The Lives of the Caesars
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  • Published: 20 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241186909
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448

The Lives of the Caesars

Formats & editions
Hardback
23 Apr 2025
EBook
20 Feb 2025
Audiobook
20 Feb 2025
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A masterful new translation of Suetonius' renowned biographies of the twelve Caesars, by the award-winning historian and The Rest Is History podcaster Tom Holland.

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in the early 2nd century AD.

By placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius succeeded in painting Rome’s ultimate portraits of power. The shortfalls, foreign policy crises and sex scandals of the emperors are laid bare; we are shown their tastes, their foibles, their eccentricities; we sit at their tables and enter their bedrooms. The result is perhaps the most influential series of biographies ever written.

That Rome lives more vividly in people's imagination than any other ancient empire owes an inordinate amount to Suetonius. Now award-winning author and translator Tom Holland brings us even closer in a new, spellbinding translation. Giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of Rome’s first emperors, and of how they swayed the fates of millions, The Lives of the Caesars is an astonishing, immersive experience of a time and culture at once familiar and utterly alien to our own.
  • Published: 20 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241186909
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448
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About the author

Suetonius

Not much is known about the life of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. He was probably born in AD 69— the famous 'year of the four Emperors'— when his father, a Roman knight, served as a colonel in a regular legion and took part in the Battle of Betriacum. From the letters of Suetonius' close friend Pliny the Younger we learn that he practiced briefly at the bar, avoided political life, and became chief secretary to the Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-38).

He was one of several Palace officials, including the Guards Commander, whom Hadrian, when he returned from Britain, dismissed for behaving impolitely to the Empress Sabina. Suetonius seems to have lived to a good age and probably died around the year AD 140. The titles of his books are recorded as follows: The Twelve Caesars, Royal Biographies, Lives of Famous Whores, Roman Masters and Customs, The Roman Year, Roman Festivals, Roman Dress, Greek Games, On Public Offices, Cicero's Republic, The Physical Defects of Mankind, Methods of Reckoning Time, An Essay on Nature, Greek Terms of Abuse, Grammatical Problems and Critical Signs Used in Books. But apart from fragments of his Illustrious Writers, which include short biographies of Virgil, Horace and Lucan, the only extant book is The Twelve Caesars, one of the most fascinating and colorful of all Latin histories.

Also by Suetonius

Caligula
The Twelve Caesars
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Praise for The Lives of the Caesars

A gossipy, often racy biography of 12 rulers of the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, written by the historian Suetonius in AD 121. Holland’s beautifully fluent translation is compulsively readable throughout

Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph

A scurrilous, wonderfully detailed potted history of 12 Roman rulers [that] gives[s] a coherent, sweeping account of how autocracy took root in the Roman state [and] shows the sheer theatricality it took to sustain an imperial image. There is plenty of contemporary resonance in this new translation by Tom Holland

Delphine Strauss, Financial Times

Powerful ... Suetonius’s biographies of the rulers of Rome, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, are rich in character and telling detail – as emerges with clarity from Tom Holland’s excellent new translation from the Latin. Holland conveys ... the distinctive Roman character of the biographies [and] confronts us with a text from a culture quite different from our own

Roy Gibson, Times Literary Supplement

Tom Holland [is] the princeps ('first citizen') of popular Roman history ... this vibrant new translation of Suetonius ... combine[s] concision with accuracy [and is] closer to the original without slavishly being so. Readers coming to The Lives of the Caesars for the first time will find many dramatic and memorable scenes to detain them.

Mark Bostridge, Spectator

Tom Holland is a master populariser of the ancients ... his new translation of Suetonius [is] a peerlessly enjoyable introduction to the earlier imperial Romans. [It] remind[s] us that the monsters who, astoundingly, achieve power in 21st-century democracies had forebears in the ancient world who matched them folly for folly, whim for whim, vanity for vanity.

Max Hastings, Sunday Times