In his biography of Augustus Suetonius o fers no discussion of Augustus' plans for succession, nor in subsequent lives is 'succession' ever used as a rubric to organize material or judge emperors. The contrast with modern scholars of the Caesars is striking. Barbara Levick, for example, devotes a chapter of her study of Tiberius to the "Dynastic Catastrophe" and a chapter of her Vespasian to "Vespasian and His Sons." More explicitly, Anthony Barrett has an early chapter in his life of Caligula on "The Struggle for the Succession" and Miriam Gri n a retrospective chapter in her life of Nero on "The Problem of the Succession." Contributors to Barrett's serial Lives of the Caesars regularly include a section on the succession (e.g., Werner Eck on "Succession" in his chapter on Augustus, Anthony Birley on "Hadrianic Succession" in his chapter on Marcus Aurelius). In my own recent study of the principate of Claudius the problem of succession is foregrounded throughout. Whole articles and monographs are devoted to various aspects of the subject, and it looms large in a remarkable essay by Paul Veyne "Qu'était-ce qu'un empereur romain?". Suetonius' practice, to be sure, is followed by Fergus Millar, who (as Keith Hopkins noted in a review) never mentioned in The Emperor and the Roman World the problem of succession, despite its evident interest to modern historians. It certainly is anachronistic, and arguably misleading, to use such phrases as "succession policy" when speaking of Roman emperors, especially early Roman emperors, and Millar's avowed goal in his study was Levick (1976) 148-179 and Levick (1999) 184-195 respectively. I take the opportunity to acknowledge here very helpful comments from Alisdair Gibson on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Julius Caesar was remembered in later times for the unprecedented scale of his military activity. He was also remembered for writing copiously while on campaign. Focusing on the period of Rome's war with Gaul (58––50 BCE), this paper argues that the two activities were interrelated: writing helped to facilitate the Roman conquest of the Gallic peoples. It allowed Caesar to send messages within his own theater of operations, sometimes with distinctive advantages; it helped him stay in touch with Rome, from where he obtained ever more resources; and it helped him, in his Gallic War above all, to turn the story of his scattered campaigns into a coherent narrative of the subjection of a vast territory henceforward to be called ““Gaul.”” The place of epistolography in late Republican politics receives new analysis in the paper, with detailed discussion of the evidence of Cicero.

It is hard for biographers, ancient and modern alike, to resist the story of the young Julius Caesar's kidnapping by a band of pirates. Suetonius and Plutarch both include full versions of the tale, with specific details (Suet. Iul. 4; Plut. Vit. Caes. 1.4–2). Suetonius, for instance, writes that the kidnapping took place near the island of Pharmacusa (just off the coast of Asia Minor), while Plutarch, noting that too, also specifies that the ransom that freed Caesar came from the (nearby) city of Miletus. And while Suetonius writes that Caesar, after his release, launched a fleet, pursued the pirates, and punished them, Plutarch includes another phase in the story: having taken command of a fleet and set sail (again, from Miletus), Plutarch's Caesar captured nearly all the pirates but, instead of killing them right away, ‘he himself went to Iuncus, the governor of Asia, on the grounds that it belonged to him, as governor of the province, to punish the captives’. When Iuncus postponed a decision on the matter (evidently hoping to make a profit out of the situation), Caesar returned to Pergamum, took the robbers out of prison, and only then crucified them himself.

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