Sources for the life and career of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus are four: Suetonius himself; letters to him and references elsewhere written by his friend and patron the younger Pliny; a contemporary or near-contemporary inscription found at Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria; and later, sometimes much later, notices--especially in a fourth-century collection of imperial biographies called the Historia Augusta and in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia of the tenth century--which preserve, however undependably, some memory of the Suetonian corpus before most of it was lost and the remainder mangled. Suetonius himself tells us, in passing, something of his family. His grandfather was able to report a likely motive behind Caligula's bridge of boats across the bay at Baiae, since he was at least close enough to the imperial household to gain information ab interioribus aulicis (from courtiers of the inner circle; Gaius Caligula 19.3). During the civil wars of the year A.D. 69 Suetonius's father, Suetonius Laetus, of equestrian rank, was a military tribune in the army, and possibly on the staff, of the emperor Otho (Otho 10.1); after Otho's suicide, the legion in which Laetus served went over to the cause of the ultimately victorious Vespasian.
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