Suetonius

c. 69–after 122 CE

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a friend of the younger Pliny, held the secretaryships of studies, libraries and correspondence under Trajan and Hadrian, with access to the imperial archives. His Lives of the Twelve Caesars, from Julius Caesar to Domitian, arrange each life by topics — ancestry, public career, private habits, appearance, omens, death — and preserve letters, sayings and gossip found nowhere else; they fixed the pattern of biography for centuries.