Suetonius was a great scholar, who had an inclined interested in describing the lives of Caesar and the first eleven emperors of the Roman Empire. In Suetonius writings, the audience can implicitly feel the passion that he had in describing the lives of the emperors, two of which were Nero and Caligula. During their reign, they were both driven by their ego, supreme power, and jealousy, behind their outrageous demonstration of power there was a very frightened man, who probably regret their past actions and feared possible consequences.
I am mainly interested in Caligula’s acts, because in his short time of reign he was able to terrorize and recklessly kill numerous people, and his killings were mostly based on illegitimate reasons. In particular, my focus will be from passage 27 to 41 of “The Life of Caligula” by Suetonius, in these passages, Suetonius explicitly describe Caligula’s atrocities. I believe that what makes these passages memorable was Caligula’s cruelty and his carelessness of people’s feelings. An example of this behavior is when Suetonius states that “He had the manager of his gladiatorial shows and beast-baitings beaten…show more content… I believe that what makes this particular text so readable is not only the language, grammar, or the detailed description of the events used by Suetonius, but also the fact the audience (me included) is very intrigued by how a human being can possibly be so cruel in his actions, which pushes the audience to read more, just for the curiosity of figuring out how far he could possibly go with his actions. I believe this is also the reason why audiences gravitated to this material hoping that, it will not happen again in history. Suetonius is indeed a great scholar and through his interesting works, the lives of the emperors are brought back to life, in our
