Suetonius: Life of Augustus

ISBN-13: 9780199686452 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 300 str.

D. Wardle

Opis

Suetonius' Life of Augustus is the most commonly read ancient account of the life of Rome's first emperor, presenting a mass of historical and biographical detail about both his public and personal lives. This volume provides the first large-scale commentary on Suetonius' work in English, drawing out what is unique about Suetonius' information, discussing how it relates to other ancient accounts, and assessing its historical reliability.
The commentary is the first to be accessible to readers without any knowledge of Latin or Greek due to its use of English lemmata, while the new translation remains faithful to the original Latin. Accompanied by an introduction which investigates the career of Suetonius, the date of the Lives of the Caesars, the structure of the Life of Augustus, the various sources utilized by Suetonius, and the way in which the reader should approach this complex text, the commentary also looks to examine Suetonius' work not just as a repository of facts, but as a literary artefact carefully constructed by its author.

Recenzje

To absorb the sheer range of published scholarship relating both to such a well-trodden text and to the lengthy career of Augustus is a daunting task, but Wardle. has shown that it can be done. In the commentary itself he synthesises clearly, evaluates judiciously and offers perceptive insights of his own: for example, noting Suetonius' tragic framing of the reversals in Augustus' family fortunes (416). His practice of not only referencing and discussing but often quoting the most relevant comparative or contextualising primary sources will be greatly appreciated by undergraduates in particular. He is also refreshingly forthright about the limitations of what we can glean from any of them

O autorze

D. Wardle is NKGV Professor of Classics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.