This thesis examines the role of the emperor’s ‘private life’ in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars against the backdrop of contemporary political discourse. Suetonius is (in)famous for writing more about an emperor’s love affairs, dining habits or pastimes than about speeches in the senate or military campaigns, a focus that has led many scholars to argue that he is ‘not interested in politics’ (Wallace-Hadrill). I aim to revise this judgement by showing how Suetonius’ interest in the emperor’s ‘private life’ reflects the structure of the principate and engages with the politics of his own time.

My thesis consists of three chapters. The first analyses the role of private life in two (quasi )biographical texts that are near contemporaries to Suetonius’ Caesars, Tacitus’ Agricola and Pliny’s Panegyricus. By depicting Agricola’s private life as impeccable yet insignificant, Tacitus follows a historiographical and biographical tradition in which the private life of protagonists is eclipsed in favour of their public life (examples are Cato the Elder, Sallust and Nepos). Pliny’s Panegyricus, by contrast, gives ample space to matters such as family life or pastimes, stressing their political impact and importance as indicators of the emperor’s genuine character. Hence, these two texts represent two different models of dealing with private life in political literature, one pointing backwards to the Republic and one pointing forwards to the Empire. Suetonius, I suggest, follows Pliny’s model and applies it to imperial biography.

The second chapter deals with Suetonius’ concept of ‘private life’. In a close reading of Aug. 61, the key passage in this context, I argue that Suetonius deliberately avoids using the term privata vita when introducing the emperor’s sex life, dining habits and so forth. This is in line with a broader terminological shift under the principate: due to the emperor’s eminently public position, privatus was increasingly seen as the opposite to princeps, and privata vita only ever used for the emperor’s life before or after his reign – the reigning emperor never had a ‘private life’. Employing the terms interior ac familiaris vita instead, Suetonius stresses that this is simply another sphere of the emperor’s activity, but one that is no less publicly and politically relevant than his life in imperis ac magistratibus. If we want to do justice to his concept in English, we would do better to drop the term ‘private life’ and speak of (e.g.) ‘unofficial life’ instead.

The third chapter investigates what this concept means in practice and proposes a new reading of Suetonius’ depiction of unofficial life in a series of case studies. I argue that many of Suetonius’ ‘lurid’ anecdotes are designed to demonstrate the direct political impact of, for instance, Tiberius’ drinking bouts, Claudius’ domestic weakness and Caesar’s body care. They are also designed to reveal the emperor’s character, indicating it more reliably than his often deceptive or ambiguous official actions. Since this character shapes the emperor’s reign at large, anyone who sees the emperor in his unofficial life has a privileged understanding of his politics; and since authenticity and dissimulation were hot topics in the discourse of the post-Domitianic period, Suetonius’ literary technique also has political implications.

In short, my thesis argues that Suetonius’ focus on the emperor’s ‘private life’ is not a rejection of politics and history, but an adaptation of political history to the circumstances of the principate.