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Suetonius

Suetonius

c. 69 CE–c. 130 CE · Rome

Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, c. 69 – c. 130 CE) was a Roman biographer, antiquarian, and equestrian official who held administrative posts at the imperial court, including charge of the libraries and archives and the secretaryship ab epistulis under Hadrian. He is best known for De Vita Caesarum (The Twelve Caesars), biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors, from Augustus through Domitian. His method combined chronological narrative with thematic catalogues of each subject's character, appearance, and conduct, drawing on archival documents and anecdote. He also wrote De Viris Illustribus, biographies of Roman literary figures, of which only fragments survive, chiefly the section on grammarians and rhetoricians.

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Stop 1 of 169–122Lived

RomeרומאItaly

What they did here

Imperial biographer at Rome.

Rome in this era

Under the emperors (from Augustus, 27 BCE) Rome was the capital of an empire stretching from Britain to Syria, a city of perhaps a million people. Greek-speaking philosophers, physicians, rhetoricians and historians came to teach and write there; Domitian expelled philosophers from the city around 93-95 CE, and in the 3rd century Plotinus taught in Rome (244-270).

About Rome

Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

In Rome at the same time

Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Curtius Rufus, Quintus, Pliny, the Elder, Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius, Musonius Rufus, Quintilian

Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time

See other sages who lived in Rome→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Suetonius’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Suetonius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(12)