The oldest surviving copy of The Twelve Caesars was made in Tours in the late 8th or early 9th century AD, and is currently held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is missing the prologue and the first part of the life of Julius Caesar, as are all other surviving copies of the book. Including the Tours manuscript, there are nineteen surviving copies of The Twelve Caesars from the 13th century or earlier. The presence of certain errors in some copies but not others suggests that the nineteen books can be split into two branches of transmission of roughly equal size.
