STRUCTURE AND PERSUASION IN SUETONIUS’ DE VITA CAESARVM

Abstract

At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force in the arrangement of his material creates a portrait that is absolutely not neutral. As David Wardle put it in a 2016 review, ‘Anyone who reads Suetonius without regard to the careful structures within which the biographer places his material can produce almost any picture.’ Yet these ‘careful structures’ are a mystery known only to the initiated. This paper lays out the complex and varied ways in which Suetonius uses structure, specifically the ‘rubric system’ of arranging his material under subheadings and those subheadings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer creates.