Drinking with Suetonius

I was delighted recently to learn of the twelve silver chalices, commemorating the first twelve Roman emperors, that art historians now call the Aldobrandini Tazze. Their sixteenth-century designer surmounted each tazza with a figurine of the appropriate ruler, and decorated each saucer with four intricate scenes from that monarch's life, as recounted in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius, as fans of I, Claudius know, wrote formulaic biographies of the Roman imperators from Julius Caesar to Domitian, describing each man's virtues and vices. His early readers and imitators tended more to appreciate the praises Suetonius sang than the salacious details he dished. The ninth-century German monk Einhard used the more high-minded parts of the "Life of Augustus" as the model for his Life of Charlemagne, and Renaissance readers like Petrarch preferred to read S's biographies as models of noble behavior rather than gossipy celebrity bios. 

The silversmith who designed the tazze also preferred the exalted to the depraved. The four scenes on the Tiberius tazza, for example, included T's mother Livia rescuing him from a forest fire and the older Tiberius paying homage to Augustus after a military triumph. None of Tiberius's notorious dalliances with underage boys make an appearance. Nor do the more famous episodes from its subject's life show up on the Caligula tazza, which focuses on that emperor's generosity rather than his alleged sexual affairs with his sisters, his appointment of his horse to the Senate, or his cross-dressing dance homage to the goddess Dawn. The art historian Julia Siemon argues that the tazze's designer wanted them to exalt the Roman emperors in order to pay homage to their presumptive descendants, the Habsburgs. On a continent wracked with religious warfare, the unity and orderliness of the Roman Empire, and the promise of another universal empire claiming descent from Caesar and Charlemagne, must have had great appeal. In our more democratic and prosperous age, we prefer instead to see the emperors' feet of clay, and compare their personal excesses and foibles with our own bourgeois restraint.