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Murder, incest and paedophilia in imperial Rome

Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars appears in a vibrant new translation by Tom Holland, the current princeps of popular Roman history

8 February 2025

9:00 AM

8 February 2025

9:00 AM

The Lives of the Caesars Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland

Penguin Classics, pp.416, 25

I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits was enough to make my younger brother bury his head in a cushion.

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