probably had more to do in fashioning the rough-and-ready notions on the subject which occupy a corner in the imperfectly furnished minds of plainer men. It may in any case be profitable to look into this work of Suetonius with as open an eye and as fair a judgment as we can command.

Not much is known about Caius Suetonius Tranquillus. He himself puts us on the track of a date and makes one helpful reference to his father. At the end of his Nero he mentions that in his young days (adulescente me), twenty years after Nero's death a pretended Nero appeared and found strong support among the Parthians. Nero died in 68 A.D. Again in the Domitian (chapter 12), Suetonius records that as a lad (adulescentulum) he had seen an unfortunate old man of ninety examined in a crowded court to settle a delicate physical question. Domitian reigned from 81 to 96. Here again, therefore, we gather that Suetonius was in his teens about the year 90; so there is good ground for assigning his birth approximately to the year 75, midway in the reign of Vespasian. In the Otho we are told that his father, Suetonius Lactus (or Lenis) served as tribunus augusticlavius, that is, an officer of high rank but not of the highest social standing, in the campaign in North Italy when the Emperor Otho was overthrown. (69 A.D.) A.D.) Suetonius was a friend, though hardly on equal terms, and a correspondent of the younger Pliny, who used his influence in his behalf, and took him with him when he went to Bithynia in the year 109. After Pliny's death he found a patron in Caius Septicius Clarus, to whose good offices he owed a post as secretary at the court of Hadrian. When Hadrian was in Britain busy about the famous Wall (121), he dismissed both Septicius and Suetonius, apparently for being too friendly with the ill-used Empress Sabina. Suetonius was verging on fifty when this misadventure befell him. He lived to be very old, since we hear of him as still alive under Antoninus about 160. There is good evidence that the Twelve Caesars was published in 120,

since a dedication to Septimius, which is apparently a mistake for Septicius, describes him as "prefect of the Praetorian cohorts," and Septicius lost that post, as we have seen, in 121, after holding it for two years.

Beginning with Julius Cæsar, who was born in 100 B.C., and closing with Domitian, who was assassinated in 96 A.D., the Twelve Caesars may be said roughly to cover two centuries-the last of the pre-Christian and the first of the Christian Era. Suetonius is not responsible for the title by which his work is now known. What he called it we cannot be certain, since the beginning, though fortunately not much of it, is lost. The Twelve Caesars makes a good working title; but there is really no better reason for speaking of the Cæsars as twelve, than there would be for speaking of the Ten Popes, if some one writing under the eleventh or twelfth had brought a series of biographical notices as far down as was then possible. In strictness there were never twelve Cæsars, except as there are still Cæsars, Kaisers, or Czars in Europe, since what was originally the name of a great family, or indeed of one supremely great man, became the title of a great office. As Suetonius himself says, at the opening of his Galba, the line of the Cæsars went out with Nero; so that there were not twelve of them but only six-Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caius, Claudius and Nero. Even for the six the line was anything but straight or unbroken. Augustus was only the grand-nephew of Julius Cæsar, being the son of Atia, who was the daughter of Julia, the Dictator's sister. Tiberius had no Julian blood in his veins, being the son of Livia, the wife of Augustus, by her former husband. Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, married the younger of two Antonias, whom Octavia, the sister of Augustus, bore to Mark Antony. One of their sons was Germanicus and another was the Emperor Claudius. Germanicus married Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the daughter of Augustus. Two of their children were the Emperor Caius and Agrippina, the mother of Nero, Domitius,

the father of Nero, was the son of the elder Antonia. Thus Tiberius was no Cæsar at all; Claudius bore a closer relation to Antony than to Augustus; Caius and Nero were in the direct line from both Augustus and Antony.

To these, more or less true Cæsars, Suetonius devoted six of his eight books, a book to each. The seventh took up the three Emperors of the anarchy or interregnum that followed the death of Nero-Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; while the last dealt with Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian.

The weaknesses of Suetonius are obvious enough. He is credulous and superstitious. It was perhaps inevitable that his work should have some of the qualities of a chronique scandaleuse. The times were evil, and any true account of the Emperors was bound to say something about sexual and unnatural vice; but much that Suetonius tells on that foul subject is the sort of irresponsible calumny common in all ages against public men. He seems to have thought it enough evidence for such a charge that he had heard it said or seen it written. The ribald songs of his soldiers and an epigram of the elder Curio are taken as evidence against Cæsar, and Antony's coarse banter or insults as evidence against Augustus. One remembers the story told by Carlyle in his Frederic of Peter the Great and the Duchess of Mecklenburg, which is, as he says, "too Samoeidic for human speech, and would excel belief, were not the testimony so strong." It would require testimony much stronger than we get, and a better witness than Suetonius, to make us believe a similar story about Augustus and Livia. Nero is black enough without being guilty of half the iniquity Suetonius lays to his charge; that he could treat his mother worse than a lecherous coal-heaver would the commonest streetwalker-or that the proud and fell Agrippina would let herself be so treated-is flatly incredible. And surely Caius might be fond of his sister, Drusilla, without the horrid guilt Suetonius imputes to him.

To do Suetonius justice, he seems to take no prurient pleasure in these ugly stories. He tells them with cool precision, betraying no sign of any emotion. His anomalous attitude to sins of this sort becomes almost ludicrous when he writes as if it were but one more example of a "want" in Claudius that he was 66 marum omnino expers.

What Suetonius could believe, two cases taken almost at random will show. They are typical and might be multiplied many times over. In a catalogue of marvels connected with the career of Augustus, he includes a wild. story about his mother Atia, which he found in the Theologumena of Asclepiades of Mendes. It must have been customary in Rome for women to sleep in the temple of Apollo on the eve or the night of his yearly festival. Atia, this story runs, came at midnight, while the rest of the ladies were sleeping; had her litter set down in the temple, and duly fell asleep. Whereupon "suddenly a dragon crept up to her, and shortly after made off again. When she awoke she purified herself; and straightway a mark like the picture of a dragon appeared on her body, and could never be removed, so that she soon discontinued for ever her visits to the public baths. Augustus, who was born ten months later, was consequently regarded as a son of Apollo." (Aug. 94.) The parents' prophetic dreams are then recorded, Atia's being grotesque to the

last degree.

The second case occurs at the beginning of the Galba. "The line of the Cæsars became extinct in Nero. That this would be so divers wonders prognosticated, but most clearly and particularly two. Once, when Livia, just after her marriage with Augustus, was revisiting her villa at Veii, an eagle flew past and dropped in her lap a white hen, which still held fast a sprig of laurel she had in her bill when the eagle snatched her. Livia ordered the hen to be kept and the twig to be set, and the result was such a brood of chickens that the country seat is called

Henstead (ad Gallinas) to this day, and a laurel thicket so thriving that the Cæsars cut the chaplets for their triumphs from it. The princes made it a rule to plant the laurel thus used as soon as possible on the same spot; and it was observed that shortly before the death of each of them the tree he had planted withered. Now in Nero's last year the whole planting shrivelled from the roots, and every single fowl on the estate died. Much about the same time the temple of the Cæsars was struck by lightning, and the heads of all the statues fell off together, the sceptre of Augustus, too, was dashed out of his hands."

It cannot be said that Suetonius is absolutely uncritical. Here and there he seems to feel that what he writes needs confirmation; and he sometimes gives alternative accounts of tragedies in the imperial family without deciding between them, though he does not always remember that he had thus left the question open. Thus, among the presages of Cæsar's murder, he tells how a brass tablet was found at Capua in the tomb in which Capys was buried, bearing the inscription in Greek: "Whensoever the bones of Capys are discovered, a descendant of Julus will be done to death by the hand of his kinsmen, and will thereafter be avenged with great calamities to Italy." This is by no means the least credible of these stories, yet he makes haste to add : "Lest any one should take this for a fable or an invention my authority for it is Cornelius Balbus, one of Cæsar's closest intimates." (Jul. 81.) Balbus, we hope, was not also his voucher for the tale which immediately follows of the horses consecrated by Cæsar when he crossed the Rubicon, and allowed to roam and graze at large, which showed their sympathy with their liberator by a determined hunger strike and floods of tears, when his assassination was impending.

Of cases of the open question and our author's way of dealing with them, we may instance two. The first is the execution of the younger Agrippa. Tiberius, Suetonius says, "did not publicly announce the demise of Augustus,