The Horror of Unlimited Freedom: a review of The Lives of the Caesars By Suetonius, Translated by Tom Holland (John Byron Kuhner, May 12, 2025, Compass)
It is easy to feel that our era loves the Roman Empire too much, and the frugal, law-abiding, freedom-loving Roman Republic too little. I would rather see a new Hollywood movie about Scipio Africanus than another Gladiator retread. Yet the basic reason for having a republic at all is found on every page of the Lives. The emperors are powerful, but with this power comes no grace, no elevation of virtue or capacity to justify such power. In the very Caesars themselves, who have given their name to absolute power in the West for millennia, Suetonius can find no mystique. Here are no heroes, no mandate of heaven. They are caliphs of nobody. Just human beings, no more. He makes sure to describe them all as if naked: “potbellied,” “balding,” “speckled with birthmarks,” “with splayed feet and bandy legs.” In his introduction, Holland claims that “Suetonius was not, nor had any wish to be, a historian… He did not bother himself with the precise details of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, nor of the ferociously complex political machinations that had accompanied Augustus’ rise to power, nor of the tortured relationship between Tiberius and his fellow aristocrats.” Perhaps he merely wrote a different type of history, and for different reasons. Historians tend to swaddle their subjects in great robes of historical dignity. Suetonius depicts what is under everyone’s clothes.We tend to think of the arrival of Julius Caesar and the destruction of the Republic as the end of freedom. Suetonius, by focusing on the persons of the emperors, shows that this reading is incorrect. In fact, the arrival of the Empire meant unlimited freedom—for one individual. Indeed this book is primarily a study in such freedom. Caligula during a meal with two friends suddenly begins laughing, and when asked why, he answers, “Why, only that with a single nod I could have either of your throats cut here and now!” Augustus is dining with a friend when he gets up, takes the man’s wife away, has sex with her, and returns, “with her hair dishevelled and her face bright red from ear to ear.” He knew the husband and wife were powerless to oppose him.
This is a sobering thought for every republic, that freedom corrupted might well devolve in this way. The worst form of slavery is a society where the leaders feel themselves completely free. What is slavery itself, but someone else’s freedom over you?