Custom Clothes: Suetonius Augustus

Suetonius Augustus

Suetonius was a waspish commentator. He knew how to put the dagger in, even into Julius Caesar himself, telling us he was anguished by his receding hairline and constantly grooming what few hairs remained. This first of the Caesars wielded so much power that he was able to overrule the Senate and defeat the Armies of the Republic. In the year of his murder in 44 BC he took a new name - ‘Dictator’ - and was eventually deified.His successor, Augustus, could do no wrong in Suetonius’s eyes.It was a time of peace and plenty and became the historian’s benchmark, to which the Caesars who followed could never aspire.Suetonius portrayed Augustus as a pillar of rectitude, living respectably with his wife Livia, appalled when he heard their daughter Julia had been offering herself as a tart to passers-by in Rome.He expelled his only child to a volcanic island for life.The third Caesar, Livia’s son Tiberius, supposedly had unusually large eyes and could see in the dark - making it easier to spot assassins. He spent nine years of his Imperium living in his palace in Capri - accessible only by one small beach - and attended by astrologers and ladies of the night. Hostile sources muttered darkly about vile obscenities taking place, and of transgressors ‘who after long and exquisite tortures were hurled into the sea . . . while Tiberius looked on’.More likely, Tiberius wanted a quiet life far from Rome and from his family, particularly as he had been forced by Augustus to divorce his own wife and marry ‘a sneering harlot’. He became morose, suspicious and increasingly paranoid as younger family members fought among themselves to succeed him.Meanwhile in Rome, he created the first Water Board and expediently solved the city’s financial crisis by printing money and distributing it in loans: 1st century AD quantitative easing.