Ahve and welcome to Emperor of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and this is episode CXLI, translating suetonius. My guest is Tom Holland, a celebrated

historian and author of such works as Rubicon Dynasty.

His most recent book is a history of Christianity, titled Dominion.

He's now working on a translation of Suetonius for the publisher Penguin.

Their last edition, a translation by Robert Graves of I-Claudeus fame, has been in publication

since 1957.

He took time away from the manuscript to talk to me about his process.

Here's Tom Holland.

I was asked years ago to do a translation of Pencombe Classics of Herodotus,

because Herodotus' histories have been one of the very first

classics that Penguin commissioned decades ago.

So they wanted an updated version of it.

And that took me a very, very long time to do.

And then I finished it and thought, well, you know, that's enough translation.

And then the guy in charge of it said, you know, would I like to do another one and I thought

satonious partly Herodot is quite short and relative to Tacitus it's quite easy

I see what you mean and also the guy who did the previous Penguin Classics translation is Robert Graves.

So I thought, you know, it's massive bragging rights to do the translation that replaces Robert Graveses.

So for all those reasons, and doing the translation is kind of like getting married, but it's the best way to really

get to know someone. I've read Satonius plenty of times but to translate it and

to think about the bare bones of the text you get to know it in a way that you

...