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The Stock Tyrant and the Roman Emperors: the Influence of the Traditional Portrait of Tyranny on Suetonius' Caesares

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The Stock Tyrant and the Roman Emperors: the Influence of the Traditional Portrait of Tyranny on Suetonius' Caesares The Stock Tyrant and the Roman Emperors: The Influence of the Traditional Portrait of Tyranny on Suetonius' Caesares Harold Smith Reeves Brooksville, Florida A.B., Princeton University, 1991 J.D., University of Chicago, 1996 Ph.L., Catholic University of America, 2002 S.T.B., Pontificia Università di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 2005 M.A., University of Virginia, 2010 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Virginia May, 2014 ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ ______________________________________________ Contents Table of Contents i Abstract ii Acknowldgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Rhetoric and the Caesares 19 Chapter 2: From Ancestry to Empire 53 Chapter 3: The Stock Figure of the Tyrant 107 Chapter 4: Dissecting the Roman Tyrants: The Eidological Portraits of the 146 Emperors in the Caesares Chapter 5: Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Death of the Emperor in the Caesares 264 Conclusion 367 Bibliography 371 ii Abstract This dissertation analyzes the influence of the epideictic rhetoric, and in particular of the traditional portrait of the tyrant drawn from invective, on Suetonius’ Caesares. Using the works of Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, it first establishes that both the form of a Suetonian biography and the way in which Suetonius describes the ancestry and early life of each emperor, reflect the rhetorical practices traditionally employed to praise a great man in antiquity. It then demonstrates that for the substance of his portraits Suetonius turned to the stock figure of the tyrant. It traces the development of the traditional portrait of the tyrant in Greek and Roman drama, historiography, oratory, rhetoric, and political philosophy. It then shows that Suetonius portrayed the Caesars as men who not only exhibited the vices traditionally associated with the tyrant but also governed and ruled in ways consistent with the accounts of tyrannical government found in the historians and philosophers and died in the ways tyrants have always died. The Roman biographer far from being the collector of delightful trifles and salacious gossip that many have taken him for, was in fact creating a consistently political portrait of each emperor and of the principate itself. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my committee, especially Professor Anthony Woodman, my advisor, who exhibited remarkable patience in the face of my inability to come to terms with the relationship between rhetoric and biography, and Professor Elizabeth Meyer, whose critique of my method and of my organization has been invaluable; without their help, it would simply have been impossible to develop and write this dissertation over the past two years. I would also like to express my thanks to Professors Gregory Hays and John Dillery, and to offer a special thanks to Professor Jane Crawford, who generously agreed to lend her aid and assistance in the last weeks of this process. I extend my thanks also to Professors Christopher Pelling and Elaine Fantham, who offered valuable comments on drafts of an early form of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to offer my special thanks to my wife, Daniela Ziegler, without whose support and love I would have been unable to complete this project. Introduction ma pensi un po' a ciò che è stato Svetonio al tempo dei cesari. No, lei parte con una ambizione di denuncia e arriva al favoreggiamento d'un complice, ma lei vede che confusione, che ambiguità. Federico Fellini, 8 1/2 There are few ancient authors more popular with students and mainstream readers — and more consistently and thoroughly denigrated by modern scholars — than Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.1 Although some have tried to explain his Caesares as the product of specific literary traditions or of a specific social, philosophical, or political point of view,2 the 1 For the life of Suetonius, see Townend (1967) 79-81; Baldwin (1983) 1-51; Wallace- Hadrill (1983) 2-8. Suetonius exercised a considerable influence on ancient and medieval biography. Bowersock (1998) 194-5 has observed that, while both Suetonius and Plutarch embarked upon separate works of sequential lives, Suetonius alone had successors: “Obviously, something must have moved Plutarch and Suetonius to invent the vita Caesarum when they did. Something must also have moved them to elect such very different ways of doing their work. Finally, something must have made the Suetonian form so popular in the following centuries while leaving the Plutarchean form utterly without successors. These are fundamental problems in achieving an understanding of imperial biography.” For Marius Maximus as a continuator of Suetonius and for Suetonius’ specific influences on Maximus, see Syme (1980) 57 and 124-5. For the influence of Suetonius on pagan and Christian biographers generally, see Bowersock (1998) 206-9. For the displacement of annalistic history by biography after Suetonius, see Syme (1980) 36: “No Latin writer of annalistic history existed in the age of the Severi. Since Suetonius, biography held the field. Indeed, the Greek Cassius Dio is much under the influence of the pattern and tradition – observe his treatment of Hadrian.” For the specific influence of Suetonius on the form of later biography, see Bowersock (2010) 912-3; Hägg (2012) 230-2. 2 Macé (1900) 84 and Ailloud (1931) xxxiii represent the traditional view that Suetonius shared the senatorial point of view. Della Corte (1958) argued that the Caesares reflect Reeves 2 consensus of opinion today remains that Suetonius wrote biographies that, at best, reflect his idiosyncratic tastes, antiquarian interests, and peculiar personality, or, at worst, partake “of the nature of a chronique scandaleuse based upon tittle-tattle about the emperors and compiled by a literary man with the muckrake, too keen upon petty and prurient detail to produce a scientific account of his subjects.”3 Although some historians the particular biases and aspirations of the equestrian order; this thesis aroused considerable interest when first proposed, but has not generally been accepted. Paratore (1959) 326-41 in turn argued that Suetonius shared the viewpoint of the common man. For the different class and social attitudes of Suetonius and Tacitus, see Sage (1991) 338, who notes that Suetonius “is frankly approving and little disturbed by the end of the primacy of the Republican aristocracy. He remains impatient with Republican nostalgia and sincere in his admiration of Augustus.” See also Paratore (1959) 341: “Il n’a ni foi politique, ni foi religieuse ou philosophique.” Galand-Hallyn (1991) 3577 observes that the nineteenth-century scholarly appraisals likewise tended to conclude that Suetonius wrote with no particular philosophical or ideological perspective: “L’ensemble de son oeuvre ne serait, d’ailleurs, soutenu par nulle idéologie, nulle perspective philosophique.” 3 Duff (1927) 508. Perhaps the most often quoted judgment passed on Suetonius as a literary author is, however, that of Funaioli (1927) 26: “ma un vero scrittore non è.” For a thorough and convenient review of the diction and style of Suetonius, see Mooney (1930) 611-39, who usefully catalogues the findings of Thimm (1867), Bagge (1875), Freund (1901), and Dalmasso (1906). The most notable feature of Suetonius’ writing is its brevity, which, as Mooney (1930) 634-6 observes, the author achieves by a very free use of participles, frequent and varied ellipses, asyndeton, a wide and frequent use of the ablative absolute, a “bold use of relative clauses in apposition to substantives,” and the use of prepositions with participial force. Suetonius avoids concinnitas in favor of variatio, which he achieves most often, as Freund (1901) and Dalmasso (1906) are reported by Mooney (1930) 636 to have catalogued, by pairing adjectives or adverbs with nouns in the genitive or ablative or dependent on a preposition; juxtaposing adjectives Reeves 3 consider Suetonius a reliable historical source — being an author devoid both of literary artistry and of the aspiration to write history, Suetonius would have lacked the craft to deceive4 — the appraisal of his biographies as works of literature remains predominantly negative and often dismissive.5 The modern scholarly study of Suetonius begins with the publication in 1900 of A. Macé’s Essai sur Suétone.6 Macé concluded that the Caesares are not the representative of a biographical, or even literary, tradition, but are rather the product of the scholarly and academic tendencies of their author. Suetonius, the learned antiquarian, collected and catalogued his findings about the emperors much as a grammarian would and adverbs; and answering a clause with ut, ne, quo, etc. with a noun. Finally, Mooney (1930) 637-8 offers examples of how Suetonius will occasionally use all of the ordinary figures of speech, both rhetorical and syntactical, including alliteration, anacoluthon, anaphora, ἀπὸ κοινοῦ, asyndeton, chiasmus, ellipsis, hendiadys, hypallage, hyperbaton, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, omission, pleonasm, polysyndeton, prolepsis, synesis, and zeugma. As Macé (1903) 379-81 established, moreover, Suetonius made frequent use of metrical clausulae. 4 Paratore (1958) 341, for example, concluded that Suetonius was a reliable source because of his tendency to assemble his mass of material mechanically. His approach is often
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