Genealogy Books - The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics)

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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Hair raising, educational, and utterly fun.
Comment: What can you say about a classic? Suetonius' geat biographies are enormously significant. Graves'
translation is living, livid, and crackling. This book is a compulsive page turner. How many
ancient books can you say that about? What comes through most clearly is how absolute power
corrupts absolutely. The values of Republican Rome were sold out to the worship of the strongman.
It's as if a whole society just decided that Tony Soprano's was the only way to rule. Tony Soprano
is actually far more principled and moral than any of these emperors. As a piece of social
documentary this book is fascinating and thought provoking. Just be aware it's very strong meat.
Rape, murder, excess and debauch of every stripe runs rampant through almost every story. This kind
of thing can warp you. I recommend you read a good history of Rome first, to get you ready and give
you perspective, and then follow it up with a visit to church to wash the taste from your mouth!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Guilty Pleasure
Comment: Associated with classical literature is an image of intellectualism. When one is seen reading a book
with the name of a great Greek or Roman author on its cover (Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus,
Virgil, Tacitus, Seneca, Suetonius), the assumption is immediately made that you are a cerebral
individual, and should be paid high respect.
For anyone who wishes to thereby trick the rest
of the world into paying you undeserved dues, I would highly recommend "The Twelve Caesars" of
Suetonius. The material may seem cultured, but the book itself provides scads of sinful fun. If
celebrity television had existed in the ancient Roman empire, its broadcasts would have been an
awful lot like Suetonius's texts. Sexual escapades, humanitarian atrocities, moral shortcomings,
bouts of insanity - these are lovingly chronicled and detailed with the attention only a first-rate
muckraker could provide. Political analysis, psychological insight, philosophical musings? Better
turn to Tacitus for that sort of thing.
Conscience requires me to give this book only three
stars, but that disgusting part of me that loves sensationalism yearns to scroll up to five.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Julius Caesar as gay, Nero as sweet singing choir boy?? But Caligula WAS crazy...
Comment: I only endured two or three episodes of the TV series "Rome", supposedly the most expensive
television series ever made. Oh, really? Presumably, they spent so much cash on the uniforms, that
they forgot to pay the scriptwriter. I have seldom seen such ridiculous trash on TV.
/>Do you want real gossip about Julius Caesar and the Roman emperors? Then, buy this book. It's a
modern translation of an ancient Roman book, written by the historian Suetonius. It's most famous
for two passing references to Christians, but if that's all you know about it, you are missing
out...

Not being a historian, I can't judge how reliable the information given by
Suetonius really is. But as a collection of funny gossip about Caesar and the emperors, it must be
unmatched!

Did you know that Julius Caesar had a reputation for being gay? I always
thought of Caesar as the essence of manliness, but apparently he dressed in an effeminate manner,
and was rumored to be the gay lover of a certain king in Asia Minor. As Caesar was also a notorious
womanizer, he was called "the man of all women, and the woman of all men".

OK, maybe
I'm a bit unserious, but I had great fun reading these rumours, about one of world history's most
accomplished conquerors! And you thought the Lewinsky affair was shocking?

From
Suetonius, we also learn that Nero regarded himself as an accomplished singer with a really sweet
singing voice (apparently, everyone else had a different idea about it), that Caligula wanted to
appoint his horse to the Roman Senate, that Domitian had an advisor who turned out to be a
handicapped child, that Julius Caesar was pro-Jewish, and countless other strange claims. />
Ironically, the emperor most favored by Suetonius seem to be Titus, generally regarded as a
villain today, since he smashed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Jewish temple. Are we to
believe Suetonius, Titus was like a father to his people, very generous, so moral that he stopped
seeing his sexy mistresses when becoming emperor, so righteous that he had all finks and snitches
banished to wild islands, while he was looking for medecine to cure a plague in Rome...
/>Oh my, sounds almost to good to be true!

Regardless of whether the stories of
Suetonius are tall-tales or true, they at least tell us a lot about how Romans wanted, and didn't
want, their rulers to behave. And a lot about how Romans slandered each other.

I have
seldom read such an entertaining ancient work. Buy it! Yes, punk, I was talking to you...

Customer Rating:

Summary: All the dirt on the Caesars
Comment: Here is history with all the boring stuff left out. Suetonius, a historian around the time of
Hadrian (117-138 C.E.), had access to many of the Imperial records, and apparently from them gleaned
most of the incredibly juicy information regarding the 12 Caesars included here. Wars, campaigns,
laws, affairs of state, and all the other matters one might expect to read about in a book of
historical biographies was not the major concern of Suetonius. He was more interested in the
personal (often dastardly) deeds of these rulers and the behaviors they exhibited, many of which
were very unflattering, to say the least. Many of these guys - Claudius, Caligula, Nero, Vitellius -
were veritable monsters: mass murder, theft of private property and national treasure, incest,
patricide, ostentation and audacity, material devastation were routine to many of them. Suetonius
almost revels in dishing the dirt. It's not just a list of one cruelty after another, either, for
Suetonius also knows a funny story when he sees it: the time, for example, when Augustus expelled a
man from Italy for giving him the finger. Is this the earliest account on record of that particular
obscene gesture? If the National Inquirer existed back then Suetonius would be its editor-in-chief.
Some of what he tells is exaggeration or hearsay and perhaps not extremely accurate, but he is often
still considered the best source on the Caesars after Tacitus. The book is a lot of fun to read and
I would think it would be required reading in most high schools, if for no other reason than it
would get a lot of kids interested in ancient history in a hurry.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Want to know all the juicy tidbits about the first 12 Ceasers?
Comment: I randomly picked this book up, hankering after some ancient text. Lo and behold, I picked up the
juiciest book in ancient Rome. This is no dry, linear blah blah about the first 12 Ceasers, oh no!
Seutonius gives you all the incest, the murder, the blunders, the insanity, the triumphs...it's got
it all. Actually, if you know nothing about the first 12 Ceasers, start here, because Seutonius
gives you all the good stuff.

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