumph.’ Almost immediately Tiberius sent him to the other end of the empire, ‘where he defeated the king of Armenia and reduced Cappadocia to the status of a province’, before dying at the age of 33 in Antioch. ‘It was generally held,’ Suetonius writes, that Germanicus was poisoned on Tiberius’ orders. His death was met with uncontrollable grief in Rome, and he came to be seen as the greatest princeps the empire never had. Even his enemies were said to have mourned him – a little implausibly, given the way he treated them. Tacitus provides the details: ‘Germanicus completely surprised the Chatti. Helpless women, children and old people were at once slaughtered or captured.’ Against the Cherusci, he ‘ordered his men to kill and kill. No prisoners were wanted. Only the total destruction of the tribe [internicionem gentis] would end the war.’

Germanicus’ children accompanied him on campaign, which is how Gaius came to be known as Caligula, ‘little boots’, by the legionaries who dressed him up as one of them, like a mascot. He was seven when his father died. When he was eighteen he went to live with Tiberius on Capri, where he seems to have kept himself alive by abasing himself before the emperor while his brothers and mother were dying in prison or exile. ‘It has been said of him (quite justifiably) that never was there a better slave, nor a worse master.’ After Tiberius died Caligula gave him a ‘splendid funeral’ and was welcomed to Rome by rapturous crowds who couldn’t have been happier that the 24-year-old son of Germanicus was now in charge. The Senate tore up Tiberius’ will, which named his 16-year-old grandson, Tiberius Gemellus, as Caligula’s co-heir.

Their delight didn’t last long. If Tiberius practised his vices in secret, Caligula revelled in openly flouting received proprieties and hierarchies. Whether or not half the stories that Suetonius tells about him are true, their common thread is the sadistic pleasure he took in rubbing everyone’s noses in the power he had over them. He made senators run alongside his chariot in their togas, wait on him at table dressed as slave boys, and give up their wives to him – if he wasn’t having them tortured to death on a whim. ‘No spendthrift has ever rivalled the sheer creativity he brought to the squandering of money.’ He introduced new taxes to fund his extravagances, and ‘there was no category of object on which he failed to levy a tariff.’ In exchange he refused to fulfil even the basic social contract of bread and circuses:

Sometimes, when gladiatorial shows were being staged and the sun was at its very fiercest, he would pull back the awnings and forbid anyone to leave; then, rather than lay on the customary fare, he would send out into the arena mangy wild animals, gladiators so decrepit that they could barely function, and – in place of exhibition fighters – heads of households who, while known to be of good standing, were also conspicuous for a range of physical disabilities. Sometimes he would shut up the granaries and condemn the masses to starve.

‘Remember,’ he is said to have told his grandmother, ‘I am allowed to do anything to anybody.’ This was more or less true – but only if he pretended it wasn’t. The senators’ patience soon ran out. Caligula was murdered in January 41, aged 28, ‘after a reign of three years, ten months and eight days’.

An​ emergency meeting of the Senate was held on the Capitoline and there was talk of restoring the republic. Meanwhile the Praetorian Guard had found Caligula’s fifty-year-old uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the royal palace and carried him off to their camp. The consuls and Senate, arguing among themselves instead of taking action, lost the momentum of the crisis. The crowd wanted one man to be made leader, and were calling for Claudius. He promised each of the praetorians fifteen thousand sesterces when they swore loyalty to him, ‘thereby becoming the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe’.

This isn’t the last time that Suetonius seems to be slightly unfair to Claudius, inclined to put a negative spin on actions he would consider praiseworthy if performed by an emperor he admires more. When Augustus or Julius Caesar dishes out extra cash to the troops, it’s a ‘bonus’ or a ‘share of the booty’, but when Claudius does it, it’s a ‘bribe’. He shored up the grain supply by promising to indemnify merchants against losses at sea and offering incentives to shipbuilders – but only after he’d been attacked by a hungry mob in the Forum, who ‘hurled abuse and crusts of bread at him’. His ‘few major infrastructure projects … made up in utility what they lacked in quantity’. Like Augustus, he took measures to protect Rome from fire; he was also, like Augustus, a devoted gambler, and ‘had his carriage fitted with a special board so that he could continue gaming while out on his travels without the dice constantly being jolted’.

He undertook only a solitary campaign, and even that was of limited duration … Longing for the glory of a legitimate triumph, he settled on Britain as the place which promised him the best chance of securing it … It then took him only a few days – and no battles or bloodshed at all – to secure the surrender of a whole chunk of the island.

Easy-peasy and hardly worth the bother, compared to Julius Caesar’s ‘success’ against the Britons, which had consisted of ‘a number of victories’ that enabled him to ‘command tribute and hostages from them’ before skedaddling.

Unlike Robert Graves, Suetonius doubts Claudius’ claim that under Caligula ‘he had deliberately pretended to be stupid’ as a cunning means of self-preservation. Graves goes too far in the other direction, glossing over Claudius’ nastier side: Suetonius calls him ‘a man instinctively cruel and bloodthirsty’. In any case he can’t really take credit for anything because ‘pretty much everything he did’ was ‘dictated less by his own judgment than by that of his wives and freedmen’. Holland notes that, as with Tiberius, there ‘were evidently rival traditions about Claudius’ in the second century, ‘one claiming that he was despised and one that he was respected’: a ‘tension … left unresolved by Suetonius’, or explained away by reference to his ‘inconsistency of temperament’.

Having ruled for nearly fourteen years, Claudius died in October 54, aged 63, allegedly poisoned, possibly by his fourth wife, Agrippina, his brother Germanicus’ daughter, who may have used ‘a dish of mushrooms – a food of which he was particularly fond’. Agrippina’s 16-year-old son, Nero, Claudius’ great-nephew, succeeded him. Nero’s main rival was his younger stepbrother, Britannicus, Claudius’ son with his third wife, Messalina, who had been executed (or murdered) for adultery in 48. Britannicus died within months of Nero’s accession, almost certainly poisoned on the emperor’s orders. By some accounts, the city and the empire were well managed during the first five years of Nero’s reign, possibly thanks to the influence of his mother and his tutors, Seneca and Burrus, but Suetonius’ thematic approach obscures the idea, even if he acknowledges that Nero’s vices – ‘insolence, an uninhibited sexual appetite, dissipation, greed, cruelty’ – emerged ‘incrementally’. Everything got rapidly worse after he had Agrippina murdered in 59.

Like Caligula, Nero took pleasure in upending the established order. His alleged sex crimes – ‘forcing himself on freeborn boys as though they were young slaves’, for instance – disgusted Suetonius, though not for the reasons they horrify us. The ancient Romans didn’t have a problem with rape per se; it depended on the relative social status of perpetrator and victim. Nero also liked to go out at night disguised as a freedman and ‘mug people as they made their way back from dinner’. He loved performing, but wasn’t interested in playing the role of princeps: he wanted to make a spectacle of himself singing on the stage like a common actor. He was so concerned with preserving his voice for recitals ‘that he would only ever communicate with his soldiers by letter or by employing someone to deliver his speeches for him’ – a serious dereliction of duty.

When Julius Vindex, the governor of a province in Gaul, rose up against him, Nero ‘failed to address the Senate and the people in person, but instead summoned some of Rome’s leading men to his house’. Planning to confront Vindex in Gaul (he never went), Nero’s ‘overriding concern … was to source wagons capable of transporting his stage machinery’. As other legions joined the rebellion, someone else read Nero’s speech condemning Vindex to the Senate. After the Senate declared Nero an enemy of the state he fled Rome in disguise and hid in a villa belonging to one of his freedmen. There, ‘with the assistance of his secretary … he slit his throat.’ He was thirty. His last words, according to Suetonius, were a quotation from the Iliad. His almost last words, ‘Qualis artifex pereo,’ traditionally rendered as ‘What an artist perishes with me,’ Holland, following Edward Champlin, translates as: ‘That I should die a mere artisan!’ As Nero speaks the phrase, he is digging his own grave, trying to build himself a tomb, a sorry mockery of the Domus Aurea, the enormous palace he had constructed on the ashes of the great fire that raged for a week in July 64, which Suetonius claims Nero started before singing about the fall of Troy as he watched Rome burn. (One reason to doubt that Nero was an arsonist is that he had previously devised a ‘new style of building’, with arcades at the front ‘so that fires might more readily be fought from their terraces’.)

If Augustus constructed an elaborate social and political framework that enabled him to perch secure on its pinnacle, Nero brought it crashing down in flames like a flimsy stage set, or the badly made wooden theatre at Fidenae, a few miles north of Rome, which collapsed halfway through Tiberius’ reign, killing twenty thousand people. The former gladiator who built it, Tacitus says (putting the casualty toll at fifty thousand), ‘neither rested its foundations on solid ground nor fastened the wooden superstructure securely’. With Nero’s suicide in June 68 – which comes more than three-quarters of the way through The Lives of the Caesars – the curtain fell on the Julio-Claudian dynasty that had begun with Augustus, ushering in a protracted constitutional crisis known as the Year of the Four Emperors, as a series of generals launched a succession of military coups.

Galba,​ the 73-year-old governor of a Spanish province – he had lived under all six of the Julio-Claudian emperors – joined Vindex’s rebellion and was acclaimed emperor by his troops in April 68. The Senate recognised him in June. But he didn’t reach Rome until October, after what Tacitus calls a ‘slow and bloody journey’, and was not popularly received. In January 69, legions in Germania refused to pledge allegiance to him, instead proclaiming their leader Vitellius emperor. Galba ‘jumped to the conclusion that it was his childlessness … that was being held against him’ and quickly adopted a ‘distinguished young nobleman’ called Piso. Another young nobleman, Otho, who as governor of Lusitania had been among the first to join Galba’s cause and hoped to be his heir, took umbrage at being overlooked. (Otho had been sent to Lusitania by Nero after being forced to divorce his wife, Poppaea, so that Nero could marry her. A few years later Nero killed her by kicking her in the stomach. She was pregnant.)

After buying the loyalty of the Praetorian Guard and having Galba and Piso murdered, Otho was emperor for as long as it took Vitellius’ armies to march south from the lower reaches of the Rhine and cross the Alps. Otho’s forces were defeated by Vitellius’ vanguard at Bedriacum, near Cremona, on 14 April. When Otho heard the news he took his own life. ‘The majority of those who had loathed him with such bitterness while he was alive sang his praises now that he was dead.’ Suetonius’ father, who fought on Otho’s side, ‘often used to say in later life that even as a private citizen Otho felt such horror for civil war … that he would never have launched his coup against Galba had he not been confident that there would be no need for him to go to war’.

Vitellius didn’t last much longer than Otho. He had ‘spent his boyhood and early youth on Capri as a participant in Tiberius’ sex games’, which might go some way to explaining why his ‘passion was principally for dissipation and cruelty’ and for ‘putting people to torture or death’, though he would have been the odd one out in Suetonius’ profiles in corruption if he’d instead had a passion for flower-arranging. Troops loyal to Vespasian, the last of the year’s four emperors, defeated Vitellius’ army at Bedriacum on 24 October 69, reversing his victory on the same battlefield only six months earlier. In Rome, Vitellius was taken prisoner, paraded through the streets to be ‘pelted … with dung and filth’ and ‘tortured to death’. Vespasian himself, who had been dispatched to Judea by Nero three years earlier to put down the Jewish Revolt, was in Egypt when he was declared emperor by the Senate in December 69. He reached Rome a few months later and ‘for the entire length of his reign viewed as his principal objective the stabilisation of the republic’. ‘The only aspect of his character for which he may justly be censured,’ Suetonius writes, ‘was his love of money,’ offset by his willingness to joke about it, though what Suetonius calls his ‘excellent sense of humour’ has not aged well over the centuries.

Vespasian, the founder of the Flavian dynasty, was the first princeps not to come from a patrician family, but he was encouraged in his ambition by a prophecy that ‘men were fated to come from Judea to rule the world.’ Suetonius throughout gives a lot of attention, and credence, to the various prophecies that the emperors heard, believed or rejected, often coming up with convoluted reasons to accept or dismiss them, or turn apparently evil omens to their advantage. Julius Caesar fell over on arriving in Africa to fight Scipio. A bad sign, which he dismissed with a quick-witted remark: ‘I have you, Africa, in my grasp.’ The Delphic oracle told Nero to beware the 73rd year. He thought that meant he would live to a grand age, but it turned out to be a cryptic allusion to Galba, prophecies always being so much easier to interpret after the fact. There’s a nice letter from Pliny to Suetonius reassuring him about an ‘alarming dream’: ‘It makes a difference whether your dreams usually come true or not, for to judge by a dream of my own, the one which has frightened you might well foretell that you will be successful.’

When Vespasian’s elder son, Titus, succeeded his father, who died of natural causes in 79, it was the first time an emperor’s biological son had inherited the principate. Suetonius says that Titus ‘was adored and doted upon by the whole of humanity’, which makes it pretty clear who counted as human in ancient Rome and who didn’t: four paragraphs later we’re told that ‘he slew twelve defenders with as many arrows during the final assault on Jerusalem.’ Before he became princeps he had a reputation for ‘cruelty’ and ‘overindulgence’, but like Shakespeare’s Henry V – ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was’ – he put all that aside on taking power. The eruption of Vesuvius, a three-day fire in Rome and a severe plague all occurred while he was emperor: ‘In the face of calamities on such a terrible scale he showed not only the concern proper to a princeps but the devotion that a father uniquely can provide.’ There’s no way of knowing if it would have lasted, since he died in September 81, barely two years after his father.

His younger brother, Domitian, began on a ‘course of mercy and continence’, but it didn’t last long. ‘His plunge into cruelty occurred much faster than his descent into avarice.’ He executed ‘a large number of senators’ and enforced all taxes ‘with the utmost stringency’, including the duty that Vespasian had imposed on the Jews after Titus conquered Jerusalem, diverting to Rome the tithe that had previously been paid to the Temple. By now Suetonius has reached a point in his narrative close enough to the time of writing to be able to enter it as a witness: ‘I remember as a young man being present in a very crowded court when an old man who was ninety years old had his penis inspected by a financial official to see if he had been circumcised.’ Domitian’s delight in humiliation and torture made him ‘an object of universal fear and loathing, until eventually a conspiracy of his friends and most trusted freedmen, in which his wife too participated, brought an end to his rule’. He was murdered in September 96, after a reign of fifteen years.

As for the men who followed Domitian – Nerva; his adopted son, Trajan; and his adopted son, Hadrian, to whom Suetonius personally owed so much – we get only a rumour of a dream of better days that we’re told has come true:

Even Domitian himself, they say, when he dreamed that a hump of gold sprouted out of his back, interpreted this as a sure sign that the republic was destined to enjoy happier and more prosperous times once he had gone – and sure enough, thanks to the measured and moderate behaviour displayed by the principes who followed him, so it rapidly came to pass.

It’s often argued that Suetonius tells us more about the way the first twelve emperors were perceived in the years following their reigns than he does about the reigns themselves; that The Lives of the Caesars might more accurately be titled ‘the reputations of the Caesars’. But you come away from it with a strong sense of how hard it is to disentangle those two things. Where does the life end and the reputation begin? It’s doubtful that Augustus ‘cared more for the wellbeing of the people than for their applause’, but he must have known that giving a certain impression was the surest way to secure that applause. And it’s all too tragically plausible – who knows, there may even be a lesson here – that Nero ‘more than anything … craved popularity’ yet ‘ended up arousing … universal detestation’.