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STRUCTURE AND PERSUASION IN SUETONIUS’ DE VITA CAESARVM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2019

Phoebe Garrett
Phoebe Garrett*
Affiliation:
Australian National Universityphoebe.garrett@anu.edu.au
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Extract

At the sentence level Suetonius often appears to be neutral, but I argue here that the persuasive force 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 ‘rubric system’ of arranging his material under subheadings and those subheadings in sequences, in the hope that with this knowledge we see more accurately what ‘picture’ the biographer creates.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 197 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Ramus 2019 

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Footnotes

Previous versions of this study were presented in various forms at the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (in Adelaide) and at the departmental seminar at the Australian National University. I thank the members of those audiences for their contributions. I warmly thank Christopher Bishop and Patrick Quinn Quirke for their contributions to various drafts, and Michelle Borg for help with bibliography. All faults are obviously my own. The paper is part of a larger project on structure and persuasion in Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum which has been supported by Fondation Hardt, Switzerland. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Fondation Hardt and the Australian National University. The text is that of the new Oxford Classical Text by Robert Kaster (2016).

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