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Suetonius: Diuus Claudius (review)

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/clw.2006.0094

1558-9234

Richard C. Lounsbury,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Reviewed by: Suetonius: Diuus Claudius Richard C. Lounsbury Donna W. Hurley . Suetonius: Diuus Claudius. Cambridge Greek and Roman Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 274. $75.00 (hb). ISBN 0-521-59325-5; $29.99 (pb). ISBN 0-521-59676-9. To paraphrase the elder Pliny, no commentary is so bad as to have nothing good in it. More safely, we may say that, of commentaries which we might commend to a student, there are two kinds. The first has done its homework; has compiled, and perhaps even read, a relevant bibliography; has organized necessary explanatory material into a helpful introduction; has explicated its text concisely and modestly, placing author before commentator. Nobody is ever satisfied with a commentary: we might have liked, for example, more attention given to historical background and less to basic grammatical principles, or the other way about. But we leave the book better informed than we came to it. The second kind of commentary has brought, besides all the virtues of the first, the large erudition and copious understanding of a vir scholasticus (as Pliny the younger described Suetonius himself and which, at that time, meant much more than Hurley ascribes). This second kind of commentary need have no lofty opinion of author and work, but it has a deep respect for the business of explicating both. Such a commentary comes from a great critic. Edmund Wilson would send me off to Hemingway's novels and stories. I did not like them; I knew that I did not like them, and I knew why. Back I would come to Wilson; he would weave his spell again, and again off I would go to Hemingway, not just persuaded but, as if by Gorgias, bewitched. Hurley's commentary of the Divus Claudius is of the first kind, dutiful albeit not unworthy of criticism. Its biographical notice of Suetonius gives little sense of the importance of his offices a studiis, a bybliothecis, and especially ab epistulis, offices suggesting what sort of literary culture Suetonius must have commanded, especially in order to satisfy an emperor of Hadrian's cultural pretensions. Hurley's historical annotation is spare but dense and sometimes tendentious; what grammatical or—very rare—rhetorical help there is, sparer still and meager. The chief fault of Hurley's commentary is indeed that it is not of the second kind, for Suetonius needs commentators who share his own breadth of learning and skillful deployment of it. Who would know from Hurley, as Macé demonstrated in 1900, that Suetonius writes in a prose so rhythmical as to verge upon the metrical? Hurley should know, for Macé's Essai sur Suétone lurks in her nearly fifteen pages of bibliography and creeps into an early footnote. Hurley knows (they, too, are listed in her bibliography), she even allows, that many and serious charges have been lobbed recently at twentieth-century critics who—so a biographer of (among others) Louis XI and Richard III, Paul Murray Kendall, depicted them—"nag and cluck at Suetonius." But, without explanation, Hurley cleaves closely to the old abuse, the old condescension: her author will "dig out" or "rummage through," "not Tacitean brilliance but an honest job," dry, repetitive, mechanical in structure and style. But the shade of Suetonius may smile at the court of Hades. His commentator condemns him to have written "a kind of ancient journalistic style, straightforward, 'business-like,'" to "have cared nothing at all for rhetoric." However unjust, unhistorical, tone-deaf this verdict may be of Suetonius, it is abundantly true of the judge pronouncing it. Students to whom we commend Hurley's Divus Claudius will receive assistance in background and, often shipped off to the OLD, in particular [End Page 79] locutions. They will gain no sense whether or why Suetonius is worth reading. How could such a dreary scribbler have become, as Hurley herself admits amid otherwise scanty Nachleben, "a favourite of Petrarch and Boccaccio"? Kendall in his Art of Biography explained that Suetonius "'brings 'em back alive.' It is his one virtue, but in biography that is the only virtue." Richard C. Lounsbury Brigham Young University Copyright © 2006 Classical Association of the Atlantic States