also of a people called Suebi, who shortly after the middle of the 6th century settled north of the Unstrut. There is evidence also for a people called Suebi in the district above the mouth of the Scheldt. It is likely that both these settlements were colonies from the Suebi of whom we hear in the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith as neighbours of the Angli, and whose name may possibly be preserved in Schwabstedt on the Treene. The question has recently been raised whether these Suebi should be identified with the people whom the Romans called Heruli. After the 7th century the name Suebi is practically only applied to the Alamannic Suebi (Schwaben), with whom it remains a territorial designation in Württemberg and Bavaria until the present day.
See Caesar, De bello gallico, i. 37, 51 sqq., iv. I sqq., vi. 9 sqq.; Strabo, p. 290 seq.; Tacitus, Germania, 38 sqq.; K. Zeuss, Die Deutscher: und die Nachbarstämme, pp. 55 sqq., 315 sqq.; C. Bremer in Paul's Grundriss (2nd ed.), iii. 915-950; H. M. Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation, 216 sqq. (Cambridge, 1907). (F. G. M. B.)
SUECA, a town of eastern Spain, in the province of Valencia, near the left bank of the river Júcar, and on the Silla-Cullera railway. Pop. (1900), 14,435. Sueca is separated from the Mediterranean Sea (7 m. east) by the Sierra de Cullera. It is a modern town, although many of the houses have the flat roofs, view-turrets (miradores) and horseshoe arches characteristic of Moorish architecture. There are a few handsome public buildings, such as the hospital, town-hall and theatre. Sueca has a thriving trade in grain and fruit from the Júcar Valley, which is irrigated by waterways created by the Moors.
SUESS, EDUARD (1831–), Austrian geologist, was born in London on the 20th of August 1831, his father, a native of Saxony, having settled there as a German merchant. Three years later the family removed to Prague, and in 1845 to Vienna. Eduard Suess was educated for commercial life, but early displayed a bent for geology. At the age of nineteen he published a short sketch of the geology of Carlsbad and its mineral waters; and in 1852 he was appointed an assistant in the Imperial museum of Vienna. There he studied the fossil Brachiopoda, and manifested such ability that in 1857 he was appointed professor of geology at the university. In 1862 he relinquished his museum duties, and gave his whole time to special research and teaching, retaining his professorship until 1901. Questions of ancient physical geography, such as the former connexion between northern Africa and Europe, occupied his attention; and in 1862 he published an essay on the soils and water-supply of Vienna. He was elected a member of the town council, and in 1869 to a seat in the Diet of Lower Austria, which he retained until 1896. Meanwhile he continued his geological and palaeontological work dealing with the Tertiary strata of the Vienna Basin, also turning his attention to the problems connected with the evolution of the earth's surface-features, on which he wrote a monumental treatise. This, the great task of his life, embodied the results of personal research and of a comprehensive study of the work of the leading geologists of all countries; it is entitled Antlitz der Erde, of which the first volume was published in 1885, the second in 1888, and pt. i. of the third volume in 1901. The work has been translated into French, and (in part) into English. Suess was elected a corresponding member of the Institute of France in 1889, and a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1894. In 1896 the Geological Society of London awarded to him the Wollaston medal.
Memoir (with portrait), by Sir A. Geikie, Nature (May 4, 1905).
SUESSULA, an ancient town of Campania, Italy, in the plain 1½ m. W. of the modern Cancello, 9 m. S.E. of the ancient Capua. Its earlier history is obscure. In 338 B.C. it obtained Latin rights from Rome. In the Samnite and Hannibalic wars it was strategically important as commanding the entrance to the Caudine pass. Sulla seems to have founded a colony here. It is frequently named as an episcopal see up till the 10th century A.D., and was for a time the chief town of a small Lombard principality. It was several times plundered by the Saracens, and at last abandoned by the inhabitants in consequence of the malaria. The ruins of the town lie within the Bosco d'Acerra, a picturesque forest. They were more conspicuous in the 18th century than they now are, but traces of the theatre may still be seen, and débris of other buildings. Oscan tombs were excavated there between 1878 and 1886, and important finds of vases, bronzes, &c., have been made. The dead were generally buried within slabs of tufa arranged to form a kind of sarcophagus (see F. von Duhn in Römische Mitteilungen, 1887, p. 235 sqq.). Suessula lay on the line of the Via Popillia, which was here intersected by a road which ran from Neapolis through Acerrae, and on to the Via Appia, which it reached just west of the Caudine pass. On the hills above Cancello to the east of Suessula was situated the fortified camp of M. Claudius Marcellus, which covered Nola and served as a post of observation against Hannibal in Capua. (T. As.)
SUET (M. Eng. sewet, a diminutive of O. Fr. seu, suis, mod. suif, lard, from Lat. sebum, or sevum, tallow, grease, probably allied to sapo, soap), the hard flaked white fat lying round the kidneys of the sheep or ox; that of the pig forms lard. Beef-suet is especially used in cookery.
SUETONIUS TRANQUILLUS, GAIUS, Roman historian, lived during the end of the 1st and the first half of the 2nd century A.D. He was the contemporary of Tacitus and the younger Pliny, and his literary work seems to have been chiefly done in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian (A.D. 98-138). His father was military tribune in the XIIIth legion, and he himself began life as a teacher of rhetoric and an advocate. To us he is known as the biographer of the twelve Caesars (including Julius) down to Domitian. The lives are valuable as covering a good deal of ground where we are without the guidance of Tacitus. As Suetonius was the emperor Hadrian's private secretary (magister epistolarum), he must have had access to many important documents in the Imperial archives, e.g. the decrees and transactions of the senate. In addition to written and official documents, he picked up in society a mass of information and anecdotes, which, though of doubtful authenticity, need not be regarded as mere inventions of his own. They give a very good idea of the kind of court gossip prevalent in Rome at the time. He was a friend and correspondent of the younger Pliny, who when appointed governor of Bithynia took Suetonius with him. Pliny also recommended him to the favourable notice of the emperor Trajan, “as a most upright, honourable, and learned man, whom persons often remember in their wills because of his merits,” and he begs that he may be made legally capable of inheriting these bequests, for which under a special enactment Suetonius was, as a childless married man, disqualified. Hadrian's biographer, Aelius Spartianus, tells us that Suetonius was deprived of his private secretaryship because he had not been sufficiently observant of court etiquette towards the emperor's wife during Hadrian's absence in Britain.
The Lives of the Caesars has always been a popular work. It is rather a chronicle than a history. It gives no picture of the society of the time, no hints as to the general character and tendencies of the period. It is the emperor who is always before us, and yet the portrait is drawn without any real historical judgment or insight. It is the personal anecdotes, several of which are very amusing, that give the lives their chief interest; but the author panders rather too much to a taste for scandal and gossip. None the less he throws considerable light on an important period, and next to Tacitus and Dio Cassius is the chief (sometimes the only) authority. The language is clear and simple. The work was continued by Marius Maximus (3rd century), who wrote a history of the emperors from Nerva to Elagabalus (now lost). Suetonius was a voluminous writer. Of his De viris illustribus, the lives of Terence and Horace, fragments of those of Lucan and the elder Pliny and the greater part of the chapter on grammarians and rhetoricians, are extant. Other works by him (now lost) were: Prata ( = λειμῶνες patchwork), in ten books, a kind of encyclopaedia; the Roman Year, Roman Institutions and Customs, Children's Games among the Greeks, Roman Public Spectacles, On the Kings, On Cicero's Republic.
Editio princeps, 1470; editions by great scholars: Erasmus, Isaac Casaubon, J. G. Graevius, P. Burmann; the best complete annotated edition Is still that of C. G. Baumgarten-Crusius (1816); recent editions by H. T. Peck (New York, 1889); Leo Preud'homme (1906); M. Ihm (1907). Editions of separate lives: Augustus, by E. S. Shuckburgh (with useful introduction, 1896); Claudius, by H. Smilda (1896), with notes and parallel passages from other authorities. The best editions of the text are by C. L. Roth (1886), and A. Reifferscheid (not including the Lives, 1860). On the De viris illustrious, see
