Suetonius. CAIUS SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS, grammarian, critic, and chronicler, was contemporary with Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian, having been born (birthplace and parentage unknown) under Vespasian. Of his manhood we find some traces in the letters of the younger Pliny, who, when appointed by Trajan proconsul of Bithynia, took Suetonius with him. Pliny's friendship, manifested in bringing him under the emperor's notice as 'probissimum, honestissimum, eruditissimum virum,' procured him means and leisure enough for literature, of which he was a professed votary. After Pliny's death he was befriended by C. Septicius Clarus, prefect of the prætorians, to whom he dedicated his best-known work, in eight books, The Lives of the First Twelve Cæsars. He became Hadrian's private secretary, a post he long held till, compromised in a court intrigue, he forfeited it, to devote himself entirely to literature. He was then about fifty years of age, but no further incident of his life is known to us.
In the compilation of his Lives Suetonius must have had before him the Annals and Histories of Tacitus; perhaps (according to some scholars) the Lives of Plutarch. But he has neither the dramatic power of the Roman nor the philosophy of the Greek. The Augustan historian Vopiscus praises him as a 'most finished and impartial writer' (emendatissimus et candidissimus scriptor)—merits which later criticism still allows him. His method, indeed, is of the simplest. After detailing the emperor's family history, he describes his youth and manhood till he assumes the purple; after this he abandons the chronological order and dwells on the character of his subject, as shown in public and private, according to virtues and vices, irrespective of periods of life; next he reverts to the order of time in relating the portents of death, the mode of death itself, and the terms of the emperor's will. Ever anxious to exclude uncertainty from his narrative, he deals with ascertained fact and does nothing by interposed discussion to bias the reader's judgment one way or another. With no affectation of epigram, his brevity is masterly, and probably no writer ever compressed so much that is interesting into so brief a space. He had many imitators (St Jerome among them) in antiquity and in the middle ages. His other works, De Illustribus Grammaticis (of which a complete copy existed in the 15th century) and De Claris Rhetoribus, need only be mentioned here, as also the fragmentary lives of Terence, Horace, Persius, Lucan, Juvenal, and Pliny.
British scholarship has done nothing for the text or exegesis of Suetonius. After the editio princeps (Rome, 1470), the best are those of Casaubon (1596 and 1610), F. A. Wolf (1802), Roth, with admirable prolegomena (1857), and Reifferscheid (1860). See also D. Ruhken's Scholia (Leyd. 1888). Of translations those of Adolf Stahr in German (1864) and of Rigutini in Italian (1882, with Roth's text) are among the best. That in Bohn's Classical Library is fair. For Suetonius Paulinus, the Roman governor of Britain, see BOADICEA.