Year of Three Emperors

[D B Campbell]

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.

That's interesting. Weren't you encouraged to use the Latin text? :wink:

Graves himself had warned that his translation (1957) was "no school crib" and that he had striven to capture the flavour rather than the literal word order (or even, in places, the sentence order!). Although it's not wildly inaccurate, it's certainly true that the late A.R. Burn (Professor of Classics here in Glasgow) rounded off his review with the advice that "Students are recommended to use this book with caution". And G B Townend (then Professor of Classics at Liverpool) listed about 20 significant inaccuracies in his review.

But Graves' translation was edited by Michael Grant in 1979, to bring it "inside the range of what is now generally regarded by readers of the Penguin Classics as a 'translation'." In other words, to help out those students with a crib!