It would be wrong, however, to dismiss, as so many commentators have, the wide variety of Caesarean sensuality as simply the viciousness of twelve abnormal men. They were, after all, a fairly representative lot. They differed from us—and their contemporaries—only in the fact of power, which made it possible for each to act out his most recondite sexual fantasies. This is the psychological fascination of Suetonius. What will men so placed do? Alfred Whitehead once remarked that one got the essence of a culture not by those things which were said at the time but by those things which were not said, the underlying assumptions of the society, too obvious to be stated. Now it is an underlying assumption of twentieth-century America that human beings are either heterosexual, or through some arresting of normal psychic growth, homosexual; the family is central; all else is deviation pleasing or not depending on one’s own tastes and moral preoccupations. Suetonius reveals a very different world. His underlying assumption is that man is bisexual and that given complete freedom to love—or, perhaps more to the point in the case of the Caesars, to violate—others, he will do so, going blithely from male to female as fancy dictates. Nor is Suetonius alone in this assumption of man’s variousness. From Plato to the rise of Pauline Christianity, which tried to put the lid on sex, it is explicit in classical writing.
Gore Vidal, from his 1959 essay “Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars.”
Last week I checked the Oxford Book of Essays out from the local library without looking to see exactly what was inside. Later, when I opened the thing and scanned the table of contents I was pleasantly surprised to see Gore Vidal’s write-up on Suetonius listed there. I recently finished reading The Twelve Caesars and found it every bit as fascinating as he did. Unfortunately I wasn’t equipped with Whitehead’s advice on getting at the essence of a culture, which Vidal puts to such good use. In addition to the question of sexual norms, certain preconceived ideas about political power are addressed in the essay. Suetonius, Vidal says, shows us a world in which it is taken for granted that men pursue and exercise power for the mere pleasure of it. It’s politics as a great game of king-of-the-hill. Vidal suggests that in American democracy, this fact is obscured by all sorts of myths, for instance the noble desire to serve the people. It’s interesting stuff. I wonder where else Whitehead’s advice might be applied?