I9I3.] ROLFE— SUETONIUS AND HIS BIOGRAPHIES. 217 



sition of encomiastic biography.*'^ Therefore the fact that Sue- 

 tonius took as his model the " grammatical " biographies of the 

 Greeks does not mean that the Romans derived the idea of that 

 branch of literature from across the seas. On the contrary, there 

 are good reasons for supposing that biography was one of the nu- 

 merous forms of writing in which a beginning had been made before 

 the days of Livius Andronicus, and it seems altogether probable that 

 considerable progress had been made before that time. 



At first thought we should not be inclined to look to the Romans 

 for a form of literature in which the personal element is so strong, 

 at least in the earlier period of their history. It is a commonplace 

 of criticism that at the beginning of their national life they were led 

 by their situation to form a military and political organization in 

 which the interests of the community were paramount and those of 

 the individual distinctly subordinate. To this we may attribute the 

 late and exotic impulse to many forms of creative literature and the 

 prominence given to military science and to law. Heine's witty 

 characterization of the people as " eine casuistische Soldateska " con- 

 tains as much truth as any generalization epigrammatically ex- 

 pressed. The Greeks, on the contrary, exalted the individual, and 

 their greatness in literature and the arts was in marked contrast to 

 their failure to achieve political unity, and their consequent early 

 relation to Rome of Grcccia capta. That they were so late in devel- 

 oping a biographical literature is doubtless to be attributed to their 

 original notion of the moral and didactic function of that class of 

 writing and its subordination to other forms of philosophical teach- 

 ing, and to the relatively restricted nature of the " grammatical " 

 biography in its earlier stages. 



In spite of the suppression of the individual in early Rome, there 

 were certain customs which favored the production of biographies 

 of a laudatory character, the purpose of which was in part moral 

 precept, as with the Greeks, and in part the gratification of national 

 and family pride. We are told that it was usual at banquets to sing 

 the praises of illustrious men and their houses. Cicero twice alludes 



** See Hendrickson, " The Proconsulate of Cn. Julius Agrippa," Univ. of 

 Chicago Decenn. Puhl., VI., 29 ff. 



