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Ancient Egypt and Western Asia had a library tradition many centuries before the advent of the Greek script and the building of the Library of Alexandria. The chapter provides an overview of this tradition from the third millennium BCE onwards. It presents a rich archaeological record of many thousands of texts; the scripts, languages, and different types of manuscripts and writing equipment; the scholarship, acquisition, and curation that went into their creation; the various types of collections and assemblages of texts; literacy, reading, and access; and the architecture, storage, and maintenance of these early collections.

This introduction discusses the biographical form of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars, asking what defines a Suetonian biography. Two of its key features are identified: the consistent use of the third person and the division of material into thematic categories. Suetonius is seen as unique in these two regards, with the nearest parallel to the first being Augustus’ continuous use of the first person in the Res Gestae. The possibility that Suetonius was influenced by this text is dealt with briefly, but more likely the two works draw independently on earlier biography and oratory. For the development of Suetonius’ precise divisions, which also separate him from earlier biographers, attention is drawn to his scholarly research, from which he probably originated his distinctive style of organization. The last part of the introduction summarizes the chapters of the book and how each contributes to a new understanding of Suetonius’ works as Lives.

This chapter reconstructs the work attested by the sixth-century writer John Lydus as Suetonius’ Famous Courtesans, a title which has long been used as evidence for the biographer’s prurient interests. Misconceptions about the work are refuted first, followed by a survey of what is known about ancient courtesan literature in general. It is argued that the Famous Courtesans was not in fact a collection of biographies at all, but rather a scholarly work on female characters who appear in Roman poetry. Possible fragments identified from the work are examined, and new ones proposed. This study has important implications for the way in which the Romans viewed Roman poetry, especially its depictions of women, as well as for the closeness and interrelation of Suetonius’ biographical and scholarly endeavours.

The introduction contextualizes Cicero’s decision to strive for a permanent position in the Roman canon as a classic. First, it demonstrates that Cicero used his literary works innovatively in order to extend his political self-fashioning across both space and time. It then discusses the flourishing of classicism in Greek intellectual culture of the second and first centuries BCE, the routes by which this culture came to Rome, and the ambivalent Roman response to Greece in this period. The chapter concludes by arguing that the Hellenized educational system at Rome had a powerful impact upon Roman canon formation, and meant that Roman authors could quickly become classics. For a new man like Cicero who had staked his career on his abilities with Latin prose—and who had learned to use writing and publication to further his career—this was an attractive prospect.

After a brief summary of the book’s argument, the conclusion turns to a consideration of how successful Cicero was in shaping his own reception as a classic. The ancient reception of Cicero’s poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and oratory are all briefly outlined, and it is shown that the works in which Cicero evoked Greek models were among his most successful. This is because Roman literary criticism and scholarship had a powerful tendency to mimic the methods of Greek literary criticism and scholarship, and authors who had themselves mimicked Greek models were easy targets for this approach. A comparison is drawn between the ancient reception of Cicero and the ancient reception of Vergil, and the conclusion closes with the suggestion that the bids for classical immortality made by the Augustan poets (Vergil, Horace, Ovid) were modelled in part on Cicero’s successful construction of himself as a classic.

The chapter compares the find-spots of lexical and literary texts from three different places: Shuruppag and Tell Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamia and Ebla situated in modern-day Syria. In Shuruppag and Ebla lexical and literary texts have been found in official buildings of the ruling elite, also combination with a massive amount of administrative texts. It can be seen that lexical and literary texts were produced, kept, and transmitted by scribes in the context of the administration of the different cities. They played therefore not only an important role in transmission and mastery of the cuneiform writing system, the main administrative tool. Their importance for the elites resulted in the development of a network of knowledge that spread Mesopotamian myths and lore over the Near East in the third millennium BCE.

This chapter analyses an often-ignored fragment in Diomedes’ Ars grammatica, on the origin of pantomime, that has been disputed as deriving from either Suetonius’ Illustrious Men or his writing on games. An argument is made for the latter, and Tertullian’s use of Suetonius is also compared, to shed light on the writing’s structure. Suetonius’ probable source for this discussion was Varro, and it therefore contains trustworthy information. The development of the genre of comedy is discussed, and the evidence of Suetonius on the subject of theatre—not only in this fragment but also in the Caesars—is seen as a helpful corrective to the study of ancient drama more generally. Suetonius’ view of the protean quality of ancient comedy, and its mixture with other genres in its earliest roots, has a real and neglected basis in fact.

This concluding chapter reviews the lessons learned from the collection, paying particular attention to the ways commentaries empower their users by providing ready access to expert knowledge even as they empower their authors through patterns of inclusion and exclusion that tacitly set the agenda for future inquiry. The role of teaching in the shaping of commentaries is also emphasized. The chapter then surveys recent experiments in online systems of annotation including both works born digital and those converted to digital form, and weighs the merits of the traditional printed commentary against the promise of digital technology to reshape the very idea of the classical commentary