He omits nothing which concerns the person whose life he is writing he relates everything, but paints nothing.

La Harpe remarks of Suetonius, “He is scrupulously exact, and strictly methodical. In them we find a series of individual portraits sketched to the life, with perfect truth and rigorous impartiality. The pages of Suetonius will amply gratify this natural curiosity.

When we stop to gaze in a museum or gallery on the antique busts of the Cæsars, we perhaps endeavour to trace in their sculptured physiognomy the characteristics of those princes, who, for good or evil, were in their times masters of the destinies of a large portion of the human race. He neither dwells on the civil wars which sealed the fall of the Republic, nor on the military expeditions which extended the frontiers of the empire nor does he attempt to develope the causes of the great political changes which marked the period of which he treats. The plan adopted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, led him to be more diffuse on their personal conduct and habits than on public events. They afford some brief, but generally pleasant, glimpses of his habits and career and in a letter, in which Pliny makes application on behalf of his friend to the emperor Trajan, for a mark of favour, he speaks of him as “a most excellent, honourable, and learned man, whom he had the pleasure of entertaining under his own roof, and with whom the Edition: current Page: nearer he was brought into communion, the more he loved him.” 1 Several of the younger Pliny’s letters are addressed to Suetonius, with whom he lived in the closest friendship. How long he survived this disgrace, which appears to have befallen him in the year 121, we are not informed but we find that the leisure afforded him by his retirement, was employed in the composition of numerous works, of which the only portions now extant are collected in the present volume.

He lived till the time of Hadrian, under whose administration he filled the office of secretary until, with several others, he was dismissed for presuming on familiarities with the empress Sabina, of which we have no further account than that they were unbecoming his position in the imperial court. From incidental notices in the following History, we learn that he was born towards the close of the reign of Vespasian, who died in the year 79 of the Christian era. Suetonius Tranquillus was the son of a Roman knight who commanded a legion, on the side of Otho, at the battle which decided the fate of the empire in favour of Vitellius.

Derivation Incognita by Diogenes Vindex