Lives of the Later Caesars: The First Part of the Augustan History : With Newly Compiled Lives of Nerva and Trajan Book

One would think that, in order to survive some 1600-1700 years, a Roman text must have a certain level of quality. Apparently, not always. Lives of the Later Caesars, by Anonymous (of whom I expected better things), builds on the popularity of Suetonius's earlier Lives of the Twelve Caesars by continuing the sequence from Nerva on.

It is now thought that the work had a single author, though he used invented authors for individual sections, such as Capitolinus, Lampridius, Spartianus, and Gallicanus -- none of whom were ever referenced in any other known written work.

This would not matter if the biographies were any good. The earlier emperors, from Hadrian through Commodus tend to be acceptable, but then Anonymous descends to just making up stuff. Judge, for example, the following said of Clodius Albinus:Cordus, who recounts such things in his books, says that [Clodius Albinus] was a glutton, so much so indeed that he used to consume a greater quantity of fruit than human capacities permit. For he says that Albinus, when hungry, ate five hundred dried figs ..., a hundred Campanian peaches, ten Ostian melons, twenty pounds of Labican grapes, a hundred fig-peckers and four hundred oysters.Now, that's quite an appetite! Guaranteed to kill any human long before they got to the thirtieth fig-pecker, whatever that is!

Not only does Anonymous invent authors for the individual biographies, but when he thinks it would help, he invents experts to back him up.

Toward the end, the name Antoninus became part of every emperor's name (because of the veneration in which Antonnus Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus were held), and Anonymous builds on the confusion by just referring to each one as Antoninus by itself. At one point, "Lampridius," in his biography of Diadumenus Antoninus writes, "Indeed, so beloved was the name of the Antonines in those times that those who did not have the support of that name seemed not to have deserved imperial power."

After Marcus Aurelius's death, the Roman Empire entered a truly dismal period, in which the only variety seemed to be how each bearer of the title was murdered. The most interesting was Heliogabalus, whose body was dunked into a swer, and then weighted with stones and thrown into the Tiber.

Dismal as the period was, this book makes for some dismal reading, with unnecessary confusion to boot. I suppose Anthony Birley did a yeomanlike job translating it, but it does seem that the original was pretty punk.