Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (), commonly referred to as Suetonius ( ; – after AD 122), was a Roman historian who wrote during the early Imperial era of the Roman Empire. His most important surviving work is De vita Caesarum, commonly known in English as The Twelve Caesars, a set of biographies of 12 successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Other works by Suetonius concerned the daily life of Rome, politics, oratory, and the lives of famous writers, including poets, historians, and grammarians. A few of these books have partially survived, but many have been lost.
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was probably born about AD 69, a date deduced from his remarks describing himself as being about 57 years after Nero's death. His place of birth is disputed, but most scholars place it in Hippo Regius (the modern Annaba), at the time a small north African town in Numidia, in modern-day Algeria. It is certain that Suetonius came from a family of moderate social position, that his father, Suetonius Laetus, was a tribune belonging to the equestrian order (tribunus angusticlavius) in Legio XIII Gemina, and that Suetonius was educated when schools of rhetoric flourished in Rome.
Suetonius was a close friend of senator and letter-writer Pliny the Younger. Pliny describes him as "quiet and studious, a man dedicated to writing". Pliny helped him buy a small property and interceded with the Emperor Trajan (not Hadrian) to grant Suetonius tax immunities usually granted to a father of three, the ius trium liberorum, because he was childless even though he was married; such tax immunities were also granted to thousands of inhabitants of Italy who were part of the empire at the time of Suetonius and Trajan and at the time...the population of Rome is estimated to have been more than 600,000 people. Through Pliny, Suetonius came into favour with Trajan and Hadrian. Suetonius may have served on Pliny's staff when Pliny was imperial governor (legatus Augusti pro praetore) of Bithynia and Pontus (northern Asia Minor) between 110 and 112. Under Trajan he served as secretary of studies (precise functions are uncertain) and director of Imperial archives; while under Hadrian, Suetonius became the emperor's secretary.
According to the controversial and historically factually customized writing Historia Augusta, which has no specific author and was written more than 150 years after "The Twelve Caesars", Hadrian later dismissed Suetonius from his position for an affair with the empress Vibia Sabina who was in an unhappy marriage and childless. Note that Hadrian's Father was not a Roman emperor but a Roman senator by the name of Publius, that his mother's name was Paulina, that Hadrian was not adopted by Trajan in writing, and that Sabina's marriage to Hadrian may have been arranged by Plotina who also adopted Hadrian in writing after the death of the Emperor Trajan; one could argue that Hadrian was a false or illegitimate emperor of Rome. Under Trajan the Spanish sought to alter Roman history. In fact, Wikipedia says that "Hadrian seems to have been well connected to the powerful and influential coterie of Spanish senators at Trajan's court, through his ties to Plotina and the Prefect Attianus." Plotina was raised in Hispania and entered the imperial palace stating that she would not change. The writing "The Twelve Caesars" does not include Hadrian as emperor of Rome and the Roman senate at the time of Hadrian's death was less willing to deify Hadrian.
Suetonius is mainly remembered as the author of De Vita CaesarumâÂÂtranslated as The Life of the Caesars, although a more common English title is The Lives of the Twelve Caesars or simply The Twelve CaesarsâÂÂhis only extant work except for the brief biographies and other fragments noted below. The Twelve Caesars, probably written in Hadrian's time, is a collective biography of the Roman Empire's first leaders, Julius Caesar (the first few chapters are missing), Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. The book was dedicated to his friend Gaius Septicius Clarus, a prefect of the Praetorian Guard in 119. The work tells the tale of each Caesar's life according to a set formula: the descriptions of appearance, omens, family history, quotes, and then a history are given in a consistent order. He recorded the earliest accounts of Julius Caesar's epileptic seizures.
The two last works were written in Greek. They apparently survive in part in the form of extracts in later Greek glossaries.
The following list of Suetonius's lost works is from Robert Graves's foreword to his translation of the Twelve Caesars.
The introduction to the Loeb edition of Suetonius, translated by J. C. Rolfe, with an introduction by K. R. Bradley, references the Suda with the following titles:
The volume adds other titles not testified within the Suda.
Two other titles may also be collections of some of the aforelisted: