Suetonius Life of Augustus [Paperback]

Suetonius'Life of Augustusis the most commonly read ancient account of the life of Rome's first emperor, presenting a mass of historical and biographical detail about both his public and personal lives. This volume provides the first large-scale commentary on Suetonius' work in English, drawing out what is unique about Suetonius' information, discussing how it relates to other ancient accounts, and assessing its historical reliability.

The commentary is the first to be accessible to readers without any knowledge of Latin or Greek due to its use of English lemmata, while the new translation remains faithful to the original Latin. Accompanied by an introduction which investigates the career of Suetonius, the date of theLives of theCaesars, the structure of theLife of Augustus, the various sources utilized by Suetonius, and the way in which the reader should approach this complex text, the commentary also looks to examine Suetonius' work not just as a repository of facts, but as a literary artefact carefully constructed by its author.

List of Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
Suetonius: Career and Literary Production
Suetonius' Place in the Development of Imperial Biography
The Structure ofAugustus
Suetonius' Sources inAugustus
Reading Suetonius'Augustus
The Text and Translation
Translation
Commentary
Bibliography
Index

To absorb the sheer range of published scholarship relating both to such a well-trodden text and to the lengthy career of Augustus is a daunting task, but Wardle. has shown that it can be done. In the commentary itself he synthesises clearly, evaluates judiciously and offers perceptive insights of his own: for example, noting Suetonius' tragic framing of the reversals in Augustus' family fortunes (416). His practice of not only referencing and discusslSµ