The Horror of Unlimited Freedom

A Thessalian warlock meets the ghost of dead Julius Caesar alone in the pathless waste. A cloud of flying ants swarm an emperor and drag him down to hell. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus bolt open of their own accord and summon Nero. Caligula stands before the ocean at night and it swells into a giant luminescent phantom and begins to speak. This isn’t Amazon Prime sexing up Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the Age of TikTok: It’s the original source, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, the hallucinatory second-century A.D. collection of biographies of Julius Caesar and his first eleven successors. Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History, the world’s most popular history podcast, has done us all a service with his new translation. It shines a spotlight on an under-read and underappreciated classic.