Imperial Desires

Talk about reading yourself into a pickle: we selected a perfectly respectable volume of ancient history, written by an actual and respectable ancient. Or so I thought…what I got was Confidential magazine, translated from the original Latin.

Let’s just say the New Year is showing promise.

Our volume is The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, translated to English by Robert Graves. It gives us a history of the first century of the Roman Empire, starting with Julius, that river, and the fall of the Roman Republic. Suetonius (full name Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, A.D. 69-122; although both dates are approximate) was in a position to know the material: not only does it span much of Suetonius’s life, he was secretary to the Emperor Claudius, who was the fifth of the Twelve Caesars. Suetonius knew many of the players personally, and as imperial secretary, he had access to private and state papers that inform his work. The names, “Emperor Claudius” and that of the book’s translator, Robert Graves, may ring bells for readers of a certain age. Graves wrote a novel entitled I, Claudius, loosely based on Suetonius, which was later filmed by the BBC and broadcast on PBS in 1976.

Structurally the book is not a history at all, not by the Roman definition of same. Rather, as the title implies, it is a set of biographical sketches of the early Caesars. These deal with the personal and domestic, and are distinguished (in the Roman mind, anyway) from histories, which deal with the political and military. So, for example, if we are reading about Augustus we find references to Actium, but no explanation of the battle. Similarly, Claudius’s conquest of the Britons is mentioned as a bit of offstage business. You’ll want to approach this one with some basic knowledge of Roman history…dimly remembered from high school is fine.

Approach the work, too, with an open sexual mind.

While it really is too much to claim that the volume is about gay sex in Roman history, the reader cannot help but be impressed by the sheer volume of homosexual activity in the work, and even more impressed by the completely matter-of-fact way in which Suetonius details it. For starters, most of us would not immediately seize on Julius Caesar as one of the gays in history. Yet Suetonius tells us that Julius’s early service was as aide-de-camp to the governor of Asia Minor. Sent to assemble a fleet, Julius was apparently star-struck by the king of Bithynia and began a homosexual relationship with him. Interestingly, the man who crossed the Rubicon and brought down the Roman Republic was said to be a bottom sexually, and kept his body smooth by shaving and tweezing. All of which was, apparently, common knowledge: later in his career a senator openly accused Julius of being “the queen of Bithynia who wants to be king of Rome.” Ouch. Julius was also known for his affairs with married women, so the best way to understand him may be as a sexual omnivore, or at least a Kinsey 4. However you place him, late in his career, when he had attained both emperor and consul titles, Suetonius blithely tells us Julius, “...sent his toy boy Rufio…to command three legions…”

Toy boy? Oh, for the original Latin on that one.

Julius’s successor, Augustus, was much more of a family man, provided, of course, you overlook the rumor (which Suetonius repeats) that he allowed Julius to penetrate him anally as the price for naming him successor to the throne. Augustus ruled for forty years (27 B.C. to A.D. 14) and is known for his public accomplishments. Suetonius, however, is writing about the private man, of whom there is less gay activity to report. Much of the domestic misbehavior during Augustus’s rule had to do with his family, particularly his daughter’s infidelity and his wife’s habit of poisoning rivals.

Julius and Augustus, if you can believe it, are the virtuous ones of the Twelve Caesars. Yikes.

Following Augustus, imperial reigns became shorter and the emperors odder. Augustus was succeeded by his son-in-law Tiberius. Tiberius was largely straight, but Suetonius notes that he kept young boys who would go swimming with him and “lick and nibble” at his genitals as he swam. One of the boys swimming and nibbling was the future emperor, Nero. Tiberius was succeeded by Gaius, whom you and I grew up calling by his nickname, Caligula. Call him what you like, the boy was insane: early in his reign he deemed himself a god (Roman emperors were not named gods in their lifetimes, if at all; one of Julius’s excesses was to allow altars to himself be raised before he died). Gaius/Caligula did engage in all sorts of sexual extremes, some of which Suetonius recounts. But in the end, his sexual excesses seem an outgrowth of his overall insanity.

Gaius was succeeded by Claudius, who was, in contrast, sexually boring: he was even faithful (mostly) to his wife, who was massively and famously unfaithful to him. But compared to his peers, Claudius was the sane one — or at least, the least insane of the later emperors; Suetonius even bothers to note his passion for women, “but men left him cold.” That could not be said for his successor, Nero, whom we last encountered as a boy nibbling Tiberias. Nero, we are told, was drawn to freeborn boys and married women. He even went so far as to have a boy named Sporus castrated so that Nero could marry him as a woman…which Nero did, and then paraded Sporus as empress. Nero was succeeded by Galba, who was gay and preferred what are currently called “bears.” Galba was followed by Otho, who had been an item with Nero. And Otho was succeeded by Vitellus, who got his political start by putting out sexually for Tiberias in order to gain promotion for his father. While emperor, Vitellus took a slave named Asiaticus as his lover, whom he freed. Vitellus was succeeded by Titus, who Suetonius tells us kept “a troop of toy boys and eunuchs,” although he professed a deep and abiding love for Queen Beatrice. Finally, we end with Domitian, who rose from poor circumstances to emperor, in part by offering his sexual favors to a member of the praetorian class, then sleeping with the emperor Nerva.

Forget “gay visibility,” this thing reads like a porn script.

Despite its prurient interest, The Twelve Caesars is serious history, and has been read as such over the centuries. Monarchs in particular were encouraged to read Suetonius, in the hope that it might improve their behavior, or at least warn them that their messy family lives could be immortalized. Suetonius is also useful to the modern reader as a preamble to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While the works were written sixteen hundred years apart and are radically different in form, Suetonius ends his biographies neatly at the point Gibbon picks up his history. Plus, both writers imbue their works with a satisfying level of snark.

Robert Graves’s translation of Suetonius has stood the test of time, and the widely available Penguin edition includes additional editorial matter, including a timeline of major events, glossaries of terms and place names, maps, and family charts of the Caesars. All dreadfully useful, especially the family tree…inbreeding was the order of the day. Suetonius drops references to people and events contemporary to his time without explanation, so expect to do some online searching, and expect some surprises: looking up one minor character, I found his Wikipedia entry to be a direct paraphrase of the paragraph I was reading in Suetonius. Thus does the ancient inform us all.

We focus on the sexual in this review, mainly because it’s titillating and fun to write about. But for the gay reader, The Twelve Caesars presents an interesting case study. Suetonius reports a world in which sexuality is a matter of total indifference, and pursuit of pleasure is considered good in and of itself. That is, of course, exactly the world that we gay folk have claimed we want, at least since Stonewall. And there was a window post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS when a newly-out gay community did revel in sexual freedom in ways that would have done any of the Caesars proud. (I know…I was there, doing my part for the cause. Nightly, some weeks.) Just as the rulers of old read The Twelve Caesars as a cautionary tale, maybe we should, too.

Or use it as a checklist, your option.