The Transmission of Suetonius’s Caesars in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The medieval manuscript tradition (9th–13th centuries) of Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum has not been fully understood, and no complete and accurate stemma of the earliest extant witnesses has been drawn. This paper, based upon a fresh collation of the manuscripts, describes in detail the constitution of the tradition’s two main branches, the main lines of contamination that can be traced within and between them, and the “family tree” best suited to reconstructing the archetype from which all extant copies of the work ultimately descend.