Suetonius and the Politics of Private Life (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Jannis Koltermann reexamines the function of the emperor's so-called "private life" in Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars, challenging the influential view that Suetonius' attention to love affairs, dining habits, and pastimes signals a disinterest in politics. Combining philological and historical approaches (e.g. close reading and contextualisation), the author argues that Suetonius' treatment of the emperor's private life reflects the structural realities of the principate in Ancient Rome and actively engages with the political discourse of his own time, the post-Domitianic period (late 1st/early 2nd century AD).
The book proceeds in three stages. First, it situates Suetonius within the tradition of Roman biography and historiography by comparing his approach to that of, amongst others, Tacitus' Agricola and Pliny's Panegyricus, identifying two competing models - one Republican, one imperial - for representing a protagonist's private sphere. Second, through a close reading of Augustus 61, it reconstructs Suetonius' own terminology, showing that he deliberately avoids privata vita in favour of interior ac familiaris vita, a shift that mirrors the changing semantics of privatus under one-man rule. The book proposes 'unofficial life' as a more accurate English equivalent. Third, through case studies of emperors including Tiberius, Claudius, and Julius Caesar, it demonstrates how Suetonius uses anecdotes about unofficial conduct to expose political impact and authentic character, set against the era's preoccupation with dissimulation. Suetonius' method thus emerges as an adaptation of political history to the conditions of one-man rule, not an abandonment of it.