Reading Suetonius

Some of you may know this book (pictured above), and some of you will never have heard of it. It’s actually quite a famous book, which is one reason I’ve just reread it. It was originally written in Latin by a pagan Roman author in the employ of the emperor Hadrian in the early second century AD. In other words, it’s a very old book. I read it in a modern English translation in the Penguin Classics series.

But why bother to read a book like this at all? Sure, it’s famous. But simply “being famous” is a pretty lame reason for spending ten or twelve hours reading what is quite a challenging book.

Actually, for a writer, there are a number of reasons for reading such a book.

A lesser reason, though still significant, is that this book helps fill out the story of a century that had a real impact on the course of later western civilisation. The book gives an account of twelve Roman Caesars from Julius Caesar to Domitian (it is one of the major primary sources for the world’s knowledge of the first-century Roman empire). And what a story it tells! Suetonius tells us of the good, the bad and the extremely ugly. Some of the emperors’ private lives were absolute train wrecks, and atrocities were committed—sometimes on a grand scale—that make a modern reader’s hair stand on end. I’ll leave you to read the gory details for yourself one day. But I want to focus here on something else.

I was first alerted to this “something else” by CS Lewis. In one of his essays, he pointed out that every age—including our own—has its own particular blind spots. Each era in world history takes for granted certain things without question, and it does so without really noticing. Later generations can look back and can often easily see the faults of a past era.

But how do you learn to notice the characteristic failures of the era you yourself happen to live in? How can you know in what ways your own society is going wrong? Many things, as Lewis himself points out, are simply taken for granted by your own generation, without any thought as to why these things are done or whether they are valid.

Lewis’ answer is to read old books. The books of future generations, he notes, would also be a good corrective, but of course we can’t get our hands on those. But the books of the past do offer us the chance to see our own generation more clearly. The mistakes that characterised any of those old societies can easily be noticed by us now, and therefore pose little danger to us. We see them for what they are. But, far more significantly, our own modern failures—that we might not otherwise notice (because they have become so commonplace)—might suddenly dawn on us as we compare our society to theirs.

Let me give you one example. Suetonius recounts a number of graphic examples of Roman gladiatorial spectacles. These were vast stadium shows put on by various Roman emperors for the general population. In front of crowds of tens of thousands, large forces of gladiators and condemned criminals would fight to the death against each other or against wild animals. There was real blood, real deaths (yes, lots of real deaths) and real terror—played out for hours or days before the masses. And the vast crowds roared their approval.

From our vantage point of the twenty-first century, we easily see the Romans’ terrible faults. They used animal and human violence and death as live entertainment. Brutal things happened in those stadiums in front of the adoring eyes of masses of ordinary citizens.

But, if we have our eyes open, we might also notice something else. Those Roman spectacles, by their very nature, were only occasional, staged by the Caesars for a few days of the year. But what do we have now? Our own generation might have replaced gladiators with actors, and real violence and bloodshed with acted violence and bloodshed, but it’s no longer just a few days of the year. Now it’s streamed to us twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, in a way that would have been unthinkable to the Romans. Now we have non-stop violent entertainment at the fingertips of all our citizens. We have corrected one fault, but only to introduce a new and far more pervasive one, and we barely notice what we are doing.

All this became much more obvious to me when I reread Suetonius’ book. I saw an aspect of our own society far more clearly by reading a book from the distant past. This, of course, is why it’s worth reading Suetonius, and many other old books. Which is why it’s something I plan to keep doing.  

© Peter Friend, 2019. All rights reserved.