534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
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Now all Nero's attendants urged him to place himself beyond the reach of the indignities that were closing in on him. And so he ordered them, as he watched, to dig a hole the size of his body, and to collect such fragments of marble as could be found, and to bring water and firewood ready for the disposal of what would very soon be his corpse. And as these things were being done, so he wept, and cried repeatedly, that I should die a mere artisan. When, during the delay caused by these preparations, a letter was brought to his freedman by courier, he snatched it and learned by reading it that the Senate had proclaimed him a public enemy and ordered a search made for him so that he might be punished according to the ancestral fashion.
And when, after asking what this punishment might be, he learned that a man sentenced to it would be stripped naked, have his neck put in a fork, and then be beaten to death with rods, so terror-stricken was he that he grabbed two daggers he had brought with him and tested the blades of both, after which, on the grounds that the fatal hour had not yet arrived, he put them away again. But then came the horseman, who had been commissioned to bring him back alive, closing in upon him. When he heard their approach, he said in a shaking voice, quoting Homer, The thundering of swift-footed horses echoes in my ears. Whereupon, with the assistance of his secretary, Epaphroditus, he slit his throat.
Although still on the margins of consciousness when a centurion came bursting in and pretending to have come with the aim of helping him, held a cloak up to staunch his wound, he only muttered, too late and such loyalty. With these words, he died, and so fixedly did his eyeballs bulge from their sockets that onlookers were filled with horror and dread. So that tremendous passage is describing the death of Nero. On the 9th of June, 68, it was written by the Roman scholar Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus in his great collection of biographies, The Lives of the Caesars, The Twelve Caesars, depending on what you call it. And I'm delighted to say that that was translated by a top amateur translator. And that gifted young amateur, Tom, is yourself because this is your new translation of Suetonius coming out in Penguin Classics on the 13th of February. Very exciting.
Thanks, Dominic. It is. And I believe it's available for pre-order. So everyone fill your boots.
Yeah.
So the lives of the Caesars, as you said, I mean, they are probably along with the biographies written by Plutarch, the most celebrated of all the biographies that we've received from the ancient world. And these, I think, are... Without doubt, the most glamorous, the most scabrous, occasionally the most shocking. And as you said, they describe the lives of 12 Caesars, and they range from the life of Julius Caesar, who was born in 100 BC, up to the Emperor Domitian, who died in AD 96. So... That's covering two centuries, probably the most dramatic, the most spectacular two centuries in all of Roman history. And these are rulers who, in succession, were the most powerful men in the Roman Empire.
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