Seutonius, a Roman historian, was the author of The Lives of the Caesars. This biography sets the historian's career and his method of dealing with his subject matter in the context of Roman society in the early Empire, and draws a picture of the coherence of Suetonius's life, appointments, scholarship and literary activities. Seutonius is presented as a man of learning, rather than as a failed narrative historian. This portrait takes account of recent evidence concerning his life and seeks to clarify the character of The Lives of the Caesars as a description of emperors and Roman imperial society by a scholarly biographer who himself was in the service of a scholarly Caesar - the Emperor Hadrian.