The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics) by Suetonius Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.36 You Save: $6.64 (44%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.98 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Guilty Pleasure
Summary: 3 Stars
Associated with classical literature is an image of intellectualism. When one is seen reading a book with the name of a great Greek or Roman author on its cover (Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Virgil, Tacitus, Seneca, Suetonius), the assumption is immediately made that you are a cerebral individual, and should be paid high respect.
For anyone who wishes to thereby trick the rest of the world into paying you undeserved dues, I would highly recommend "The Twelve Caesars" of Suetonius. The material may seem cultured, but the book itself provides scads of sinful fun. If celebrity television had existed in the ancient Roman empire, its broadcasts would have been an awful lot like Suetonius's texts. Sexual escapades, humanitarian atrocities, moral shortcomings, bouts of insanity - these are lovingly chronicled and detailed with the attention only a first-rate muckraker could provide. Political analysis, psychological insight, philosophical musings? Better turn to Tacitus for that sort of thing.
Conscience requires me to give this book only three stars, but that disgusting part of me that loves sensationalism yearns to scroll up to five.
Book Review: Julius Caesar as gay, Nero as sweet singing choir boy?? But Caligula WAS crazy...
Summary: 5 Stars
I only endured two or three episodes of the TV series "Rome", supposedly the most expensive television series ever made. Oh, really? Presumably, they spent so much cash on the uniforms, that they forgot to pay the scriptwriter. I have seldom seen such ridiculous trash on TV.
Do you want real gossip about Julius Caesar and the Roman emperors? Then, buy this book. Its a modern translation of an ancient Roman book, written by the historian Suetonius. Its most famous for two passing references to Christians, but if thats all you know about it, you are missing out...
Not being a historian, I cant judge how reliable the information given by Suetonius really is. But as a collection of funny gossip about Caesar and the emperors, it must be unmatched!
Did you know that Julius Caesar had a reputation for being gay? I always thought of Caesar as the essence of manliness, but apparently he dressed in an effeminate manner, and was rumored to be the gay lover of a certain king in Asia Minor. As Caesar was also a notorious womanizer, he was called "the man of all women, and the woman of all men".
OK, maybe Im a bit unserious, but I had great fun reading these rumours, about one of world historys most accomplished conquerors! And you thought the Lewinsky affair was shocking?
From Suetonius, we also learn that Nero regarded himself as an accomplished singer with a really sweet singing voice (apparently, everyone else had a different idea about it), that Caligula wanted to appoint his horse to the Roman Senate, that Domitian had an advisor who turned out to be a handicapped child, that Julius Caesar was pro-Jewish, and countless other strange claims.
Ironically, the emperor most favored by Suetonius seem to be Titus, generally regarded as a villain today, since he smashed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Jewish temple. Are we to believe Suetonius, Titus was like a father to his people, very generous, so moral that he stopped seeing his sexy mistresses when becoming emperor, so righteous that he had all finks and snitches banished to wild islands, while he was looking for medecine to cure a plague in Rome...
Oh my, sounds almost to good to be true!
Regardless of whether the stories of Suetonius are tall-tales or true, they at least tell us a lot about how Romans wanted, and didnt want, their rulers to behave. And a lot about how Romans slandered each other.
I have seldom read such an entertaining ancient work. Buy it! Yes, punk, I was talking to you...
Book Review: All the dirt on the Caesars
Summary: 5 Stars
Here is history with all the boring stuff left out. Suetonius, a historian around the time of Hadrian (117-138 C.E.), had access to many of the Imperial records, and apparently from them gleaned most of the incredibly juicy information regarding the 12 Caesars included here. Wars, campaigns, laws, affairs of state, and all the other matters one might expect to read about in a book of historical biographies was not the major concern of Suetonius. He was more interested in the personal (often dastardly) deeds of these rulers and the behaviors they exhibited, many of which were very unflattering, to say the least. Many of these guys - Claudius, Caligula, Nero, Vitellius - were veritable monsters: mass murder, theft of private property and national treasure, incest, patricide, ostentation and audacity, material devastation were routine to many of them. Suetonius almost revels in dishing the dirt. It's not just a list of one cruelty after another, either, for Suetonius also knows a funny story when he sees it: the time, for example, when Augustus expelled a man from Italy for giving him the finger. Is this the earliest account on record of that particular obscene gesture? If the National Inquirer existed back then Suetonius would be its editor-in-chief. Some of what he tells is exaggeration or hearsay and perhaps not extremely accurate, but he is often still considered the best source on the Caesars after Tacitus. The book is a lot of fun to read and I would think it would be required reading in most high schools, if for no other reason than it would get a lot of kids interested in ancient history in a hurry.Book Review: Want to know all the juicy tidbits about the first 12 Ceasers?
Summary: 5 Stars
I randomly picked this book up, hankering after some ancient text. Lo and behold, I picked up the juiciest book in ancient Rome. This is no dry, linear blah blah about the first 12 Ceasers, oh no! Seutonius gives you all the incest, the murder, the blunders, the insanity, the triumphs...it's got it all. Actually, if you know nothing about the first 12 Ceasers, start here, because Seutonius gives you all the good stuff.Book Review: The Twelve Caesars
Summary: 5 Stars
It was in very good condition. None of the pages were written on or the cover was not bent. It was as if the book was new!