Hair matters to Suetonius — as it evidently would for his patrician Roman readers in the second century AD. Lives of the Caesars helped to make Julius Caesar history’s best-known exponent of the comb-over, “combing forward the thinning hair from the top of his head”, because advancing baldness “offered his detractors endless material for jokes”. As for the divine Augustus, his successor, Suetonius treats the story that he employed “various stylists simultaneously” while he read as proof that he disdained fancy hairdressing. Really? Vain Otho, in contrast, “wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald”.

The fine — or coarse — details of imperial coiffure have not passed into legend to the same degree as some of Suetonius’s other juicy titbits. More renowned are the scenes of the aged Tiberius having his genitals nibbled while swimming with his young male “minnows”; Nero singing (not fiddling) while Rome burned in the fires that he had himself started, or castrating his toyboy Sporus before marrying him “with all the traditional ceremonies (dowry and bridal veil included)”. Less gamey than such chunks of scuttlebutt, Suetonius’s hairpieces typify the way he writes. Intimate data that high-minded historians would scorn help him to build a full-length picture of each imperial figure. An emperor’s barnet sits, or maybe falls, on the visible borderline between personal habit and public image: a revealing site of individual choice but also — as those imperial slapheads ruefully understood — inexorable fate.

The writer who paid so much heed to hair respected testimony from barbers as much as from senators. As Holland notes in his new edition, Suetonius takes care to source all his stories, however outlandish and outrageous they may sound: “The methodology is careful, balanced, nuanced.” Some of the most striking moments arrive when he draws on evidence from his own home and family, citing his soldierly father and other relatives.

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The Lives of the Caesars spans the 12 rulers of Rome and its empire from the ascent of Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) to the assassination of Domitian in 96 AD. Suetonius probably completed the work in the late 120s, after the Emperor Hadrian had sacked its well-connected author from the job of correspondence secretary. For all its procedural scruples, The Lives nonetheless ranks as one of the first, greatest and most influential fusions of low scandal and high politics in the history of history.

Every breathless “unauthorised” biography of premiers and presidents that currently vies for media and bookstore space aims for the Suetonius touch: what Holland calls an “amalgam of lurid anecdotes” that enriches and extends a full-spectrum account not just of persons and policies, but of a state and a time. As its rocket fuel, or secret spice, this all-round portraiture rests on a targeted deployment of gossip.

Gossip, like the sexual activity it habitually evokes, is everywhere practised and everywhere condemned. Highbrow defences of its means and ends are very hard to find — although Patricia Meyer Spacks, a Yale professor of literature, has elegantly argued for its value. She observes that “for several centuries everyone has gossiped, and everyone has felt ashamed of doing so”. Make that “millennia”. In her 1985 study Gossip, she demonstrates that “few activities so nearly universal have been the object of such sustained and passionate attack”. Spacks warmly champions gossip, in life and in literature, as a “resource for the subordinated” — women above all — and a democratic creator of community: “Gossip emphasises what people hold in common, dwells on frailties, seeks the hidden rather than the manifest.” This charitable, even utopian, vision of gossip as the whispered revenge of the oppressed may fit small-scale traditional communities. Sadly, it hardly suits the partisan campaigns of toxic innuendo now practised by media giants and political enforcers.

Three decades ago, I could, had I so wished, flick past the gossip columns in the paper. Now I visit X to answer a direct message and can’t unsee (just one current example) the ludicrous claim that President Macron is married to a transgender person originally called Jean-Michel Trogneux. In reality, that’s Brigitte Macron’s brother. The siblings sued over this viral fantasy and, last September, won damages of €13,000 against the pair of internet muck-spreaders who began to circulate it in 2021: Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey. Yet algorithmic elves still shovel the manure around as busily as ever. Sought or unsought, hardcore scandal and outright “fake news” now splatter into every screen-facing mind.

The “transgender Brigitte Macron” meme obviously intends to ridicule the president and benefit his enemies. It harks back to the distinctly similar weaponizing of rumor — sexual and financial — via popular prints in the decades before the French Revolution. Think of Marie Antoinette: one of history’s most gossiped-against figures, by repute an adulterous lesbian spendthrift cheat responsible for ruining her nation; in reality a blundering naif guilty of almost none of the crimes and misdemeanors attached to her name. (The apocryphal “Let them eat cake” — Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — is attributed to a fictional princess in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1769.)

Gossip about the great always serves sectional interests. In Marie Antoinette’s case, it became an armor-piercing weapon of revolutionary war. For all his zest, bite and wit, Suetonius also spreads tales initially devised to favor one senatorial faction or another. And he plays on the same drives — curiosity, prurience, envy, schadenfreude — as his mass-media heirs. His enlistment of scurrilous anecdotes cuts imperial titans down to human size. He conjures up a community of readers in the know, united by what Spacks calls “the glamour and the power of secret knowledge”. Have you heard that a posh young blade called Valerius Catullus “boasted loudly” about screwing Gaius Caligula “as though he were a slave”, and of being “left exhausted by the demands he made in bed”? Well, you have now. Pass it on…

That frisson of complicity — half-exciting, half-demeaning — persists across the ages from the pages of The Lives to the latest squirt of online bile. And gossip, as Suetonius knew, contributes not just to the matter of history, but the making of history. Take the (reputed) sexual adventures of young Julius Caesar.

Ancient Rome, as everyone surely knows by now, had no concept of “homosexuality”. It did expect that high-status males should take their chosen pleasures actively. Top boys had to be, well, top boys. Right at the start of The Lives, we learn that Julius Caesar “was rumored” to have submitted to King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s sexual advances. This early surrender of power haunted Caesar as “a lingering scandal, and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts”. In a droll paragraph, Suetonius primly asserts he “will not dwell” on tittle-tattle about the divine Julius as “queen of Bithynia”. Then of course he does exactly that, right down to the legionaries’ marching songs: “Caesar bent Gaul to his will; Nicomedes bent Caesar”, etc.

Yet Suetonius’s examples blend ridicule and affection. The soldiers evidently didn’t mind seeing their revolutionary dictator taken down a bit. That “lingering scandal” may have won as well as lost votes. Besides, what happens in Asia… Suetonius, a pioneer practitioner of gossip as history, also explores the ambiguous force of gossip in history.

Suetonius has a well-merited name for memorable vignettes of atrocities and debaucheries. However, much of his most piquant hearsay simply underlines the sheer fragility of the attempt to control Rome’s domains via the frail figure of a single princeps. Tortures and fornications aside, Suetonius’s cameos of hidden lives frequently arouse not loathing but compassion: as in his sketch of the always-chilly Augustus, muffled up against the winter cold with “four tunics, a thick toga, an undershirt, a woolen vest, and strips of cloth wrapped around his thighs and shins”. The sort of gossip transmitted here illuminates the vulnerability not only of a princeps but of the system he fronted. In this instance, malice and resentment — presumed to be gossip’s default setting — give way to something nearer sympathy.

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Gossip, in Suetonius’s hands, can turn a man into a monster, as when Nero kills his wife Poppaea by “kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant and sick, after she had scolded him for coming home late from the chariot races”. As so often in The Lives, it’s that final clinching detail that pushes what might count as hostile spin from political foes into an unforgettably plausible vignette. Yet it can also humanize and complicate the princeps, especially when rival rumors push in contrary directions.

Holland believes that the perplexing contradictions of imperial portraiture of The Lives may stem from Suetonius’s dependence on both friendly and hostile sources for a single narrative. Whether the cause, this cross-grained gossip makes the man in full appear. The deep ambivalence towards “laughing stock”-turned-conqueror Claudius planted the seed of Graves’s peerless novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. In Suetonius, what lingers are not the “cruel and bloodthirsty” stunts of Claudius or his “paranoid sense of suspicion” but backstairs memories of the family fool: the hapless scapegoat who had to make “an entire tour of the dining room” before someone would grudgingly find space, before being pelted with olive and date stones and lashed by some toff “with a rod or whip” — “just for the banter”.

Or look at Otho, one of the short-lived rulers of 69 AD, the “year of the four emperors”. Predictably, Suetonius tells us that Otho and Nero had been “in the habit of abusing each other sexually”, and that the former ran around the streets at night, picking fights with the “puny or drunk”. Later, however, he mentions that his father fought with Otho and found him a brave and decent commander with a “horror of civil war”. Confronted with one soldier’s self-sacrifice, Otho said that “I will no longer risk the lives of such men, who deserve so well.” When Nero, his protector, sent Poppaea to him for safekeeping, Otho genuinely fell in love with her. He barred his front door to Nero, who was left “alternately threatening and imploring him to no effect”.

Our digital dependency has made public gossip ubiquitous and inescapable save for hermits, Luddites and — paradoxically — the sort of well-staffed magnates and celebrities who become its subject. For the rest of us, however frugal our online habits, it forever spits in the face and lodges in the brain. Suetonius can come to our aid. An analyst of gossip as much as a connoisseur, he shows where it springs from, how it flows, and where it issues. If we can no longer stand haughtily aloof from rumors about authority and celebrity, at least we can learn to recognize their motives, means and effects. Entertaining and enlightening, The Lives may also equip readers with the tools to become more critical consumers of gossip about politics and power — better able to assess both their own impulses as receivers of rumor, and the aims of its diffusers. As always with historical gossip, the reader or listener has to judge. Who told this story? Who spread it? Who gains from it? Who suffers? Whose interests does it ultimately serve? Cui bono?

For instance: did the disguised Nero truly make the rounds of Rome’s cookshops in order to mug customers “as they made their way back from dinner”, or dump his victims’ corpses in a sewer, or break into taverns to loot them and then “auction off the spoils” back at his house? We will never know the nocturnal itineraries of the volatile tearaway born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. But we do know his solidly-grounded later notoriety for theft, plunder and confiscation — which these tales render as a kind of grotesque comic-strip. Many of Suetonius’s wilder anecdotes follow this formula. Don’t always take such gossip literally; but do take it seriously.

Viewed on a clear day from the chalk cliffs of Ramsgate, the matching white cliffs of France’s Cap Blanc Nez, our isle’s separated geological twin, shimmer on the horizon. In 1940 newsreels, Goering was famously shown peering at a defiant Britain from over there, no doubt picking out the town’s landmarks — the tall church spires that guided ships into harbour, the gaps and folds between the dazzling cliffs — through his binoculars. Heavily bombed in World War Two, and the marshalling point for the Little Ships of the Dunkirk evacuation, Ramsgate and Thanet’s proximity to continental Europe, source of both threat and promise, has shaped the region from the beginning of Britain’s recorded history. Perched on the edge of England, surrounded on three sides by the North Sea, the Isle of Thanet is simultaneously both marginal and central to our island’s story. Wherever it was finished, the first draft of the nation’s history was always written here.

Joined to Ramsgate by the village of Pegwell — a series of flint-walled cottages perched precariously on chalk cliffs concealing tunnels that lead to long-disused smugglers’ caves — sweeps the broad expanse of Pegwell Bay. For thousands of years the bay’s sombre mudflats, quaking bogs and salt marshes, patrolled by long-legged wading birds and basking seals, have served as the first beachhead for migrants and adventurers, missionaries and invaders making their way to this island.

It was here, in 2017, that archaeologists discovered the expeditionary fort built by Julius Caesar in 54 BC to defend his newly-landed legions from the hostile Celtic tribesmen, and here that the legions of Claudius returned in 43 AD, this time to stay. Here, too, were the great oyster beds of Ritupiae, singled out by Roman gourmets like the poet Juvenal for special praise, part of the network of trade and empire linking this lonely shoreline to the great hub of Mediterranean civilisation.

On the other side of the bay, the great flint fort of Richborough, built half a millennium of Roman rule after Caesar splashed ashore, failed to dissuade Saxon raiders from seizing the island for their own.

According to legend, the Jutish brothers Hengist and Horsa, summoned by the Romano-British king Vortigern as mercenaries, first came ashore right here, beginning the process that carved out Saxon England from Celtic Britain. A wooden longship, a gift of the Danish government, commemorates this turning point, its dragon-headed prow looking fiercely out across the North Sea towards its distant homeland.

Under the later Saxon king Ethelbert, Pegwell’s lonely mudflats welcomed more peaceful continental migrants in the guise of St Augustine and his retinue of monks, sent wading ashore here on a mission to civilise the northern barbarians, an effort culminating in the great church of Canterbury and the beginning of England’s 1700-year Christian story. Even today, a fragment of the missionary saint’s bone is still revered in my local church, Pugin’s wondrous neo-Gothic confection of St Augustine’s, a dream in incense-clouded stone of England’s lost High Middle Ages. The England we live in now was birthed on this lonely stretch of low chalk cliffs and brown and squelching shore.

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Where England ends, Europe begins, a geographic fact that built Ramsgate, the town where I live and write this. Still a modest fishing village wedged in a gap between the chalk cliffs, Ramsgate boomed as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. So many regiments passed through the town, so many warships and troop transports hugged the harbour for shelter, that ranks of Regency villas, handsome in brick and stucco, formed up along the cliffs to house the colonels and admirals, sea captains and majors quartered here.

By the war’s end, Ramsgate had played host to so many eligible officers that, in a fit of “scarlet fever” (named after their red uniforms), the town had become an extension of the London season, with fashionable debutantes and anxious spinsters alike hurrying down in flocks to bathe in the North Sea’s chill green waters and marry well. Ramsgate’s street names — Wellington Crescent, Plains of Waterloo, La Belle Alliance Square — still bear witness to this brief moment of Regency glamour, when hussars and dragoons clip-clopped along the fishing port’s cobblestones to board the ships that would take them to death or glory in the continent’s wars. 

The postwar peace cemented Ramsgate’s status as England’s fashionable resort of choice. Lords Canning and Liverpool strolled the town’s leafy squares discussing the business of government. King George IV and Princess Victoria holidayed here, splashing in the brisk North Sea, and delighting the local burghers with their regal presence. Wilkie Collins summered here, as did Dickens before he settled on the more firmly genteel charms of Broadstairs, just along the coast. Karl Marx, too, would holiday here with his long-suffering family, putting aside his lifetime’s work of global revolution for a week or two to enjoy the minstrel bands on the seafront promenades, dashing off brief notes on Europe’s political convulsions to his fellow revolutionaries while Mrs Marx and the children picnicked on the sands with Engels. 

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Along with kings and revolutionaries, statesmen and writers, the town attracted artists in its heyday. William Powell Friths’s 1854 painting Ramsgate Sands — bought by Queen Victoria to remind herself of her childhood holidays — captures the crowds of mid-Victorian holidaymakers down from London by train, paddling, fully-clothed, in the lapping water, sheltering under umbrellas from the sun in their top hats and hooped skirts. The French painter James Tissot sketched fashionable ladies in crinoline taking tea overlooking the mast-filled harbour, while an impoverished Vincent Van Gogh taught art in a squalid school here for his room and board while admiring the “harbour full of all kinds of ships, closed in by stone jetties running into the sea on which one can walk,” where “further out one sees the sea in its natural state, and that’s beautiful.” Writing to his brother Theo, praising the shafts of light that burst through the black clouds after a squall, Van Gogh observed “this town has something very singular; one notices the sea in everything.” 

Turner, a regular visitor to neighbouring Margate, famously remarked in a similar vein to Ruskin that “the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe,” a quality given to them by the North Sea, which forms the clouds that reflect the dying sun’s most lurid moods. Still the violent drama of their sunsets — the livid reds and golds, oranges and pinks — make the sea and sky seem more real and vivid than the ground you stand on. Indeed, living here feels, at times, more like living out at sea than on land. 

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All through the year, sudden sea mists drift ashore and blanket the town in white cloud. The lights of fishing boats blink out at sea through the chill fog even as the road in front of you is swallowed by the gloom. In winter, the North Sea winds make the town’s Victorian houses list and creak like wooden ships in high swell, as waves of rain lash against their window glass. Cars and fixtures rust quickly here, wooden doorframes and windows peel and warp in the harsh salt air. The trees along the seafront are bent sideways by the wind; the salt sea air smells sharp, and fresh, like a living thing caught wriggling in a net.

As far back as 1536, the essayist William Camden remarked that Thanet’s locals were “as it were amphibious creatures, and get their living both by sea and land; for they deal in both elements, and are both fishers and ploughmen; for the same hand that holds the plough, steers the ship likewise.” Smugglers and wreckers as well as fishermen, the locals were viewed with some disfavour by the Customs men sent down by Whitehall to disrupt their illicit trade with the continent. “The seamen here are generally reputed excellent sailors, and shew themselves very dextrous and bold in going off to succour ships in distress,” stated an early 19th century visitor, “but they are too apt to pilfer stranded ships, and ruin those who have already suffered so much.”

The sudden winter storms still disgorge many treasures for Thanet’s dog walkers and beachcombers. Every year, cannon balls and human bones, hunks of amber and painted porcelain are washed ashore from the vast ships’ graveyards lying out at sea, onto the treacherous and shifting sandbanks that reveal themselves, like the smuggler’s tunnels in the chalk, only at low tide.

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A local economy based on smuggling, tourism, fishing and European war has not prospered from the modern era. Like the rest of Thanet, Ramsgate is one of the most deprived areas of the country, sharing little of Southeast England’s wealth. Unemployment is high, life expectancy is low, and better times seem always, like France, barely visible on the horizon. The crumbling Regency and Victorian townhouses, no longer home to scarlet-coated officers or holidaying revolutionaries, have recently attracted another wave of invaders — middle-class London families like my own, priced out of the capital and displacing locals in turn. 

Thanet’s locals and its new army of DFLs — Down From Londoners — still live not-quite integrated lives. Like the rest of Britain, only somewhat more so, in Ramsgate the Somewheres and the Anywheres live jostled side by side. Home, until recently, to the only Ukip-run council in the UK, Thanet’s relationship with the European continent is still an ambiguous thing, and the vote for Brexit here, at 64%, was among the highest in the country.

These tensions find expression in micro-local culture wars, like the battle to re-open the old RAF Manston airfield as a commercial hub. An anti-airport poster in a window here, like an EU flag or BLM placard, is an almost certain signpost of a Londoner-in-exile, as much a marker of gentrification as doors and windows in the sombrest Farrow and Ball shades.

Proximity to the continent is writing Thanet’s history still. An RAF A-400 plane is, as I write, flying back and forth, skimming low above the sea outside my office window, scanning for the migrant boats which are landing in ever-increasing numbers. It is a strange and troubling vision of modern Britain to paddle in the sea with your children while a grey Border Force cutter patrols just offshore, searching for the latest boatloads from the coast of France. Distant past and present still collide here, peace and war, Britain and Europe and the wider world beyond still meshing in strange and unexpected ways as, perhaps, they always have and always will.