After reading Marguerite Yourcenar's wonderful Memoirs of Hadrian (reviewed here), I felt like reading some more on Roman history, and one obvious source to turn to was someone who appears briefly in aforementioned book, since he was a contemporary of Hadrian: the Roman historian Suetonius.

Suetonius is without a doubt among the four or five most famous Roman historians, and his magnum opus Twelve Caesars is an extremely important source for our knowledge of Roman history in the first century BC and the first century AD. That said, it is neither a very deep book with clever insights and analysis - for that one should turn to Tacitus - nor a really comprehensive overview of Roman history in that period. What it is instead, is pretty much what the title promises: a portrait of the twelve first "Caesars" ruling Rome, with more attention for their personalities and weaknesses than for a clear overview of their reigns.

I say "the twelve first Caesars" and not "the twelve first emperors" because the first person discussed in Suetonius' book, and the one who gets the largest page count, is Julius Caesar, who never was emperor. It then continues with his successors of the "Julio-Claudian house" (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero), the three men who briefly held the throne in the tumultuous "Year of the Four Emperors" in 69 AD (Galba, Otho, Vitellius) and finally the three emperors of the Flavian house (Vespasian and his sons Titus and Domitian). Evidently Suetonius felt it was wiser to remain silent about Nerva, Trajan and of course Hadrian, the former two being not only Hadrian's immediate predecessors but also his adoptive "father" and "grandfather".

Among those twelve rulers, there are only a few who emerge relatively unscathed from Suetonius' treatment, with the good outweighing the bad. Whether that is his fault or their own is not always entirely clear. The picture Suetonius paints of the Roman imperial court in general is not a pretty one, with debauchery, rampant fiscal irresponsibility, corruption, favoritism and murder showing up in many emperors' reigns. But at times one does wonder if Suetonius isn't a bit over-eager to list all the rumours and slander he can find about a given emperor. At times he debunks a myth through his personal research (he had access to the imperial archives, at least for a time), with obvious relish, so it's not as if he isn't critical with his sources; but the large majority of his information he simply has no way of checking.

One difficulty of the book is that Suetonius was writing for an audience which might be presumed to know the period described in rather more detail than modern readers. At times he refers in passing to certain people or political events that even a Classics major nowadays would be hard-pressed to recognize, which can make certain passages difficult to follow (there are limits to the information one will find on Wikipedia; these things would require rather more specialized information sources if one wanted to look them up). Fortunately, those references are generally not so crucial to Suetonius' points that looking them up is really necessary. Twelve Caesars is, all things considered, a fairly smooth and entertaining read, not particularly long and filled to the brim with salacious details and stories. The ones about Caligula and Nero are of course widely known (though Suetonius' treatment of both adds some much-needed nuance to their image in popular history, listing the good as well as the bad), but the stories about some others, Tiberius in particular, are quite as bad. (Since this forum counts numerous aSoIaF fans, myself among them, I should also mention that reading this book taught me that a certain particularly horrible event described in the aforementioned series, was evidently inspired by Suetonius' section on Caligula.)

Having read this book in Dutch translation, I can offer no advice on what the best English translations are; but I did not really get the impression that Suetonius was a great enough stylist for it to matter very much. I suppose I might conclude that one can easily skip Suetonius in favour of modern authors covering the same subjects, who after all will be more reliable and less prone to subjectivity and sensationalism. He does not have the brilliance of Tacitus in either style or content, and so if you're going to read one Roman historian, it should probably be the latter. But all the same, Twelve Caesars is an impressive achievement if one considers the circumstances historians worked in at the time, and it's still very readable, so I certainly wouldn't want to discourage people from reading it.