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THERE were two of Tacitus’ contemporaries who rivalled him in that part of his work where he was most successful, — portraiture; Plutarch, the Greek, and Suetonius, the Roman biographer, were both of his time; and all three used to some degree the same materials. Indeed there is so much resemblance between Plutarch’s lives of Galba and Otho and the description of the reigns of these two emperors by Tacitus in his Histories, that critics, after the most minute analysis of the two texts, are still unable to agree as to whether one of them was dependent upon the other, and if so which one; or whether both depend upon a common source; while the relation of Suetonius to them, and in general to Tacitus, remains one of the most interesting problems in source-criticism.1 However that may be, the vogue of biographies in this age is indicative of the same tendencies and limitations we have noted in Tacitus. It is not merely the interest in character or characters which is significant; that is peculiar to no one age since it belongs to all. It is the concentration of interest upon individuality to the exclusion of the larger social or political view.
Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 75-160 A.D.) was, like Tacitus, an upper class Roman who devoted himself to scholarship; by no means so much a personage as Tacitus, but perhaps more of a scholar. In his researches he reminds one of Varro, for he had a perfect mania for finding and noting all kinds of details, physical peculiarities, trivial incidents, obscure situations, in short all the miscellany that might go into an encyclopædic Notes and Queries dealing with biography. He ultimately held a position where his insatiable curiosity could have full play, as secretary to Hadrian’s prætorian prefect, Septicius Clarus, a position which opened to him the secret documents of the imperial cabinet. The result was a work as different 274 as possible from Tacitus’, yet sharing the same immortality by reason of the subjects of which it treated.
The Lives of the Cæsars (De Vita Cæsarum . . . ) is a collection of biographies in eight books. The first six books are each devoted to the life of a single emperor (Cæsar to Nero), but the seventh book covers the revolutionary year 69 with the three emperors it produced, and the Flavians make up the eighth. It was published in the year 120 A.D., and so Tacitus, in his old age, after “enjoying the serene glory of a great and serious historian,”2 may have enjoyed reading that anecdotal counterpart to his grave and unbending narrative. For the work of Suetonius is the very antithesis of the Annals. It is, indeed, something of a new genre. As Boissier has so well put it:
“We plainly perceive in reading the Lives of the Cæsars, that the author has aimed at making a work of a new order; he has avoiding including what was to be found in history as it was understood before him. He has not arranged events in chronological sequence, which is a rule of the historic art; rhetoric is quite absent; political view and general reflections occupy small space; he has made no pretence of teaching. On the other hand, anecdotes abound, told simply, without any attempt at effect or pictorial treatment. We read in his pages original documents, letters especially, when they throw some light on the great man he is describing; the witticisms fathered on him and those made at his expense; the monuments he has erected or restored are enumerated; the games he has given the people, a universal passion at the time; the signs which have announced his death, for the author is very superstitious and his readers still more so; finally, we are provided with his physical portrait, in which nothing is omitted, from the dimensions of his figure to the colour of his eyes. Suetonius has no compunction in telling us without any reticence all known of his infirmities; how Cæsar combed his hair over his forehead to conceal his baldness, how Claudius sputtered and jogged his head in speaking, how Domitian, who had been a very handsome lad when young, was afflicted towards the end with a huge stomach borne on thin legs, and only found consolation in saying, ‘that there is nought more pleasing than beauty, but also nought that passes more quickly.’ Here, obviously, we are at the antipodes of ancient history. It is highly probable that works of this order held no very high place in the hierarchy of literary forms drawn up by the grammarians of the time. Never would Pliny, who knew and liked them both, have committed the impropriety of putting Suetonius on a level with Tacitus. Tacitus is a great personage, a serious man, a senator, a consul, who ‘graves for eternity.’ Suetonius is but an advocate, a student (scholasticus), who wants 275 to divert his contemporaries. And yet Suetonius has created a form which is to last so long as the Empire and he survive. History shall scarce be written henceforth save on the model he has designed; on the contrary, whilst Tacitus is always admired, he will never again be imitated. He was almost the last of the historians who wrote in the ancient fashion.”
From the day of Hadrian, the decline in Latin literature which had already set in proceeded rapidly. Greek historians, it is true, to some extent made up for the deficiency, as we have already seen, although very hurriedly. But there were no western counterparts to Appian, Arrian or Cassius Dio; and, apart from the pleasant miscellany of the Attic Nights (Noctes Atticae) of Aulus Gellius (born c. 130), with their scraps of information, and some epitomes of history, paring down the old masters, we have little but biographical continuations of Suetonius to record, until the very closing days of imperial history.
Of these, a certain Marius Maximus (c. 165-230), carried the biographies of emperors down from Nerva to Elagabalus.3 His work seems still to have been a creditable performance. Others continued at this popular substitute for history; and finally, some one gathered together a collection from Hadrian to Numerianus (117-284 A.D.), drawn from the works of some six so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae. These are frankly mediæval in style and content. Servile in tone, they are both trivial and self-contradictory in a helpless sort of way. It is hardly an apology for them to say that, after all, “they mean well and intend to state what is, or what they believe to be, the truth. Where they go astray, they are rather dupes than imposters.”4
After such a foretaste of the Middle Ages, it is with distinct surprise that, just as we are entering those ages in reality, we come upon the single, outstanding figure of a good historian, — a Greek but writing in Latin a continuation, not of Suetonius, but of Tacitus.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330-400 A.D.) was a native of Antioch who fought with the Roman armies all along the threatened frontiers, east and west. He knew the world of the barbarians as well as the culture of the empire; and his rich and varied experiences but strengthened his large share of native common-sense. The 276 combination of plentiful information and good judgment did not produce a work of genius; but the Rerum Gestarum Libri, which carried the story of Rome from Nerva to the death of Valens (96-378 A.D.), was a performance worthy of the best company in antique historiography. Only the more contemporary sections (Bks. XIV-XXXV) have been preserved. As they cover but the years 353 to 378 A.D., it is evident that either the early books were relatively slight and introductory, or that those we have belong only to a division of the whole series, dealing with contemporary history, — much as Tacitus separated his Histories from his Annals.5 In any case, all that we have of Ammianus is the history of the last twenty-five years preceding the battle of Adrianople.
This last work of Roman history is frankly that of a soldier,6 a blunt, sincere man, honest and open-minded, a pagan, yet tolerant of Christians, not thoroughly at home in his study, yet proud of his scholarship, writing with the colloquial turn of a man of affairs and still turning it to use by preparing a history which was to be read in public. There is almost a touch of romance in the fact that this is so; that the last of the antique histories was to be declaimed, in competition with the output of the rhetoricians, the way the history of Herodotus was given to his age. Ammianus seems to have tried hard to brush up his Latin for such public presentation, but, in spite of his residence at Rome while he was writing it, his expressions remain clumsy, and obvious affectations even render the text obscure. It is only when one compares him with any other Latin historian for centuries before or after him that one appreciates his value as a straightforward, if somewhat awkward, witness to the truth. No fitter tribute has ever been paid him than that by the greatest historian who has ever dealt with the fortunes of Rome. For when Gibbon parted company with him, at the year 378, he took the occasion to bid Ammianus the farewell of a fellow-craftsman worthy of mastership in the guild of history.7 277
There are editions of the text of Suetonius by C. L. Roth (Teubner, 1898, reprinted 1886) and by M. Ihm (Teubner, Vol. I, 1908). The De Vita Cæsarum (Divus Julius; Divus Augustus) has been edited with notes in English by H. T. Peck (1889) and (Divus Augustus), by E. S. Shuckburgh (1896). For extracts see H. Peter, Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae (2 vols., 1906-1914), Vol. II, pp. 54 sqq. The translation in the Loeb Classical Library is by J. C. Rolfe (2 vols., 1914-1920). A. Macé, Essai sur Suétone (Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athens et de Rome, Vol. LXXXII, 1900) gives an exhaustive bibliography. For bibliographical material see Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. CXXXIV (1907), pp. 237 sqq., for 1897-1906; Vol. CLXXIII (1915), p. 87, p. 215; Vol. CLXXVII (1916-1918), p. 86, p. 250.
The most recent edition of Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae is by C. Hosius (2 vols., 1903). There is an old translation by A. Beloe, The Attic Nights (3 vols., 1793). On the Scriptores Historiae Augustae see H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litteratur über die römische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Quellen (2 vols., 1897), Vol. II, and his bibliographical survey in Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. CXXX (1906), pp. 1 sqq.; see also Sup. Vol. CLVI (1912), pp. 73 sqq.
Editions of the text of Ammianus Marcellinus are by F. Eyssenhardt (1871), V. Gardthausen (2 vols., 1874-1875) and by C. U. Clark (2 vols., 1910-1915). The translation by C. D. Yonge in Bohn’s Classical Library has not yet been superseded but a translation by C. U. Clark has been announced by the Loeb Classical Library. Among the many articles on Ammianus, mention should be made of those by T. R. Glover in Life and Letters in the Fourth Century (1901), Chap. II, and S. Dill in Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (2d. ed., 1899, reprinted 1906), Bk. I. Chap. I. Recent bibliographical material will be found in Jahresbericht, etc., Sup. Vol. CLVI (1912), pp. 95 sqq.; Vol CLXXVII (1916-1918), p. 61, p. 227.
1 See the discussion referred to in the Bibliographic Note on Tacitus’ works.
2 G. Boissier, Tacitus and other Roman Studies, pp. 78 sqq. The extract quoted precedes this remark.
3 Cf, H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litteratur . . ., Vol. II, pp. 106 sqq.
4 Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 392.
5 Cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 429, n. 3.
6 Vide T. R. Glover, Glover in Life and Letters in the Fourth Century (1901), Chap. II.
7 Cf. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XXVI. (J. B. Bury’s edition, Vol. III, p. 122.)
“It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary.”
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