I, Suetonius:
Art Over Ideology

2,243 words

In the first century AD, during the ascendancy of the Roman Empire, a writer named Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was born in what would nowadays be Algeria. Known to posterity as Suetonius, he wrote on various, mostly antiquarian subjects, as did all the Roman literary class. Men of good family in Rome all wrote at that time, certainly those in what we would now call the civil service. It would have seemed strange not to. Much time was spent analyzing one another’s work for rhetorical niceties or points of historical disputation. Rome may have a public image today of being more pragmatic, and therefore more boorish, than the rather ascetic Greeks, but Roman writers refined their art using the friction of a patrician class of men who were all capable of processing the world around them and communicating that to a reader, even if their readership was all known to them personally. They weren’t expecting the man in the forum to read their histories or biographies or rhetorica, just one another, an aristocracy of writers. These traditions remain, as we shall see.

As with all scribes of that class, much of Suetonius’ work is lost. This is a pity, because I would have liked to read some of the lost works ascribed to him. The Lives of Famous Whores, perhaps, or On Physical Defects, even On Insults. We can all learn from the classics. All the writers of the classical world have a “missing in action” file of lost works attached to their names at which historians can only hang their heads and sigh. But Suetonius’ most famous surviving work is De Vita Caesarum, usually translated as The Twelve Caesars.

This tells the story of the Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian. The first few chapters of De Vita Caesarum are themselves missing, and so we join Julius Caesar in medias res, as it were, and the missing pages join the MIA file noted, but this covers approximately the period from 46 BC to 96 AD. Both Julius and Domitian, the first and last of Suetonius’ dozen, were assassinated, which gives a flavor of the times. The book has been criticized by historians as “gossipy” (the same charge is made against Diogenes Laertius’ Live of the Eminent Philosophers). But the methods of research available cannot be compared with today, not when some of your sources would have been conversations with very old men.

During the Medieval low point of European education between the sixth and eighth centuries (it was kept alive by the monasteries), before the rise of Scholastic philosophy and its subtleties and minutiae in the 13th century, Suetonius had long been part of an approved corps of classical writers in Europe, along with the perhaps better-known Ovid and Livy. The scholar Isaac Casaubon produced a new translation of De Vita Caesarum in 1595 but, outside academia, Suetonius remained a lesser-known classical name until his career was revived in England, and in unlikely fashion, between the 20^th century’s two World Wars.

Suetonius’ succession of Caesars includes two names still familiar today: Caligula and Nero. Aside from their bloody debaucheries, Caligula is remembered for making his horse Emperor (actually, Suetonius informs us, he merely wished to make his steed, Incinatus, a consul) and Nero is recalled in metaphor for “fiddling while Rome burns”, an apt description of today’s Western political class. But a third Emperor of Rome is the most interesting of the whole parade: Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, better remembered simply as Claudius.

Claudius, Suetonius writes, was a reasonable Emperor by the standards of the time. He built libraries, invented new letters to improve the Latin language, and was the first Emperor to occupy Britain since Julius’ rather lackluster attempt. He never closed the granaries to starve the populace into submission like his maniacal nephew, Caligula. However, neither Claudius’ life nor his period of reluctant rule were made any easier by his physical handicap. Suetonius informs us that:

“He also stammered in his speech, and had a tremulous motion of the head at all times, but particularly when he was engaged in any business, however trifling.”

Whereas nowadays Claudius’ impediments would undoubtedly open up employment opportunities with companies keen not to appear “ableist”, the problems they posed for possibly the most powerful man in the known world at the time were obvious. And, via two works of art inspired by Suetonius, it was Claudius’ tics, shakes, and stammers that became part of both that Emperor’s popularity and his legacy, although his shade would have to wait almost two millennia from Suetonius’ account before he would stammer again.

In 1934, the English writer and poet Robert Graves was translating De Vita Caesarum when he rather oddly claimed to have been visited by Claudius in a dream. The shadow of the Emperor requested that Graves write his autobiography, which he went on to do. The real reason for writing the book, Graves later told Malcolm Muggeridge, was that he was in debt over a failed land deal, a good deal less romantic if a rather more plausible explanation. But it was by now, the author said, “a very personal affair between me and Claudius.”

Whatever his inspiration, Graves wrote the novel I, Claudius in the voice of the handicapped emperor. Presumably, the market for what became “historical fiction”, or even “faction”, was far more limited in the 1930s than the publishing sub-industry it became. Graves could have been a forerunner. The book is beautifully observed, the period brought rather uncannily to life, and the character of Claudius rounded out to literary perfection, despite being a little charitable to Clau-Clau-Claudius (as his nephew Caligula calls him) compared with the account in the De Vita Caesarum. Graves’ Claudius eats like a bird, for example, and is not the glutton of Suetonius’ account.

Apart from Graves’ novel, the only other literary reference to Suetonius I have ever found is in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. The incarcerated Hannibal Lecter is improving the reading list of his cell orderly, Barney, and includes the Roman historian on his temporary keeper’s reading list. Harris is a very literary thriller-writer, and later in the book Barney is seen watching I, Claudius with the sister of one of Lecter’s victims. How could anyone be watching the book? you may ask. We’ll get to that. Harris obviously got the link, being a well-read man. Suetonius himself would certainly have been well-read, having been both an archivist and, at one time, the head of Roman libraries.

I, Claudius sold well, given its rather novel subject matter and authorial voice, and certainly sold well enough to be considered worth rendering into film. Hungarian-born, British director Alexander Korda had experience making historical movies such as The Private Life of Henry VIII and The Rise of Catherine the Great, and cabled Graves in 1937 wanting to buy the rights to I, Claudius. Graves was happy to sell, but was a little surprised that Korda didn’t make it a package deal and hire Graves as the screenwriter. But Korda wanted a fellow Hungarian – Graves complained mildly about the number of Hungarians on the project – and he also had no intention of directing himself, but rather given the director’s chair to Josef Von Sternberg. Some of the movie was shot with Charles Laughton as Claudius, but the project was one of those seemingly cursed productions and was abandoned. It was, in the words of suave English actor Dirk Bogarde, the epic that never was.

But this wasn’t the end of Claudius’ relationship with the magic of cinema, although it would be on the small screen in the Britain of the 1970s (a period and empire just as debauched as the Roman Empire, in its way) that Suetonius, Robert Graves, and the Emperor Claudius would make their entrance together. Just as I, Claudius dramatized the life of its historical subject, so too what is possibly the best-known broadcasting organization in the world dramatized Graves’s novel.

In 1976, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) made a series directly adapted from I, Claudius, and which managed to fulfil all three of the pledges its founder, Lord Reith, had set out as a mission statement in 1922. The BBC, he said (although obviously only a radio service at its inception), will aim to inform, educate, and entertain. The TV version of I, Claudius does just that. It was shown, appropriately, in 12 parts, although not one for each Caesar. It stops after Claudius, so we only get to see Nero as a boy, not the crazed tyrant he would become.

At the time, I, Claudius was one of the most successful BBC dramas ever. It certainly entertained the British viewing public, as well as forcing a little classical education into their heads. And, looking back, it still informs us that the BBC used to contribute to British culture rather than their current role of helping to stifle it. I texted a friend in London and told him I had rediscovered the TV series on YouTube, and he replied, “That was when the BBC did art over ideology.”

The cast of I, Claudius was something of a prestigious English ensemble for the time, and the acting is pitch-perfect largely because it is Shakespearean. All of the better-known cast members, and doubtless many of the second-string performers, were theater actors who would have been familiar with Shakespeare and the style of acting traditionally associated with the Bard in England. It is declamatory and bold, designed to express the text outwards, not draw the viewer in as with the rather irritating close-ups and whispers that predominate in contemporary TV drama, and which are a natural product of improved lens technology.

The camera is mostly fixed in I, Claudius, with the occasional zoom but no tracking shots and only a minimum of pan. The cinematography is theatrical, as is the blocking, which makes many of the shots masterpieces of composition, of mise en scène. There are no outdoor shots, and so the sense of containment feels all the more theatrical. I, Claudius is often shot in shady palace interiors, claustrophobic and haunted by the tension inside characters trapped in a nest of viperous court intrigue and murder.

Again, Brits of my age will know many in the cast, and American viewers may recognize some. The bombastic Brian Blessed, minus his trademark beard in playing Augustus Caesar, was Prince Vultan in 1980’s Flash Gordon. The brilliant John Hurt, who would play Winston Smith in 1984, is a wonderfully camp Caligula. And fans of the Star Trek movies will surely recognize Patrick Stewart as Sejanus, captain of the Praetorian Guard rather than the Enterprise, and with a full head of hair curled in the height of Roman fashion. But the actor playing Clau-Clau-Claudius was the one the British TV audience warmed to.

Despite the producers wanting Charlton Heston for the lead role, it was Derek Jacobi as Claudius who won all the plaudits, as well as a BAFTA award (Britain’s TV Oscars). His performance is extraordinary, and his painful stammer, limping gait, and uncontrollable jerking of his head would be imitated in playgrounds across Britain the day after an episode was aired. My mother used to tell my little 10-year-old twin brothers to “stop being Claudius for a minute and listen”. Jacobi perfected his stammer by taking lessons from an assistant director on set who had the same affliction, and it took Jacobi some time to lose it when production had wrapped up. Jacobi’s Claudius, as an old man and now Emperor of Rome himself, narrates Suetonius’ history via Graves, which is shown in flashback. The BBC used to make the best television in the world, and I, Claudius can be seen in HD on YouTube here. Be sure and watch the short introductory title sequence as well, whose image of a snake slithering over mosaic was visually superb for the time.

Historically, I arrived at the three way-stations of Claudius in reverse order. I watched the TV series with my mother and father when I was a teenager. A few years ago, I picked up a copy of Graves’ novel in a bar which doubles as a lending-library. There is a sequel, Claudius the God, which I have not read but am saving as a treat. Reading I, Claudius persuaded me to buy an ebook copy of De Vita Caesarum. When I say buy, I mean obtain. Suetonius’ work is one of many public domain ebooks which are free on Amazon, a fact I still believe reveals that the supposed dumbing-down of the populace is the fault not of the state, but of the populace itself. This in turn made me seek out the original TV series, and I watched an episode a day of probably the best televisual production I have seen in years.

So, I had come full circle, and the circle is a virtuous one. Suetonius, Graves, and the BBC produced a peerless three-card trick between them that reminds us that white culture feeds itself through the centuries, sustaining itself like the worm ouroboros, endlessly consuming its own tail, and to good effect. In a world increasingly cleansed of art which is beautiful and worthy in exchange for tawdry, paste gew-gaws, I, Claudius in both its presentations, along with De Vita Caesarum, and the connection between the three over two millennia, also give a therapeutic reminder in our “interesting” times that art should never be tainted by ideology.