Wednesday 23 March 2011

How reliable is Suetonius...?

“...some of which have departed from the truth of facts out of favour, as having received benefits from him; while others, out of hatred to him, and the great ill-will which they bare him, have so impudently raved against him with their lies...” (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XX.8.3)

In the Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus states that many historians had lied about the life of Nero. In The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius’ description of the reign of the Emperor Nero is generally negative. Earlier in the biography to the verses I am assessing, Suetonius states “I have separated this catalogue of Nero’s less atrocious acts – some deserving no criticism, some even praiseworthy – from the others; but I must begin to list his follies and crimes” (Suet, Nero 19).

This could suggest two things; Suetonius may genuinely be trying to be objective, but has reached the end of the good things to say about Nero by verse twenty, or Suetonius may be trying to be perceived as being objective, by suggesting that he has tried to be objective but must resign himself to explaining a lot more acts of depravity than acts worthy of praise, he can make his work look more reliable.

In Nero, David Shotter devotes a chapter to discuss whether Nero was a Hellenistic monarch or a Roman megalomaniac.

Nero appears to have suffered from an immature and inadequate personality: the frantic striving for attention and the childlike frustration when he was disappointed suggest this.” (Shotter, D (2005) Nero (2nd edition), London: Routledge. p 56)

There may be evidence for Nero wanting to be a Hellenistic monarch from his freeing the Greeks and granting them immunity from taxation. To the Roman, the Greek civilisation was associated with art, something it appears Nero was greatly fond of. It may be possible that others saw this as un-Roman, so they gradually turned against him. This is turn may affect how historians have written about Nero’s life. It may be possible that eccentricity has been confused with madness.

Shotter also describes in Appendix IV (Shotter, Nero. p 96-98) of the same book, that the accounts of Nero by Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Suetonius have enough similarities to indicate the use of common source material.

To try to verify this comment, I will find similarities in Tacitus' The Annals of Imperial Rome. In The Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus mentions Doryphorus as an ex-slave who was poisoned for opposing the emperor's marriage with Poppaea, yet that is all that is said about him. In The Twelve Caesars, Doryphorus was Nero's freedman whom he married. In this there are similarities and differences. The names being the same suggests that the historians got information from the same place, though the differences in what is said about Doryphorus makes both sources disputable. The accounts do not contradict each other, but it seems strange that one source should leave out the other fact if they knew about it.

This makes the risk of Suetonius’ work being unreliable more difficult to tell, so looking at other sources is fundamental to answer the question as to whether Suetonius is being objective in The Twelve Caesars.

SENECA: It’s wrong to decide rashly against relatives.

NERO: The man without fear may easily be just.

SENECA: A great cure for fear is clemency.

NERO: To wipe out the enemy is the general’s greatest virtue.

SENECA: To save citizens is a greater virtue for the father of his country.
(Pseudo-Seneca, Octavia, 438-44)

In this extract from Octavia, Nero seems to be a paranoid individual. In Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars Nero can be seen to be a paranoid figure, in the frequent assassination attempts on his mother for fear of her power. This suggests that Suetonius’ account of Nero may be accurate in describing the reasons for his madness, if he was in fact mad.

Reflections...


I have found this section challenging. It is difficult to analyse the reliability of a source from ancient times. The process for analysing a piece of evidence from a crime in the modern day, can involve in depth forensics, DNA and fingerprints, to determine whether someone was at a certain location and participating in crime at that time, yet assessing whether someone was mad around two thousand years ago is an incredibly difficult process. My immediate thought when asked to determine whether something is reliable is to look for something that we can be certain is reliable, yet that is very rare when assessing a historical source from two thousand years ago, it is impossible to say whether anything is reliable from that time.

To find sources to compare Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars with I looked in the book Augustus to Nero: A Sourcebook on Roman History: 31 BC – AD 68 by David C. Braund. This book has a section on sources about the emperors. There are numerous descriptions of coins and busts, which I tried to figure how they could be used to compare with Suetonius’ account of Nero’s life, but in this I failed as I did not see anything particularly unique about them compared to those of other Roman Emperors. What was useful was a speech made to the Greeks in which they were granted freedom and immunity from taxation.

 In the next section I am going to write about the influences and motives upon Suetonius’ writing. I am wondering whether there is a lot to say about this, and am wondering whether I will need to compensate by adding more to another section if I cannot write so much in this section.

No comments:

Post a Comment