Suetonius’ Phoney Followers: The Invention of Emperor-Biography in the Historia Augusta

The Historia Augusta (HA), a collection of highly fictionalized lives of Roman emperors written about 400 CE, creates a rich literary heritage for itself, some of which is real. It has a genuine and complex engagement with Suetonius’ De vita Caesarum, but it also cites dozens of non-existent authors of the second and third centuries. The effect is to create an emperor-biography tradition that begins with Suetonius, goes through the HA’s fake authors and ends with the HA’s own fake narrative personae ostensibly writing under Diocletian and Constantine. I will examine how the HA constructs genre characteristics for this supposed tradition, how it imagines the relationship between the emperor and the Roman literary tradition, and the distance the HA creates between its fictional setting and its actual Theodosian-era readers.