Ancient Rome was built on gossip Tittle-tattle is a powerful weapon

Let’s talk about Nero’s hair. The infamous emperor liked to wear his curls long and, on a tour of Greece, “actually sported a mullet”. A mullet? Perhaps Tom Holland — in his shamelessly enjoyable new translation of The Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius — is having a little fun with the Latin here. In Robert Graves’s much-admired 1957 rendering, “he let it grow long and hang down his back”, while Catharine Edwards has the dissolute tyrant’s locks “flowing down the back”. Never mind: we get the shaggy rock-god picture.

Hair matters to Suetonius — as it evidently would for his patrician Roman readers in the second century AD. Lives of the Caesars helped to make Julius Caesar history’s best-known exponent of the comb-over, “combing forward the thinning hair from the top of his head”, because advancing baldness “offered his detractors endless material for jokes”. As for the divine Augustus, his successor, Suetonius treats the story that he employed “various stylists simultaneously” while he read as proof that he disdained fancy hairdressing. Really? Vain Otho, in contrast, “wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald”.

The fine — or coarse — details of imperial coiffure have not passed into legend to the same degree as some of Suetonius’s other juicy titbits. More renowned are the scenes of the aged Tiberius having his genitals nibbled while swimming with his young male “minnows”; Nero singing (not fiddling) while Rome burned in the fires that he had himself started, or castrating his toyboy Sporus before marrying him “with all the traditional ceremonies (dowry and bridal veil included)”. Less gamey than such chunks of scuttlebutt, Suetonius’s hairpieces typify the way he writes. Intimate data that high-minded historians would scorn help him to build a full-length picture of each imperial figure. An emperor’s barnet sits, or maybe falls, on the visible borderline between personal habit and public image: a revealing site of individual choice but also — as those imperial slapheads ruefully understood — inexorable fate.

The writer who paid so much heed to hair respected testimony from barbers as much as from senators. As Holland notes in his new edition, Suetonius takes care to source all his stories, however outlandish and outrageous they may sound: “The methodology is careful, balanced, nuanced.” Some of the most striking moments arrive when he draws on evidence from his own home and family, citing his soldierly father and other relatives.

The Lives of the Caesars spans the 12 rulers of Rome and its empire from the ascent of Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) to the assassination of Domitian in 96 AD. Suetonius probably completed the work in the late 120s, after the Emperor Hadrian had sacked its well-connected author from the job of correspondence secretary. For all its procedural scruples, The Lives nonetheless ranks as one of the first, greatest and most influential fusions of low scandal and high politics in the history of history.

Every breathless “unauthorised” biography of premiers and presidents that currently vies for media and bookstore space aims for the Suetonius touch: what Holland calls an “amalgam of lurid anecdotes” that enriches and extends a full-spectrum account not just of persons and policies, but of a state and a time. As its rocket fuel, or secret spice, this all-round portraiture rests on a targeted deployment of gossip.

Gossip, like the sexual activity it habitually evokes, is everywhere practised and everywhere condemned. Highbrow defences of its means and ends are very hard to find — although Patricia Meyer Spacks, a Yale professor of literature, has elegantly argued for its value. She observes that “for several centuries everyone has gossiped, and everyone has felt ashamed of doing so”. Make that “millennia”. In her 1985 study Gossip, she demonstrates that “few activities so nearly universal have been the object of such sustained and passionate attack”. Spacks warmly champions gossip, in life and in literature, as a “resource for the subordinated” — women above all — and a democratic creator of community: “Gossip emphasises what people hold in common, dwells on frailties, seeks the hidden rather than the manifest.” This charitable, even utopian, vision of gossip as the whispered revenge of the oppressed may fit small-scale traditional communities. Sadly, it hardly suits the partisan campaigns of toxic innuendo now practised by media giants and political enforcers.

Three decades ago, I could, had I so wished, flick past the gossip columns in the paper. Now I visit X to answer a direct message and can’t unsee (just one current example) the ludicrous claim that President Macron is married to a transgender person originally called Jean-Michel Trogneux. In reality, that’s Brigitte Macron’s brother. The siblings sued over this viral fantasy and, last September, won damages of €13,000 against the pair of internet muck-spreaders who began to circulate it in 2021: Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey. Yet algorithmic elves still shovel the manure around as busily as ever. Sought or unsought, hardcore scandal and outright “fake news” now splatter into every screen-facing mind.

The “transgender Brigitte Macron” meme obviously intends to ridicule the president and benefit his enemies. It harks back to the distinctly similar weaponising of rumour — sexual and financial — via popular prints in the decades before the French Revolution. Think of Marie Antoinette: one of history’s most gossiped-against figures, by repute an adulterous lesbian spendthrift cheat responsible for ruining her nation; in reality a blundering naif guilty of almost none of the crimes and misdemeanours attached to her name. (The apocryphal “Let them eat cake” — Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — is attributed to a fictional princess in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1769.)

Gossip about the great always serves sectional interests. In Marie Antoinette’s case, it became an armour-piercing weapon of revolutionary war. For all his zest, bite and wit, Suetonius also spreads tales initially devised to favour one senatorial faction or another. And he plays on the same drives — curiosity, prurience, envy, schadenfreude — as his mass-media heirs. His enlistment of scurrilous anecdotes cuts imperial titans down to human size. He conjures up a community of readers in the know, united by what Spacks calls “the glamour and the power of secret knowledge”. Have you heard that a posh young blade called Valerius Catullus “boasted loudly” about screwing Gaius Caligula “as though he were a slave”, and of being “left exhausted by the demands he made in bed”? Well, you have now. Pass it on…

That frisson of complicity — half-exciting, half-demeaning — persists across the ages from the pages of The Lives to the latest squirt of online bile. And gossip, as Suetonius knew, contributes not just to the matter of history, but the making of history. Take the (reputed) sexual adventures of young Julius Caesar.

Ancient Rome, as everyone surely knows by now, had no concept of “homosexuality”. It did expect that high-status males should take their chosen pleasures actively. Top boys had to be, well, top boys. Right at the start of The Lives, we learn that Julius Caesar “was rumoured” to have submitted to King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s sexual advances. This early surrender of power haunted Caesar as “a lingering scandal, and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts”. In a droll paragraph, Suetonius primly asserts he “will not dwell” on tittle-tattle about the divine Julius as “queen of Bithynia”. Then of course he does exactly that, right down to the legionaries’ marching songs: “Caesar bent Gaul to his will; Nicomedes bent Caesar”, etc.

Yet Suetonius’s examples blend ridicule and affection. The soldiers evidently didn’t mind seeing their revolutionary dictator taken down a bit. That “lingering scandal” may have won as well as lost votes. Besides, what happens in Asia… Suetonius, a pioneer practitioner of gossip as history, also explores the ambiguous force of gossip in history.

Suetonius has a well-merited name for memorable vignettes of atrocities and debaucheries. However, much of his most piquant hearsay simply underlines the sheer fragility of the attempt to control Rome’s domains via the frail figure of a single princeps. Tortures and fornications aside, Suetonius’s cameos of hidden lives frequently arouse not loathing but compassion: as in his sketch of the always-chilly Augustus, muffled up against the winter cold with “four tunics, a thick toga, an undershirt, a woollen vest, and strips of cloth wrapped around his thighs and shins”. The sort of gossip transmitted here illuminates the vulnerability not only of a princeps but of the system he fronted. In this instance, malice and resentment — presumed to be gossip’s default setting — give way to something nearer sympathy.

Gossip, in Suetonius’s hands, can turn a man into a monster, as when Nero kills his wife Poppaea by “kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant and sick, after she had scolded him for coming home late from the chariot races”. As so often in The Lives, it’s that final clinching detail that pushes what might count as hostile spin from political foes into an unforgettably plausible vignette. Yet it can also humanise and complicate the princeps, especially when rival rumours push in contrary directions.

Holland believes that the perplexing contradictions of imperial portraiture of The Lives may stem from Suetonius’s dependence on both friendly and hostile sources for a single narrative. Whether the cause, this cross-grained gossip makes the man in full appear. The deep ambivalence towards “laughing stock”-turned-conqueror Claudius planted the seed of Graves’s peerless novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. In Suetonius, what lingers are not the “cruel and bloodthirsty” stunts of Claudius or his “paranoid sense of suspicion” but backstairs memories of the family fool: the hapless scapegoat who had to make “an entire tour of the dining room” before someone would grudgingly find space, before being pelted with olive and date stones and lashed by some toff “with a rod or whip” — “just for the banter”.

Or look at Otho, one of the short-lived rulers of 69 AD, the “year of the four emperors”. Predictably, Suetonius tells us that Otho and Nero had been “in the habit of abusing each other sexually”, and that the former ran around the streets at night, picking fights with the “puny or drunk”. Later, however, he mentions that his father fought with Otho and found him a brave and decent commander with a “horror of civil war”. Confronted with one soldier’s self-sacrifice, Otho said that “I will no longer risk the lives of such men, who deserve so well.” When Nero, his protector, sent Poppaea to him for safekeeping, Otho genuinely fell in love with her. He barred his front door to Nero, who was left “alternately threatening and imploring him to no effect”.

Our digital dependency has made public gossip ubiquitous and inescapable save for hermits, Luddites and — paradoxically — the sort of well-staffed magnates and celebrities who become its subject. For the rest of us, however frugal our online habits, it forever spits in the face and lodges in the brain. Suetonius can come to our aid. An analyst of gossip as much as a connoisseur, he shows where it springs from, how it flows, and where it issues. If we can no longer stand haughtily aloof from rumours about authority and celebrity, at least we can learn to recognise their motives, means and effects. Entertaining and enlightening, The Lives may also equip readers with the tools to become more critical consumers of gossip about politics and power — better able to assess both their own impulses as receivers of rumour, and the aims of its diffusers. As always with historical gossip, the reader or listener has to judge. Who told this story? Who spread it? Who gains from it? Who suffers? Whose interests does it ultimately serve? Cui bono?

For instance: did the disguised Nero truly make the rounds of Rome’s cookshops in order to mug customers “as they made their way back from dinner”, or dump his victims’ corpses in a sewer, or break into taverns to loot them and then “auction off the spoils” back at his house? We will never know the nocturnal itineraries of the volatile tearaway born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. But we do know his solidly-grounded later notoriety for theft, plunder and confiscation — which these tales render as a kind of grotesque comic-strip. Many of Suetonius’s wilder anecdotes follow this formula. Don’t always take such gossip literally; but do take it seriously.

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