Today's goal is to read as many Caesar lives as I can from Suetonius, and then go play a video game.

Yesterday's meeting about Tacitus included the confession that I keep forgetting Vespasian until I work my way backwards.

I suppose reading Suetonius isn't going to help much there.

Anyway, sometimes you can /really/ tell that I got into classics via the "Ooo, this language is so interesting, and look at this literature!" route, rather than what I eventually learned was the more common route: "Wow, ancient Greeks and Romans are so cool!"

This is why my advisor keeps patiently reminding me that many people in classics thought /positively/ of the Romans in their youth, and retain warm fuzzy feelings there, as opposed to my "Yeah, they feed people to lions, now look at this artistic yet horrifying poetry!" route.

Because I end up sort of surprised and suspicious /all over again/ every time I run into an author who loves their ancient subject the way they love their children, and not the way they love their horrible barfing cat.

Okay, starting off with the Deified Caesar, which is to say, Octavian. The beginning of this one is lost, but what we have starts with him going into hiding because he wouldn't divorce his wife who was descended from an enemy of Sulla.

(Y'all know Sulla, right? The horrifically murderous dictator who the aristocrats who /didn't/ get murdered idolized because he held out against those shifty lower-class equestrian types? Yeah.)

Anyway he was so rich and so well-connected that he bribed people into not turning him until his allies talked Sulla into forgiving him.

"...he dawdled so long at the court of Nicomedes that it was suspected that his chastity was prostituted to the king."

This is why reading Suetonius is fun.

Not necessarily /accurate/. But fun.

(Not necessarily /inaccurate/ either. That's the joy of ancient historians.)

Please note that in general the 'history' delivered in this thread is Suetonius, please do not take it as necessarily what I think really happened (insofar as knowing that is even possible). Just... wanted to lay that out there.

(Though a lot of it is probably true.)

So dude's all "Woo, Sulla is dead, I should come home and become dictator!" but Lepidus was handling things and didn't offer him sufficiently lucrative terms so he was all "Eh, I'm young, I'll wait this out, maybe throw my hat in at the next round of dictatorship wars."