Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars, translated by Tom Holland, Penguin Classics, £25.

Readers of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars in the original Latin or in any translation can expect no shortage of entertainment and horror. The historian clearly relished describing the details of Tiberius’ depraved retirement on Capri, Nero’s theatrical excesses, Caligula’s megalomaniacal delusions and Claudius’ manipulation at the hands of his wives and freedmen. But beyond the blend of intrigue, anecdote, and court gossip well described in Tom Holland’s introduction to his excellent new translation, there are insights enough to dwell on, not least the notion of the performance of power, a productive theme for modern historians who deal with imperial biography. When Augustus was dying, for instance, he

asked for a mirror, ordered his hair combed and his lolling jaw set straight, and then, after admitting his friends into his presence, and asking them whether they thought that he had played his part well in the comedy of life, quoted these lines:

If the play has been a good one, then please clap your hands

And let me leave the stage to the sound of your applause.

Holland’s translation here is characteristic of his enjoyable and careful rendering of Suetonius’ work. It imitates the continuous, multi-clause syntax of the Latin in a manner that the translation best known to previous generations, that of Robert Graves from 1957 (a precursor to his famous novelisation of the life of the emperor Claudius and the subsequent BBC series), deliberately sought to avoid:

He called for a mirror, and had his hair combed and his lower jaw, which had fallen from weakness, propped up. Presently he summoned a group of friends and asked: ‘Have I played my part in the farce of life creditably enough?’ adding the theatrical tag:

If I have pleased you, kindly signify

Appreciation with a warm goodbye.

Graves’ shorter sentence style reads like an account written in English rather than one translated from Latin, but it lacks the visual immediacy of Holland’s ‘lolling jaw’ (malas labantes), and makes use of more outdated terms – ‘farce’ rather than ‘comedy’ (Latin mimus), ‘presently’ instead of ‘then’, ‘creditably’ for ‘well’ (commode). Graves regularly turns the Latin idiom of using indirect statements (‘whether they thought that he had played…’) into the English practice of direct statements (‘Have I played…?’): Latinists of his era were insistently trained to do the converse in translating English direct speech into idiomatic oratio obliqua.

It would not be clear from either version that the quotation from the comedy is given not in Latin, but in Greek verse (Holland gives many useful notes, but does not draw attention to this). There was a time when translators might have attempted the linguistic double-coding by translating it into French; in this case Graves’ rhyming pentameters may be thought a worthwhile choice on his part, though Holland’s blank verse is not inferior. A little further on in this Life, reflecting that Augustus had an easy death, Suetonius writes, in Holland’s translation:

Such, then, was the death granted him by Fortune: an easy one, of the kind he had always wanted. For invariably, whenever he heard that someone had died swiftly and without pain, he would pray that he and those he loved might enjoy a similar ‘euthanasia’ (this, a Greek word, being the very term he used).

The first clause is a well-judged expansion of two words sortitus exitum, ‘having attained his allotted death’, in that it extracts the fuller meaning of sors, ‘lot’. It is helpful that Holland adds ‘Greek’, since irrelevant associations might arise to the modern English use of ‘euthanasia’. ‘For’ at the start of a sentence (such as the second one here) is, however, something that some translators will avoid where possible, on the grounds that it is seldom found in that place in standard English writing except in translations of Latin nam or enim and of Greek gar. (One recalls the story of the member of the Academie Francaise in the 17^th century who defended the use of the French ‘car’ against its detractors; amusingly enough, his name was Vincent Voiture). It is likely that this was the reason Graves recast the Latin so that ‘for’ would not come at the very start:

He must have longed for such an easy exit, for whenever he had heard of anyone having passed away quickly and painlessly, he used to pray: ‘May Heaven grant the same euthanasia to me and mine’.

As a result of this recasting, however, which again resorts to direct rather than indirect speech, Graves over-translates semper optaverat as ‘He must have longed for’ instead of the more literal ‘he had always wanted’; the explanatory particle (nam) would seem to require some such precursor. He also abbreviates the remainder of the passage: unconcerned to gloss ‘euthanasia’ in this context, he wholly omits the parenthesis hoc enim et uerbo uti solebat (‘this is the very term he used’).

In the work’s final biography, that of Domitian, Suetonius describes the emperor’s increasing paranoia about the prediction that he would be assassinated on a stated day, which led to extreme measures for his personal protection. ‘Even so’, Holland translates:

as each day passed, and what he had been led to dread as the hour of danger drew nearer, so it came to prey ever more on his mind – to the degree that he had the walls of the colonnades where he liked to stroll lined with phengite, so that he would then be able to see reflected in its gleaming surface everything that might be happening behind his back.

Endnotes inform us that phengite is a white translucent stone (they might have added that it was named from the Greek word phengos, gleam); but the awkwardness of the complex syntax remains, despite the casual dash that divides the sentence. Graves is far more direct and perspicuous:

As the critical day drew near his nervousness increased. The gallery where he took his daily exercise was now lined with plaques of highly polished moonstone, which reflected everything that happened behind his back.                    

The literal and symbolic significance of a ruler consumed by what is ‘behind his back’ (a tergo) makes the passage resonate with a contemporary awareness of the toll taken on individuals who wield absolute power. Holland’s more generous translation contrasts with Graves’s succinctness, and there is much to be said for both; ‘the critical day’ is surely an inspired rendering of the Latin tempus suspecti periculi, even if Holland’s periphrasis ‘what he had been led to dread as the hour of danger’ draws out its fuller connotation.

The descriptions of Tiberius’s sexual criminality are liable to shock equally in both translations. Suetonius tells of a report (how reliable can it have been?) that, as Holland translates, ‘on one occasion, while [Tiberius] was offering sacrifice, he was so taken by the looks of the attendant carrying the incense that he could hardly bear to wait until the proper dues had been paid to the gods; sure enough, the moment they were done, he took both the boy and his brother, who had been playing the flute, to one side and forced himself on the pair of them, and then, when the boys complained about the rape they had endured, had their legs broken’. Graves describes the brother, simply designated tibicen by Suetonius as ‘the sacred trumpeter’. It is perhaps unnecessarily nitpicking to insist that the tibia played by the unfortunate boy was neither a flute nor a trumpet, but a double-pipe, the Roman successor of the Greek aulos.