Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • Roman historian whose major work, Lives of the Caesars, is an account of the lives of the first 12 Roman emperors.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Caesar's military campaigns are known in detail from his own written Commentaries (Commentarii), and many details of his life are recorded by later historians such as Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio.

    qdiosa Diary Entry qdiosa 2005

  • "Suetonius" and "Carlyle" lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up and read a page or a paragraph.

    The Boys' Life of Mark Twain Paine, Albert Bigelow, 1861-1937 1916

  • "Suetonius" and "Carlyle" lay on the bed beside him, and he would pick them up and read a page or a paragraph.

    The Boys' Life of Mark Twain Albert Bigelow Paine 1899

  • The saint was originally a British noble, by name Suetonius; and Dempster drops a letter from his name, and with much ingenuity makes him collateral ancestor of a Scottish family -- 'The Setons, tall and proud.' [

    Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland 1881

  • *] Nero soon after recalled Suetonius from a government, where, by suffering and inflicting so many severities, he was judged improper for composing the angry and alarmed minds of the inhabitants.

    The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part A. From the Britons of Early Times to King John David Hume 1743

  • Writing in the second century AD, the biographer Suetonius employed the word luxuria to characterize the degenerate behavior of Emperor Nero, whose habits he said included traveling with a thousand carriages pulled by mules shod with silver, and entertaining in his wildly extravagant palace, which he had overlaid with gold and fitted with pipes to spray perfume on his guests.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • Writing in the second century AD, the biographer Suetonius employed the word luxuria to characterize the degenerate behavior of Emperor Nero, whose habits he said included traveling with a thousand carriages pulled by mules shod with silver, and entertaining in his wildly extravagant palace, which he had overlaid with gold and fitted with pipes to spray perfume on his guests.

    The English Is Coming! Leslie Dunton-Downer 2010

  • The subject was taken from the Roman historian Suetonius, who recounts the story of the Roman emperor Titus and Berenice of Cilicia, the sister of Agrippa II.

    Archive 2009-03-01 Jonathan Aquino 2009

  • Suetonius wrote a single sentence on the affair, which Racine translates as: "Titus, who passionately loved Berenice and who was widely thought to have promised to marry her, sent her from Rome, in spite of himself and in spite of herself, in the early days of his empire."

    Archive 2009-03-01 Jonathan Aquino 2009

  • He notes that he looked "to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius," in the hope of emulating the best of each: "the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness."

    Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor Joseph Epstein 2010

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