The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Suetonius held secretarial posts at the court of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, and published his Lives under Hadrian. Each Life is arranged by topic rather than by year: family, career, public acts, private habits, death. He preserves a great deal that is found nowhere else, including documents and letters, and he also passes on gossip without always weighing it.

Two sentences are cited most often. In the Life of Claudius (25.4) he says that the emperor expelled the Jews from Rome because they “constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus”. Whether Chrestus is a form of the name Christ, so that the sentence is a confused report of disputes about Jesus among the Jews of Rome, or the name of an otherwise unknown man, is disputed; Rolfe’s note on the passage thinks the former probable. Suetonius gives no date. In the Life of Nero (16.2) he lists among that emperor’s measures the punishment of the Christians, whom he calls followers of “a new and mischievous superstition”, and he does not connect it with the fire of Rome. He wrote some seventy years after the first event and some fifty-five after the second.