SOURCE: Bowersock, G. W. “Suetonius in the Eighteenth Century.” In Biography in the 18th Century, edited by J. D. Browning, pp. 28-42. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980.

In the following essay, Bowersock presents a survey of works that attest to eighteenth-century scholarly and literary interest in Suetonian-styled biography.

When Boswell appealed to authority in introducing his Life of Johnson, he invoked Plutarch, “the prince,” he declared, “of ancient biographers.” There followed a quotation, first (ostentatiously) in Greek and then in translation, of the familiar lines from Plutarch's Alexander the Great on the value of apparent trifles in a man's action or conversation for the illumination of his character. Earlier in the eighteenth century the Abbé de la Bletterie in France had similarly invoked the name of Plutarch to sanctify his biography of Julian the Apostate, and he had similarly seen fit to cite exactly the same passage from the...