Re: Facile dismissal of an important insight

It's neither condescending nor facile to treat ancient historians with as much caution as modern ones No, that isn't condescending and I didn't say it was. What is condescending is to poo-poo Suetonius's account on the grounds that "modern" historians disbelieve him, as if, by being modern, they must be wiser or better informed. They are most certainly not either. If we had the opinion of a single contemporary of Suetonius saying that his account was not to be taken seriously, that would be worth more than the opinions of any number of moderns speculating in the dark. The one historiographical thing about this that is absolutely certain is that both Suetonius and Tacitus had access to mountains of information that you do not because almost all of it has been lost. Even most published histories from the period are lost. As a senator, Tacitus moved in social circles that would certainly have had inside information about goings-on less than a generation before his birth. As private secretary to two Roman emperors, Suetonius had access to (probably voluminous) unpublished manuscripts about imperial affairs. Of course, the ancient historians could have written a prejudiced account of Tiberius out of political dislike. Almost anything is possible, but so what? If you were writing a history you wanted respected about an important 20th-century figure you disapproved of politically, and your intended readership was the social circle that would have known a fair amount about him by word-of-mouth (not "technology"), would you invent sexual antics for him? www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112