Ancestry and Suetonius' De Vita Caesarum

Each Life of Suetonius’ De Vita Caesarum is constructed carefully from the very beginning, leading the reader to a preconceived judgment of the Caesar by employing techniques from epideictic rhetoric, including the comparison of the subject with his ancestors. In nine of the twelve Lives, characterisation of the Caesar begins with a detailed family tree of the subject’s ancestors or a short biography of the father. This thesis explores the role of the ancestors in the Lives as status symbols and tools of characterisation. Suetonius surpasses other authors, such as Tacitus and Plutarch, in the extent and subtlety of his characterisation through lineage. In Suetonius, the character traits of the ancestors foreshadow similarity or emphatic contrast with the character traits of their descendants. This characterisation works because the audience expects the descendant to resemble the ancestor, and this thesis also investigates the role of nature and nurture in inherited character traits in the De Vita Caesarum. In Chapter One, I explain the role of ancestors as status markers in Roman society, to situate Suetonius’ use of ancestors as status markers in its social and literary context, and in Chapter Two I discuss the use of ancestors as status markers in Suetonius. In Chapter Three, I identify the parallels between the ancestral traits and the traits of the Caesars, and in Chapter Four the unusual features of the Tiberius. At the end of Chapter Four I trace the patterns of inheritance and degeneration that arise from Suetonius’ usage of ancestors as tools of characterisation. I argue that the parallels between ancestor and descendant are sufficiently close that Suetonius can be said to have deliberately selected and shaped these ancestral anecdotes to characterise the Caesars themselves. In Chapter Five, I discuss nature and nurture in Suetonius: whether virtues and vices are innate and inherited, the possible mechanisms by which Suetonius’ Caesars resemble their ancestors, and the possible reasons the patterns of inheritance in Suetonius are different from those of the republican and Flavian periods. I conclude that the ancestors are supposed to be read with their descendants in mind, and that Suetonius chose the stories he told about the ancestors with a view to shaping the characterisation of the Caesar. The character traits of the ancestors should be taken into account in future discussions of Suetonius’ characterisation.