Caligula

'Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mention goats in any context.' 
 
The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70-130 CE). Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars is also available in Penguin Classics.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was probably born in AD69 - the famous 'year of the four Emperors'. 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 (AD117-38). Suetonius seems to have lived to a good age and probably died around the year AD140.

The Twelve Caesars

A revised edition of Robert Graves' classic translation (9780140449211), with completely fresh editorial material

'Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tempted creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within' GORE VIDAL 
 
As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eyewitness accounts) to produce one of the most colourful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded absolute power over Rome, from the foundation of the empire under Julius Caesar and Augustus to the decline into depravity under Nero and the recovery that came with his successors. This masterpiece of observation, immortalized in Robert Graves's classic translation, presents us with a gallery of vividly drawn - and all too human - individuals. 
 
Translated by ROBERT GRAVES 
Revised with an Introduction and notes by JAMES B. RIVES

Suetonius (Author) Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was probably born in AD69 - the famous 'year of the four Emperors'. 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 (AD117-38). Suetonius seems to have lived to a good age and probably died around the year AD140. Robert Graves (Author) Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon. He went from school to the First World War, where he became a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Somme. He wrote his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, in 1929, and it was soon established as a modern classic. He died on 7 December 1985 in Majorca, his home since 1929.

As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives and used them (along with eyewitness accounts) to produce one of the most colourful biographical works in history. The Twelve Caesars chronicles the public careers and private lives of the men who wielded absolute power over Rome, from the foundation of the empire under Julius Caesar and Augustus, to the decline into depravity and civil war under Nero and the recovery that came with his successors. A masterpiece of observation, anecdote and detailed physical description, The Twelve Caesars presents us with a gallery of vividly drawn &ndash; and all too human &ndash; individuals.

Suetonius

Tom Holland

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Suetonius

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 ...

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, astou ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, astou ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, astou ...

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 ...

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