Suetonius

This is the first translation of the fragments attributed to the Roman historian Suetonius in any language. They come from three major collections, Roth (1858), Reifferscheid (1860) and two Byzantine epitomes that are believed to come from the works of Suetonius (ed. Taillardat 1967).

Although the fragments have been available (in Latin/Greek) for 170 years, they are still little known. Even specialists do not always know that they exist. They cover a broad range of topics from the ancient world of interest to scholars of social history (clothes, insults, games, lexicography), ancient literature and grammar, and particularly the literature of the Nerva-Trajan-Hadrianic period.

The introduction explains the background to the fragments and how they came to be collected. The translations are accompanied by the original text itself, due to the very scattered nature of this material. Each fragment has accompanying explanatory notes, covering the content of the text and what is interesting about each one, as well as the manuscript tradition and attribution.