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Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus |
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There were other Roman biographers besides Suetonius; Suetonius wrote in more genres than biography. The writings that recorded his various, even odd, scholarship have perished, however, and other Roman biographers were little luckier. Some remain as mere names. Most of Suetonius's own De viris illustribus (On Famous Men), which surveyed probably more than a hundred Roman authors, is lost; Cornelius Nepos, apart from an abbreviated Cato and a laudatory treatment of Cicero's friend Atticus, is represented only in a series of scanty lives of foreign (mostly Greek) generals; and Tacitus's life of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola, an idiosyncratic blend of encomium and history, resisted imitation and was furthermore overshadowed by the Histories and Annals. Time, however, was kindest where Suetonius was most innovative and most influential. Comprising lives of the twelve Caesars from Julius to Domitian, his De vita Caesarum (A.D. 119-122") survived to share with Plutarch's Parallel Lives the preeminent place in classical biography and its tradition.
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