The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: An Unexpurgated English Version (The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, ML 188)

New York: The Modern Library, 1931. Reissue. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 7x4x1. 1944-53 printing, Toledano 188.1, binding/jacket style 8h with 365 titles on verso, grey Rockwell Kent endpapers. Ink stamp on front endpaper, jacket toned with minimal loss from corners, jacket price clipped. 1931 Hard Cover. xvi, 361 pp. Suetonius, chronicler of the extraordinary personalities of the first dynasties to rule the Roman Empire, was the greatest Latin biographer. His colourful work, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, is, along with Tacitus, the major source for the period from Julius Caesar to Domitian. He sets out in vivid detail a great range of aspects illuminating the emperor's characters, their habits, from table to bedchamber - their intrigues, their loves and their deaths. Himself a court official, he quotes from a variety of sources, from the official and private documents as well as from old anecdotes, gossip, songs and jokes, giving an unparalleled oblique view of his subjects. Long familiar to students of classics, he found a new audience as the main source for Robert Graves' novels and the subsequent television series I, Claudius. CONTENTS: Chronological Table; Introduction; Julius Caesar; Octavius Augustus; Tiberius; Gaius Caligula; The Deified Claudius; Nero; Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; The Deified Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.