Books & Classics
The emperors, filed by their own secretary
Suetonius wrote about the Caesars from an unusual seat: he had worked inside the imperial household, handling the emperor's own correspondence, and his Lives read like a personnel file kept by someone who had seen the palace from within. The new annotated edition of The Twelve Caesars uses John C. Rolfe's Loeb translation, with the house's own introduction and notes. One thing is stated plainly rather than patched over: the opening of the Life of Julius Caesar is lost in transmission, and the edition says so — it does not invent what the centuries dropped.