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Plutarch's Lives; Froude's Caesar; Shakspeare's Antony and Cleopatra; Plato's Dialogues; Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, especially among the poets; Lord's Old Roman World; Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars; Dion Cassius; Rollin's Ancient History; Merivale's History of the Romans; Biographic Universelle; Rees's Encyclopedia has a good article.
San Francisco and New York are both equipped with opportunities for all-night indulgences. In not one of these cities does the sight seeker or the joy hunter find difficulty in sampling the syrups of sin. Mysterious guides assail him on the street corners, pouring libidinous tales into his furry ears, tempting him with descriptions like Suetonius's account of the Roman circuses.
Though Pliny certainly did not possess his friend's amazing credulity, he takes the request with becoming seriousness, and promises to do his best; but he adds that the real question is whether Suetonius's dreams are usually true or not. He then relates how he himself once had a vision of his mother-in-law, of all people, appearing to him and begging him to abandon a case he had undertaken.
This had been also the practice of Cicero, and of many of the greatest republican authors. The difference between them lies, not in the fact that Suetonius's Greek was better, but that his Latin is less good. Instead of a national it is fast becoming a cosmopolitan dialect.
Stemma Romaion andron episaemon, a gallery of illustrious men, the plan of which was followed by Jerome in his history of the worthies of the church. But Suetonius's catalogue seems to have been confined to those eminent in literature, and to have treated only of poets, orators, historians, philosophers, grammarians, and rhetoricians.
All these writings, however, are lost, and the sole work by which we can form an estimate of Suetonius's genius is his lives of the Caesars, which we fortunately possess almost entire. Suetonius possessed in a high degree some of the most essential qualifications of a biographer.
He seems to have written chiefly on the history of Roman literature, and, in particular, to have commented on the poems of Naevius. Many obscurer writers are mentioned in Suetonius's treatise, to which, with that on rhetoric by the same author, the reader is here referred.
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