Presented as part of the Classics Seminar Series

It is generally accepted that the beginning of Suetonius’ Julius Caesar is missing. The recovery of the introduction to the Life (and possibly to the series) would not only fill in gaps about Julius Caesar, but it might also clarify the purpose of the first rubric in most of the Lives, the family tree. In 1606, Philemon Holland wrote a supplementary section to replace the missing part when he translated De Vita Caesarum into English. It had previously been attempted in Latin by Juan Luis Vives and Laevinus Torrentius, but the possible structure and contents of this section appear not to have been given much thought since then. My research on the beginnings of Lives has led me to speculate on the closeness of Holland’s version to the usual Suetonian beginning. In this paper, I will survey the extant beginnings of other Suetonian Lives for common structures and approaches, putting together a ‘template’ Suetonian introduction, and then note what this template suggests about the Julius, in order to improve upon Holland’s reconstruction. I find that, although several elements of Holland’s reconstruction fit with the general pattern of Suetonian introductions, he also interpolates some material that I suspect Suetonius would not have used. Since Suetonius often uses ancestral character traits to bring out vices in a Caesar, I will also consider the character traits of Julius himself, as they appear in Suetonius, and speculate as to which of those character traits might also have appeared in Suetonius’ family tree of the Iulii Caesares.