Year of Three Emperors

[Crispvs]

"Could it be because Suetonius uses only three in book VII of his "12 Caesars"

Andy,

As far as I have always understood, Suetonius did not write a book entitled 'The Twelve Caesars'.

I believe it was actually something like: 'The lives of the Caesars' (the six Julio-Claudians); 'The lives of famous men' (Galba, Otho and Vitellius); and 'The lives of the later emperors' (the three Flavian emperors).

In the mid twentieth century, Penguin published these together as 'The Twelve Caesars'. The translation was by Robert Graves and when I was studying Roman history at university we were warned that it was such a poor translation, which owed as much to the creativity of Robert Graves as it did to Suetonius, we would be likely to lose marks and attract unfavourable comments if we used it in preference to the much better Loeb translation when doing our course reading and researching our essays.

I am certain that Jona can comment here.

Incidentally Jona, the writers of the third pice you linked to acknowledges the historical fact that Vespasian became emperor in 69 but does not include him with Galba, Otho and Vitellius, but his two sons Titus and Domitian, which allows the writers to talk erroneously of a year of three emperors, having sectioned Vespasian off into another catagory and thus not included him in the 'year'.


Crispvs