Numbers

The Twelve Caesars

• Julius Caesar
• Augustus
• Tiberius
• Caligula
• Claudius
• Nero
• Galba
• Otho
• Vitellius
• Vespasian
• Titus
• Domitian

How It's Used

"For all the sympathy for the ruled classes evoked by the title of an early essay collection, 'Homage to Daniel Shays,' Vidal keeps his focus on the rulers of our world. Commenting on Suetonius' 'Twelve Caesars,' he insists on 'the role of the individual in history,' and the individuals he has in mind are those who can exert their will on societies."

"'We who are about to die salute you.' This is the most tenacious urban myth of the amphitheatrical world, even echoed in, of all places, the title of an AC/DC album. Too bad gladiators didn't recite it before their fights.

"'Well,' I hear some of you saying, 'what about the reference in Suetonius's 'The Twelve Caesars' to the sham sea fight on the Fucine Lake?' Yes, there is this single mention of the utterance in classical literature, but it wasn't said by gladiators. It was a bunch of prisoners condemned to die in a mock naval battle put on by the emperor Claudius. (And ironically, these guys didn't die. Claudius pardoned most of them after they fought.)

"What gladiators did say, when they took the initial oath that sealed their fate as gladiators, was much more catchy: 'I submit to being burned, chained up, beaten and killed by an iron weapon.' Kind of puts today's car rental damage waivers in perspective, doesn't it?"

"English-speaking peoples since Shakespeare have not really understood tyrants: they have not had one for 500 years. Other races and nations have not been so fortunate—and 1938, when the 25-year-old Albert Camus wrote this play ['Caligula'], was a very good year for tyrants. Camus had just read Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, and Caligula caught his imagination: the brilliantly promising statesman, the darling of Rome, who became a murderous emperor. Why? In an earlier story, Camus had created a narrator who found it impossible to live, 'having killed morality inside me', and Caligula became the first of his solitary self-exiles. He thinks he can and should do anything he wants because the world contains no reason: it faces you with silence. Camus insisted that Caligula was not a play of ideas, but he was quite wrong. His Caligula is the prisoner of an idea, the idea of an amoral freedom in a world without morality."

"For more than 20 years I have been occupied, if intermittently, with the last years of the Roman Republic and the first century of Empire. This has resulted in one non-fiction book, The Caesars, and six novels. It was living in Rome in the 1970s that set me going. The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius was my bedside book. Wonderfully entertaining, it's a fund of good stories, some credible. Suetonius led me to Tacitus, whose Histories and Annals have a moral force and indignant passion comparable to Carlyle. His epigrams ring down the ages. When Rab Butler was asked his opinion of Anthony Eden as Prime Minister, he quoted Tacitus on the Emperor Galba: 'Capax imperii nisi imperasset—he would have been judged capable of governing the empire if he had never done so.'"

"Hugh Campbell Bisset's exhibition of wall sculptures at Toronto's Angell Gallery carries a title—A Roman Siege, Well Laid—that sounds highly specific but isn't. Bisset's use of the word 'siege,' he tells me during a recent chat, 'is really a joke on myself.' It has to do not with ancient fortifications and battle plans, but with the fact that he is relatively new to the Toronto art scene—this is his first exhibition with the Angell Gallery—and it all came from asking himself questions like 'how do you get in?' (to the art community) and 'what kind of siege do you lay?' (to get your career started).

"This kind of private meaning is surprising, however, given the fact that the work that is actually called A Roman Siege, Well Laid—a large, black geometricized scribble, laser-cut from a sheet of dense material called Corian—really does seem to evoke a sketch for an attack or, perhaps, the drawing of a fortress to be taken. The only Roman associations Bisset can actually dredge up about the piece, however, come from the fact that, at the time, he was reading Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. It seems like a slim enough connection."

Also Known As (AKA)

De vita Caesarum, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Links