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The Following is adapted from: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Cross, Livingstone; (OUP, 1983).
SUETONIUS (68 - after 122). Roman writer, until 121/2 secretary to the Emp. Hadrian. He was apparently one of the first pagan writers to mention Christianity. His ‘Lives of the Caesars’ refers to the expulsion by Claudius (d. 54) of the Jews from Rome on the ground that they had made disturbances ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ (Claudius, 25. 4); this is prob. a garbled account of trouble between Jews and Christians. He seems to have approved of Nero’s persecution of the Christians, ‘a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition’ (Nero, 16).
‘Lives of the Caesars’ ed. M. Ihm (Teub., 1908), repr., with Eng. tr. by J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, 2 vols., 1914); other works ed. A. Reifferscheid (Leipzig, 1860). Convenient Eng. tr. of ‘Lives of the Caesars’ by R. Graves (Penguin Classics, 1957; rev. by M. Grant, 1979) A. Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius: The Scholar and his Caesars (1983; 2nd edn., 1995); B. Baldwin, Suetonius (Amsterdam, 1983); J. Gascou, Suétone historien (Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 255; 1984). K. R. Bradley in OCD (3rd edn.), 1996), pp. 145 f. s.v. ‘Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus)’.
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