Suetonius

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote during the early Imperial era, when the memory of Rome's first emperors was still close enough to sting. His De vita Caesarum tracked twelve successive rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, building biographies that mixed state record with bedroom scandal. He wrote other works too — studies of daily Roman life, politics, oratory, the lives of poets and historians and grammarians — but most of those have been lost or survive only in fragments. What remains is the Caesars: a set of portraits so specific and unsparing that they became the template for how power…