Suetonius, a Roman historian, was the author of The Lives of the Caesars - one of the most vivid surviving documents of the early Roma empire. His biographies illuminate not only the political history of the twelve rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, but also the whole social and cultural world to which these Caesar’s belonged. In the first major study of Suetonius in English, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill places the biographer in the context of tastes and intellectual currents of the early second century AD, and uses the portraits of earlier emperors to cast light on the values and ideology of the court of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian whom he served.

Thanks to Suetonius’ attentions to the personal lives of the Caesar’s, their tastes, sexual preferences, and superstitions, and his neglect of grand affairs of state and military narrative , he has been underrated as a serious historical source and compared unfavourably with his contemporary, the historian Tacitus. Wallace-Hadrill looks freshly at Suetonius in his own terms as a scholarly and antiquarian writer rather than a failed narrative historian. He shows how biographies reveal aspects of early imperial society and culture which Tacitus’ narrative neglects, and how important he is as a source for the current generations of historians, interested as much in a society and culture as in politics and warfare.