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Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Contributors
Editions and Abbreviations
Tristan Power: Introduction: The Originality of Suetonius
Part I: Formal Features
1: Donna W. Hurley: Suetonius' Rubric Sandwich
2: Cynthia Damon: Suetonius the Ventriloquist
3: Tristan Power: The Endings of Suetonius' Caesars
Part II: Reading the Lives
4: John Henderson: Was Suetonius' Julius a Caesar?
5: Rebecca Langlands: Exemplary Influences and Augustus' Pernicious Moral Legacy
6: Erik Gunderson: E.g. Augustus: exemplum in the Augustus and Tiberius
7: Donna W. Hurley: Rhetorics of Assassination: Ironic Reversal and the Emperor Gaius
8: W. Jeffrey Tatum: Another Look at Suetonius' Titus
9: Jean-Michel Hulls: The Mirror in the Text: Privacy, Performance, and the Power of Suetonius' Domitian
Part III: Biographical Thresholds
10: Roy K. Gibson: Suetonius and the uiri illustres of Pliny the Younger
11: Tristan Power: Suetonius' Famous Courtesans
12: T. P. Wiseman: Suetonius and the Origin of Pantomime
13: Jamie Wood: Suetonius and the De uita Caesarum in the Carolingian Empire
Bibliography
Index Locorum
General Index
