by Gwyn Morgan
The best modern monograph on Tacitus in English is R. H. Martin’s Tacitus (Batsford 1981), and the latest study of the epigraphical evidence for his career is A. R. Birley, “The life and death of Cornelius Tacitus,” Historia 49 (2000) 230–47.
Suetonius
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was born probably in the early 70s of an equestrian family, his father—Suetonius Laetus—having served as a military tribune in legion XIII Gemina at Bedriacum. Wherever Suetonius was born, he was educated in Rome, and there he was encouraged and supported in his earlier years by the Younger Pliny. The latter addressed four letters to him (1.18; 3.8; 4.10; 9.34), and wrote two more on his behalf (1.24; 10.94). Pliny paints a picture of a youngish man, uncertain in his career aims but inclined to scholarly pursuits and perhaps overly superstitious. Yet an honorary inscription set up to Suetonius in Hippo Regius (Annaba in Algeria) shows that he held not only an assortment of lower offices but also three high positions in the imperial secretariat, those of a studiis, a bibliothecis, and (this one we knew about before) ab epistulis. The first two belong probably in Trajan’s reign, the third definitely in Hadrian’s, because Hadrian fired him in 122, supposedly for insulting the emperor’s wife. The date of his death is unknown. Those who imagine the Lives of the Twelve Caesars his crowning achievement tend to set it in the early 120s, soon after this work was completed. Those who reject a linear approach and allow him more time for his literary endeavors have argued for a date as late as 141.
Suetonius was another prolific writer, but the vast majority of his works have been lost. They included treatises on such diverse topics as clothing, the Roman calendar, grammatical matters, and punctuation. Indeed, the only work to have survived more or less intact (and it lacks its preface) is his Lives of the Twelve Caesars. This must have been started in the second decade of the second century, in Trajan’s reign, when Julius Caesar’s reputation was once more on the upswing. This is one reason why the Julius heads the list, although he was never emperor. The work was dedicated to Septicius Clarus, prefect of the praetorian guard from 119 until 122, when he too was fired by Hadrian. Suetonius, anyway, was interested primarily—like Plutarch—in what kind of man each of his 12 Caesars was, but he pursued a different line. Although the format varies from one Life to another, he tended first to take his emperor from birth to accession to the throne. (This makes him the key source for the earlier years of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian.) Once his emperor was firmly on the throne, he described his qualities or failings by category (per species), subdividing these into those shown in public life (his justice, for example, or his cruelty), and those exhibited in private life (sexual proclivities, for example, his physical appearance, and so on). And this he rounded out with an account of the emperor’s last days, a quite extensive narrative in Nero’s case. The format is clearer in the Lives of Galba and Vespasian than it is in those of Otho and Vitellius, but all the later Lives are significantly briefer than those devoted to Caesar and his descendants.
Since Suetonius remained a knight throughout his career, attempts have sometimes been made to argue that he preserves an “equestrian view” of the Roman world, but this is another will-o’-the-wisp. Nonetheless, his approach to his material produces an account that is not so much antihistorical as ahistorical. The tight focus on the emperor requires that he cut out all material in which his subject had no hand. This is particularly notable in his treatment of Nero’s first years as emperor as well as in his report of Vitellius’ revolt. Under each heading, again, he may list the examples of a given trait in chronological order, but he is just as likely to settle for a social categorization, one example of cruelty towards senators, one towards knights, and one towards common people. Then too, he is particularly interested in the omens and prodigies attending an emperor’s birth, accession, and death. (These figure most prominently in the Augustus and the Vespasian, probably because each set up a dynasty, and the latter needed besides something to counter the obscurity of his origins.) But in this regard it may be the Vitellius that is most remarkable. For here the signs are used relentlessly to show that the emperor is destined to fall.
This raises the question of Suetonius’ reliability, and on this opinions vary widely. It is too often forgotten by his critics that in biography even apocryphal anecdotes are valid illustrations of how an emperor was perceived, and this holds good even if, on occasion, Suetonius shows too great a readiness to generalize from gossip. On the other hand, his defenders have argued that, as a member of the imperial civil service, he should have had access to the palace archives. It is hard to make a convincing case for this. As best we can tell, most of the documents he quotes in the earlier Lives were in circulation before he put his accounts together. But he is remarkably scrupulous in researching the ancestry and the birthplace of his emperors, using even physical evidence like the name of a road or of the quarter of a town to prove his case.
What has misled Suetonius’ readers most is his style. Though terse, it looks deceptively simple. This creates the impression that the material was assembled by a man of no great intellect. This impression is reinforced by his willingness to quote sayings or documents, in Greek or Latin, that preserve the wording and the style of their originators. (Tacitus would never have dreamt of doing this.) Described sometimes as a “chancery style,” as if Suetonius had picked it up while serving as a bureaucrat, it is as mannered in its avoidance of obvious rhetorical tricks as is Tacitus’ style for its delight in those techniques. In this way it masks two larger rhetorical tricks. First, it persuades the reader to accept his description of an emperor’s behavior by categories as if it were the most natural thing in the world, when the categories are themselves products of a rhetorical scheme. And second, Suetonius’ tendency to shun overt moralizing of the kind in which Plutarch indulged will induce some readers to imagine that he is impartial. This idea is disproved most clearly, once again, by the Vitellius. Suetonius picked his categories, he picked the examples for each category, and he decided which emperors to present as “good” and which as “evil.” The majority are “evil.”
Though Suetonius has always been a much-read author, the latest revival of interest in his Caesars was sparked in 1951 by Wolf Steidle’s Sueton und die antike Biographie. Since then the best work has appeared in German, French, or Italian. There have been numerous editions of the Lives in English, but for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius the best despite—or perhaps because of—its age remains G. W. Mooney, Suetoni Tranquilli De Vita Caesarum Libri VII–VIII (Dublin 1930). This includes a text, a translation, and detailed notes.
Dio Cassius or Cassius Dio
With Cassius Dio Cocceianus we can deal more briefly, since what survives of his work has relatively little value for the Year of the Four Emperors. He was born ca. 164, of a Greek family that already possessed Roman citizenship and had long been prominent in Nicaea in Bithynia (modern Turkey). His father, Marcus Cassius Apronianus, had risen to the consulship, and Dio followed in his father’s footsteps. He traveled to Rome around 180, entered the senate around 190, and was consul for the first time probably around 206. No military man, he still held an army command in Pannonia, probably between 226 and 228, and he returned from that to hold a second consulship in 229, as ordinarius with the emperor Severus Alexander. After this he retired to his homeland, but we have no idea when he died. He lived mainly in Italy down to 218, and he tells us that he had a country villa at Capua, to which he would retire to compose his History (76.2.1).
Dio has been described, justly, as “the supreme instance of a man who was at once a Greek and a Roman.” When he set out to write in Greek a history of Rome from its foundations down to his own day, he intended from the start to compose it in the Roman annalistic mode. He declares that he spent 10 years assembling his materials and another 12 writing them up (72.23.5), this for a history that would run through the death of Septimius Severus in 211. These two processes are usually set between 201 and 223, but he continued the work into the
reign of Severus Alexander, ultimately in 80 books. Assessments of Dio qua historian seldom rank him highly. He is often careless, with a penchant for setting events in the wrong year. He was himself prone to act on the basis of dreams, and includes numerous omens and portents in his narrative, though he may have been less inclined than Suetonius to draw conclusions from them. He puts long, turgid speeches in the mouths of his characters (Julius Vindex, for example), and not always with as good a reason as he has in Vindex’s case. And his style is run-of-the-mill, partly because of the speed with which he wrote, partly because his was a less demanding audience than Roman senators.
What is unclear is the extent to which Dio’s narrative of 68/69 was colored by his own experiences. Since he witnessed at close hand the reigns of the string of emperors from Commodus through Severus Alexander (180 to 235), a period when relations between emperor and senate were strained severely and military discipline was usually conspicuous by its absence, we might expect these themes to have dominated his narrative. But no matter what he does elsewhere, we lack evidence enough to justify speculation on this particular period. Books 64 and 65 survive only in fragments and summaries, and the summaries were made by two Byzantine monks with their own quirks. In the second half of the eleventh century Joannes Xiphilinus summarized Books 36 to 80 (from the age of Pompey and Caesar on). He excerpted huge chunks of material in Dio’s own words (this is his principal virtue), but his choices often betray his own predilections. As has been pointed out, for example, he seems to have been obsessed with Nero’s eunuch Sporus. In the first half of the twelfth century, conversely, Joannes Zonaras composed an Epitome of History that ran from the creation down to 1118. He used Dio for the period between Caesar’s murder and the accession of Nerva in 96, but he produced a genuine abridgement of Dio’s work. Hence his account preserves the layout, not the wording of the original. But he too decided which material to abridge and, as in the matter of Otho’s suicide, how to spin it.
The best study of Dio the man and his career is Fergus Millar’s A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford 1964). There is no full-length study of Dio qua historian in English—it would be a formidable task anyway, given the timespan Dio covers. But a series of editions of his History is in progress and, on matters of detail, the reader will find helpful notes in the volume by C. L. Murison, Rebellion and Reconstruction: Galba to Domitian. An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s Roman History Books 64–67 (Scholars Press 1999).
The “Common Source”
There can be no doubt that Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, probably Dio, and perhaps Josephus took sizable quantities of material and, on occasion, even the phrasing of that material from an earlier Roman writer on the Year of the Four Emperors. The farcical details of the Nero-Poppaea-Otho triangle, for example, are reported in almost identical terms by the first three, and only in the Annals (13.45–46) does Tacitus provide a differently nuanced account. Still, the existence of this work is most easily proved by setting side by side the detailed accounts of the campaign between Otho and Vitellius that Plutarch and Tacitus provide. Both have clearly lifted large quantities of material, and sometimes the same wording, from this earlier writer.
It is impossible to identify the common source, first because he is nowhere given a name, and second, because Tacitus seems so thoroughly to have eclipsed every earlier historian on the periods he covers that not even small fragments of their works have survived to give us a basis for comparison. Three names have been suggested repeatedly, however, because Tacitus cites them all together in one passage on Nero’s reign (Annals 13.20.2), and makes one separate reference to each of them, again for episodes in that reign. There is Fabius Rusticus (cf. Annals 15.61.3), a friend of Seneca and a historian whom Tacitus had already named in his discussion of Britain’s shape (Agricola 10.3). Then there is Cluvius Rufus (cf. Annals 14.2.1), the man Galba installed as governor of Tarraconensis when he himself set out for Rome in 68, but Cluvius’ work may not have gone beyond 68. And there is the Elder Pliny (cf. Annals 15.53.3). Besides the Natural History, which has survived, he wrote a work on the wars in Germany (bella Germanica), and a 31-book continuation of Aufidius Bassus’ history (a fine Aufidii Bassi), for which the outside limits are 41–71. In the preface to the Natural History (§ 20) Pliny declares that he planned withholding publication of this history until after his own death, to avoid accusations of currying favor with the new dynasty. This gives us some idea of the line it took, and it could be the work for which Tacitus cites Pliny once in the Histories (3.28), on the sack of Cremona. This does not prove Pliny the common source, rather the opposite. Besides, Tacitus could easily have appropriated both the details he reports and the reference to Pliny from the common source. That sort of thing too was by no means unusual among ancient historians.
Speculation about the identity of the common source was fueled by the hope that solving this problem would enable us to form an idea of his reliability as a historian. As this has proved to be a dead end, all we can say for certain is that his narrative covered the reigns of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, and did so more comprehensively than does Plutarch. The biographer manifestly edited out material in his account of the campaign between Otho and Vitellius. But how much Tacitus added to or modified the common source’s account there is no telling. All we can say, again by comparing Plutarch’s account with Tacitus’, is that the latter clearly put a different interpretation on the material. And so we come to the irony of the situation, that since we cannot use the supposed reliability of the common source to “correct” Tacitus, it is his existence that has been used to achieve that end (see Appendix 2).
Vipstanus Messalla
For the opening stages of the campaign Antonius Primus launched against Vitellius, so it is generally agreed, Tacitus consulted an unusually precise, more or less contemporary author, Vipstanus Messalla. In his early twenties, Messalla was serving as a military tribune of legion VII Claudia in 69, but he became the unit’s acting commander for September and October, after Aponius Saturninus ran off its legate, Tettius Julianus. Tacitus cites Messalla twice for specific incidents early in the campaign, in a manner showing that he wrote a kind of memoir. Some fancy that it covered the entire campaign, but Messalla is much more likely to have described only the two months of his command. He was replaced by Plotius Grypus in early November.
Messalla must also have written the work soon after the actual events, while his memories were still fresh. For Tacitus describes him as “the possessor of a distinguished ancestry and outstanding personal gifts, the only man to bring good qualities to this campaign” (Hist. 3.9.3). If his father was Lucius Vipstanus Poplicola Messalla (cos. ord. 48), he was linked by birth to the Valerii Messallae, a family prominent in republican times. In the Histories (4.42) he wins high praise from Tacitus again, for defending his older half brother, the unscrupulous informer Aquilius Regulus, against his score-settling senatorial enemies early in 70, and he plays a large role in the Dialogus as a champion of “classical” oratory against the modernists. So it is reasonable to assume that Messalla would have secured swift advancement to high office under the Flavians, had he lived. Since there are no traces of this in the record, it looks as if he died young, perhaps as early as 76.
The memoir was clearly favorable to Antonius, Messalla’s commander in chief. Even if Messalla had disapproved of Antonius as a demagogue and a troublemaker, it was neither gentlemanly to criticize one’s superior, nor wise to do so when one had followed his orders. But this, unfortunately, has generated another hobbyhorse to bedevil scholarship on Tacitus’ reliability, the temptation to carve Tacitus’ portrait of Antonius into good and bad strands, to trace these back to favorable and unfavorable sources, and to identify Messalla as the former and the common source as the latter. It seems to have been no deterrent that this reduces Tacitus to the level of an incompetent clerk without a brain in his head, something he manifestly was not.
Appendix 2:
Characterizations of Galba and Otho
The most difficult problem faced by anybody attempting to reconstruct and interpret the events of 68/69 is that of determining how to view Otho. Assessing Galba is not much easier, and since there are grounds in one case at least for thinking the portrayals interlinked, both issues need discussion. To do this in the main narrative would have caused it to bog down on page after page. To gloss over the problem, however, or to make a choice without any attempt to set out the reasoning behind it, would be misleading as well as dishonest.
Three of our sources lie at the heart of the problem, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius. (Dio’s account is too fragmentary to be helpful and Josephus does not concern himself much with either ruler.) Between them, nonetheless, they give us two different portraits of Galba and three of Otho. On Galba they divide into opposing camps. Plutarch admires the man, presenting him as a harsh but just, worthy, and misunderstood old man. Tacitus, by contrast, declares that Galba “did not so much possess virtues as lack vices,” and the only redeeming quality Suetonius seems to have found in Galba was his not being a heavy drinker. On Otho the situation is more complicated. Here Plutarch stands at one extreme, presenting us with a panicky, effeminate, vicious weakling. Tacitus stands at the other, picturing Otho as a tough-minded, murderous usurper. And Suetonius pursues a middle course with Otho the impetuous risk taker. On the whole, Suetonius’ account is, once again, closer to Tacitus’ than it is to Plutarch’s, as in the story that when Otho went ahead with his coup, he joked that it made no difference to him whether he fell beneath his creditors in the forum or beneath his enemies in battle. Nonetheless, Suetonius’ picture can be accommodated to either of the other two, but not to both at once. So we must make a choice.