Suetonius

Suetonius was a Roman biographer whose De vita Caesarum set the shape of imperial biography for centuries: lives told by theme and anecdote rather than chronology, mixing administrative record with portent, gossip and scandal. A friend and protégé of Pliny the Younger, he held a series of palace secretaryships, ending in charge of the imperial correspondence under Hadrian, from which he was dismissed. Little else about him is securely known. His unsqueamish treatment of Nero and Otho stands beside Tacitus behind L'incoronazione di Poppea.