It appears that the beginning of Suetonius' Divus Iulius is now lost. C.L. Roth, in 1865, argued that the work was acephalous by setting out the four things that were missing from the Divus Iulius: first, the title of the work; second, the dedication to Septicius Clarus, which is known to us only from John Lydus' sixth-century work De Magistratibus 2.6.4; third, the family tree of the Caesars; fourth, the beginning of the Divus Iulius with the details about its Trojan and Alban origins, the origin and name of the Caesars, the omens of future greatness, his education, and his first offices. These were, as Roth saw it, all things Suetonius was in the habit of giving in the extant Lives.

Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars contain at least twenty discrete anecdotes about childhood (pueritia) and youth (iuuenta or adulescentia) spread across the Lives. Some characterize the Caesars by looking forwards (foreshadowing) and others do so by looking backwards (flashbacks). In both foreshadowing and flashback, the childhood anecdote shows continuity with the adult and creates the impression of lifelong consistency of character. The foreshadowing technique is also something other ancient biographers do; the flashback is something that appears to be unique to Suetonius. In this note I briefly consider the stories from childhood and youth that foreshadow character traits and themes of the rest of the Life, and then the flashbacks from the adulthood section of the Life that refer to childhood and youth in order to demonstrate vices of the grown adult. I show that the use of foreshadowing and flashbacks contributes to the appearance of a fully formed character in the child that will be consistent into adulthood, as well as facilitating the rubric system of arranging material by type rather than by time.

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The ancestry sections in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars demonstrate the inheritance of character traits down the family line. The effectiveness of this as a rhetorical technique rests on an expectation of inheritance and resemblance along the family line. This study investigates the mechanism of that resemblance from the evidence available in Suetonius’ text—nature or nurture?—and then proposes that since the mechanism appears to be not quite the same as that evidenced in earlier writers, the biographer's model of inheritance and degeneration is part of a conversation about succession to the principate. Part one sets out the patterns of resemblance/difference that appear from the lists of ancestors, part two the evidence for nature and nurture of character traits in Suetonius’ Lives, and part three compares the way resemblance works in Suetonius with the way it works in other authors. As modern views on nature and nurture have changed with social and political changes, the final section proposes that the changes over the first century of the principate have to do with the political and social changes in that period. Suetonius’ model of hereditary vice, not hereditary virtue, arises from a disaffection with the system of hereditary succession.

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