Suetonius the Peripatetic: Aristotelian Influence upon Roman Political Biography

This talk argues that Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars reflects the influence of

Aristotle’s political thought and writings and that the peculiar form and content of the work can be explained as the direct result of this influence. In his seminal work on ancient biography, Die griechisch-römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form, Friedrich Leo argued that

Plutarch and Suetonius belonged to distinct branches of ancient biography: Plutarch represented the Peripatetic tradition, a more philosophical strain of biography that tended to focus on the lives of public figures, while Suetonius was the representative of a scholarly Alexandrian tradition that tended to focus on the lives of philosophers and poets. While many challenges have been raised, and revisions made, to Leo’s theory, most notably by W. Steidle in 1951 and more recently by J. Geiger, the distinction that Leo drew between the more philosophical Plutarch and the more scholarly Suetonius has had a lasting impact on the way scholars assess the works of these two ancient biographers. My contention is that this reading needs to be fundamentally revised.

The argument of this paper, in brief, is that the influence of Aristotle and the Peripatetic biographers is readily apparent in both the structure and the content of the Lives of the Twelve

Caesars. In terms of structure, my paper explains why Suetonius divided each biography into narrative (per tempora) and thematic (per species) sections. This sharp division is a striking feature that continues to puzzle modern scholars. Wallace-Hadrill has proposed that it reflects the influence of encomiastic works such as Xenophon’s Agesilaus. My paper proposes that the more probable source of this structure is Aristotle’s tendency to treat institutions as living organisms;

Aristotle applied this sort of analysis to tragedy, in his Poetics, and, more germanely, to the

Athenian system of government, in the Athenaion Politeia. Suetonius would have become aware of this formal structure through the writings of Peripatetic authors, such as Aristoxenus and

Hermippus, whom he acknowledges as influences in his De Viris Illustribus. This Aristotelian influence explains why Suetonius narrated the lives of the Caesars only up to the moment that the man became emperor, only up to the point at which the organism became, as it were, an adult worthy of categorical analysis, rather than narrating each life, as Xenophon did in his Agesilaus, from birth to death.

In terms of content, the paper argues that the moral categories upon which Suetonius relied to analyze each emperor also reflect the influence of Aristotle. The question of why

Suetonius chose to focus upon the particular set of virtues and vices that he did remains a matter of dispute among scholars; recent efforts have sought to ground his selection in Roman traditions of Panegyric, funeral oratory, imperial propaganda and coins. I will show that a stronger case can be made for the so-called “Manual for Tyrants” that is found in the fifth book of Aristotle’s

Politics. The categories that Aristotle employs in his analysis of tyranny explain not only the virtues and vices, but also the public and private actions, behaviors, and family relationships, that

Suetonius includes in his imperial biographies.

This paper is, therefore, an argument for the existence of a Peripatetic tradition of biography in which the thought of Aristotle was adapted to the analysis of monarchs and tyrants.

Aristotle gave the impetus to this tradition, which was developed by the likes of Phainias of

Eresus and Clearchus of Soli, and ultimately picked up by the Roman Suetonius. Ultimately, my analysis reveals that our knowledge and understanding of the emperors and of the principate has been colored by Peripatetic philosophy in a way that historians and political theorists would do well to consider when they weigh the evidence that has been preserved not only by Suetonius, but also by Plutarch and the Historia Augusta.

Geiger, J. 1985. Cornelius Nepos and Ancient Political Biography. Stuttgart.

Steidle, W. 1951. Suetonius und die Antike Biographie. Munich.

Leo, F. 1901. Die griechisch-römische Biographie nach ihrer literarischen Form. Leipzig.

Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1983. Suetonius: The Scholar and his Caesars. New Haven.