Wednesday, October 05, 2011

The Twelve Caesars - page 136, Tiberius

Some aspects of [Tiberius's] criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe.


I will leave it at that. Suetonius goes into way too much detail for me to comfortably post the subsequent sentences here. Even Project Gutenberg saw fit to excise the worst bits from their online reader version of The Twelve Caesars. So if you ever find this passage to read, read it at your own risk.

You can't unread it. And you will never get it out of your mind.

2 comments:

AlanDP said...

Of course you know you have just forced me to read this book for myself.

Albatross said...

There are some good parts to it. Though some of it can be a bit boring, most of it isn't, and it really is a good read, even if you are not particularly interested in Roman history. I'm not, and I like reading The Twelve Caesars a great deal. I recommend the Robert Graves translation, which is the one I have been quoting from.