At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force of Suetonius’ text in the arrangement of his material creates a portrait that is absolutely not neutral. As David Wardle put it in a 2016 review, ‘Anyone who reads Suetonius without regard to the careful structures within which the biographer places his material can produce almost any picture.’ Yet these ‘careful structures’ are a mystery known only to the initiated. This paper lays out the complex and varied ways in which Suetonius uses structure, specifically the system of arranging his material under sub-headings and those sub-headings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer was creating.