I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits was enough to make my younger brother bury his head in a cushion. Graves had spiced up Suetonius’s racy accounts of violent murder, incest and poison. But, in the world before trigger-warnings, the BBC outdid him in bloodlust. The most gruesome scene in the TV drama – of Caligula doing some amateur surgery on his sister’s stomach to remove their unborn incestuous child from the womb – was pure invention by the screenwriter Jack Pulman.
Graves resented the accusation that he’d relied too heavily on Suetonius to create his bestsellers. Nevertheless, in 1957 he produced his own translation of the biographies of the 12 Caesars. This begins with Julius as precursor of the first imperial dynasty and ends with the last of the Flavians, Domitian, assassinated in AD 96. Although Graves’s version for Penguin Classics has stood the test of time, it was never intended as a school crib. In fact Graves employed the poet Alastair Reed to make a literal translation from the Latin and used it to take flight towards something much less pedestrian.
Now Tom Holland, the princeps (‘first citizen’) of popular Roman history, has provided Penguin with a vibrant new translation of Suetonius that’s closer to the original without being slavishly so.
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