1 Dr Michael Beer Food as metaphor for good and evil in biographies of the later Roman emperors. When compiling his biography of Alexander the Great, Plutarch of Chaeronea, writing at the end of the first century AD, asserted that oute gar historias graphomen, alla bious, oute tais epiphanestatais praxesi pantos enesti delosis aretes e kakias, alla pragma brachu pollakis kai rema kai paidia tis emphasin ethous epoiese mallon e machai murionekroi kai parataxeis hai megistai kai poliorikai poleon 1 For Plutarch, it appears, the essential truth of character may often be best revealed in the minutiae of quotidian life. What a man does in his private life, his cultural, dietary or sexual predilections, are at least as significant as his actions in the public sphere. This partly helps to explain the differences that can be detected between the ancient disciplines of ancient biography, as typified by the accounts of the lives of illustrious public figures and rulers from the pens of Plutarch, Suetonius and the authors of the Historiae Augustae (hereafter referred to as the Scriptores Historiae Ausgustae, or SHA), and the annalistic, historiographic accounts of events from Polybius, Livy, Tacitus or Cassius Dio. Biography often dealt with traits of personality and individual habits which, if treated of at all by the ancient historiographers, were dismissed as trivial, inconsequential or somehow beneath the lofty concerns of the historiographer’s craft. 2 At this stage, it would be pertinent to make a few comments on the reliability of the SHA as an historical source (the work is much longer than is possible to deal with here: I have limited myself to the section which dealt with the lives of emperors (and 1 Plutarch Alexander I. 1: ‘For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most remarkable actions there is not always a revelation of excellence or wickedness; but a small act like a word or a game often makes a greater revelation of habit than battles where thousands die, or the greatest arrays of soldiers, or sieges of cities’. 2 There is however a good deal of overlap. Tacitus’ writings display much concern with biographical detail and see the foibles of Tiberius and Nero as fodder for condemnation. Both genres see their writings as fulfilling essentially a didactic function.