Suetonius: Ciceronian Shorthand
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CHAPTER NINE SUETONIUS: CICERONIAN SHORTHAND Literary activity flourished in the post-Flavian era; and although the otium of the homo privatus may have been conducive to the pastime of creative writing, Suetonius Tranquillus and his prolific literary friends, Pliny the Younger and Cornelius Tacitus, all combined writing with active careers in public life. 1 Like Pliny and Tacitus, Suetonius was skilled in rhetoric, and oratori cal dexterity is evident in his works. Even the most casual perusal, however, demonstrates profound differences in his literary approach from that of his contemporaries. Suetonius' style has been termed "mundane" and "artless. "2 Operating within a biographical framework in De Vita Caesarum, Suetonius is a reporter of "facts" (sometimes contradictory); he makes no attempt to delve into "behind-the-scenes" motivation, as does Tacitus in his role of "omniscient" historian. 3 The differences are evident in Suetonius' gender terms, which reflect his training in neo-Ciceronian rhetoric. 4 In the biographies of the Caesars, each "Life" is divided into set rubrics that center upon the virtues and vices of the individual emperors. 5 Consequently, almost all of the characters, except for the imperial protagonists, are ancillary to the narrative. Some of them, in fact, appear within the space of one sentence and vanish with the onset of the next. Suetonius, like Vellei us, used gender epithets as a shorthand to establish social position or to emphasize moral characteristics in as few words as possible. Suetonius employs such expressions for individual characters more frequently in the first half-dozen books, very probably because he invested more of his literary energies and utilized more words in the 1 Suetonius' equestrian career and his prolific literary output are recounted by A. Wallace-Hadrill in Suetonius (Old Woking, 1983) 2-8; 38-49; R. Martin reviews Tacitus' career and writings in the second chapter of Tacitus (London, 1981) 26-~8. 2 Wallace-Hadrill (supra, n. 1) 19. 3 Ibid., /oc. cit.; cf. Martin (supra, n. 1) 215. R.C. Lounsbury notes that Suetonius "did not seek to impose his ethos on his material after the appreciable fashion of Tacitus," The Arts of Suetonius (New York, 1987) 102. • Wallace-Hadrill notes that Suetonius attended lectures at Rome during the time that Quintilian held the chair of rhetoric (supra, n. I) 3; on Quintilian and the tradition of Cicero, G. Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Ancient World (Princeton, 1972) 523. 'Wallace-Hadrill (supra, n. 1) chapter seven, "Virtues and Vices," 145 sq. 164 THE LETTER, THE BIOGRAPHY, AND THE NOVEL early Lives than he did in the later. 6 The biographer's gender terminology is notably devoid of innovation: it falls into the familiar patterns used with variations, according to genre, by Cicero, Livy, and Pliny. 7 The Lower Classes, Foreigners,and Pejorative Gender Terms Context, according to I. Opelt, determines whether a word is pejorative or not, 8 and this observation applies to homo and mulier when the words are used to indicate members of the lower orders and foreigners. For instance, the following example from the life of Augustus demonstrates that rank (or lack of it) is the determining factor in the author's choice of words. Before Actium, Octavian meets a homo named Eutychus, an asinarius by profession, who owns a donkey called Nicon. The not-yet Augustus, demonstrating the gambler's faith that seems to have run in his family ,9 interprets the encounter as a hunch of success, since the two are so fortunately named (Aug. 96.2). The term homo is based purely upon Eutychus' profession, since viri do not engage in such vulgar occupations. Homo is therefore devoid of pejorative moral overtones. Suetonius is said to display the usual aristocratic disdain for the lower orders, though he does not employ the scathing epithets to plebs that Tacitus does. 10 Suetonius, however, will attach homo to plebs or plebeius in instances where the persons in question are definitely acting in an unacceptable manner. An example is the anonymous e plebe homo, caught near the bed of the Emperor Claudius with a drawn daggar (Cl. 13.1). The specification of the culprit as such places responsibility for 6 B. Baldwin, Suetonius (Amsterdam, I 983) 484. The question whether Suetonius has created his own gender terms or has picked them up from his sources is probably unanswer able. Nevertheless, the biographer has chosen to employ them to emphasize a character's social rank or moral status. Baldwin notes that an author's sources influence his choice of words either "consciously or unconsciously." Ibid. 485. 7 S. 's gender terms fall into the usual categories: h. and m. are used for the lower classes, foreigners, and sometimes as pejoratives, while v. and/. are employed exclusively for the upper echelons of society. 8 I. Opell, Die /ateinischen Schimpfwoerter undverwandte sprach/iche Erscheinungen; eine Typo/ogie (Heidelberg, 1965) 265. 9 The Emperor Claudius was an unabashed dice player (C/. 5; 33.2; 39). One deduces his mania by the fact that he not only published a book on the theory of the game, but invented the first portable dice board to be used while travelling. The author of Apocolocyn1osis, incidentally, uses Ciceronian pejoratives, addressing him as homo crudelissime (13), and dispatches him to the underworld with a "holey" dice board ( 14). Also of interest is the fact that Claudius had the Senate award the name Claudia Pia Fide/is to the seventh and eleventh legions who had remained loyal during the revolt of Camillus (Dio. 60.16). Those numbers are lucky in the modern game; there may be some connection! 10 Baldwin (supra, n. 6) 341-42. .