Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Introduction

• Julius Caesar ‘invaded Britain in the hope of finding pearls’. Caesar Augustus ‘wore platform shoes, to make him seem taller than he was’. Tiberius ‘was left-handed, with joints so strong that he could push a finger right through a firm, ripe apple’. Caligula ‘never learned to swim’. Claudius ‘would never let anything come between him and food and wine’. Nero had a ‘voice that was reedy and indistinct’. Galba ‘suffered so badly from arthritis ... that he could not bear to wear shoes for any length of time’. Otho ‘wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald’. Vitellius was ‘enormously tall’. Vespasian ‘did not let any fear of death stop him from cracking jokes’. Titus ‘was born ... in a dark and tiny room in a shabby building near the Septizonium’. Domitian would ‘spend hours every day on his own, during which time he would do nothing but catch flies and stab them with a well-sharpened pen’.
• Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to The Lives of the Caesars than the X-rated material. Which isn’t to say the sex crimes and scandals aren’t important: just as any account of the Clinton or Trump presidencies would be incomplete without mention of Monica Lewinsky, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll or Jeffrey Epstein, it tells you something about the principates of Tiberius and Caligula that the former retired to Capri to ‘devote himself in private to sexual activities’ and the latter is said to have ‘made a habit of committing incest with his sisters’. The Lives of the Caesars is a series of character studies, and kink is a part of character. But only a part. As he surveys the lives of the twelve men who held sway over the Mediterranean and its hinterland for the best part of 150 years, from Julius Caesar’s defeat of Pompey at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC to the death of Domitian in 96 AD, Suetonius documents, along with their sex lives, their other appetites, their ancestry, their physical appearance, how they dressed, their military records, their spending habits, their building projects, the games they put on, the speeches they made, their religious practices, their handling of the grain supply, their welfare provision, their dispensing of justice, their parties, their marriages, their friendships, their deaths – and any other interesting morsels of information or rumour he happens to have turned up in the course of his researches.