[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Recent years have seen a remarkable explosion in research on Cassius Dio and his Roman History, and a crucial part has been played in this by the Cassius Dio Network, founded by the Danish scholars Carsten Lange and Jesper Majbom Madsen, in collaboration with the North Americans Adam Kemezis and Josiah Osgood. The Network’s conferences have led to the publication of six collections of essays over the years 2016-2022. Five of these are substantial volumes, published in the Brill series Historiography of Rome and its Empire, also founded by Lange and Madsen.[1] The volume reviewed here, which arose from a 2018 gathering organized by Madsen, is slimmer, and so has been published in a different series, with welcome availability in open access.
The change from republican government (which, like other Greeks of the imperial period, Dio termed dēmokratia) to the monarchy of the emperors was the crucial development in his history, and he accordingly structured the work around it, devoting the last thirty of his eighty books to the emperors and their monarchical rule. It is thus fitting that one of the Network’s volumes should be devoted to that theme, and in fact the following year saw the publication of another collective volume on the same broad subject.[2] The present volume brings together a stimulating group of papers; despite some individual flaws, the volume as a whole makes a valuable contribution to the topic.
Dio repeatedly asserts his belief that monarchy was the only viable form of government for Rome and its empire, and by his day this had long been the only tenable view. The editors, in their introduction, remark (p. 8) that ‘it is perhaps better to see the historian not as an “adherent” or “advocate” of monarchy … but rather as a theorist of its development and execution’, and follow this with helpful observations on the interpretation of Dio’s political terminology (pp. 9-14).
The first chapter, by Gianpaolo Urso, is an erudite discussion of how Dio envisaged the formal enactment of monarchy. He rightly stresses the importance which Dio (probably misguidedly) attached to the assumption of Imperator as a praenomen first by Caesar, and then by Octavian/Augustus and his successors (43.4.2-5; 52.41.3-4; 53.17.4-5). Dio has caused confusion by appearing to date the establishment of monarchy at three different points: in 31, when the Actium victory won him supreme power (51.1.1-2; 56.30.5); in 29, after (Dio claims) he had been persuaded by Maecenas to retain the monarchy and accepted the name Imperator (52.1.1, 41.3-4); and in 27, after the constitutional settlement had been approved by the senate and people, which he interpreted as the acceptance of monarchy (53.17.1). Urso’s solution is that Dio conceived of the institution of monarchy as a two-stage process: the assumption of the name Imperator was the condition for its establishment, and the senate’s acceptance of monarchy was the ‘momento conclusivo’. This seems too schematic an analysis, and Urso’s dismissal of the Actium dating as unimportant is unconvincing.[3]
Martina Bono discusses Dio’s ideal of how emperors should conduct their government, as evinced especially in Maecenas’ speech, in his obituary comments on Augustus, and in the ‘anecdotal-biographical’ sections which he included in his accounts of individual reigns. On this evidence, she argues, Dio conceived of imperial government as ideally a mixture of ‘democracy’ and monarchy, and applauded emperors whose conduct was dēmotikos or dēmokratikos, terms corresponding to Latin writers’ concept of the civilis princeps, and by which he understood above all respect for the senate’s rights. Bono has now discussed these matters at much greater length in a monograph,[4] and it is useful to have this succinct statement of her views.
Dio’s ideal of imperial government is also the theme of Mads Lindholmer’s contribution, which mounts a forceful challenge to the usual view (reasserted by other contributors) that Dio held that good emperors from Augustus on welcomed debate in the senate and valued the senators’ advice. Dio, he maintains, thought that emperors should treat the senate with respect, inform it of important matters, and conduct business through it, but for advice they should look instead just to a smaller group of chosen counsellors. Lindholmer argues his case vigorously, but sometimes presses the evidence too hard. Maecenas’ counsel to govern with the ‘best men’ merely makes a contrast with giving power to the mob (52.14). Dio does indeed say that Augustus consulted the senate chiefly through his probouleutic consilium (53.21.4-5), but, since it was mainly composed of senators chosen by the lot, these were not handpicked advisors, as Lindholmer claims (p. 77), and Augustus’ successors anyway discontinued this innovation. When Dio speaks of emperors ‘communicating’ business to the senate, using (ἐπι)κοινόω, this may sometimes imply merely informing them without ensuing debate, but need not always do so.
Madsen devotes his chapter to Dio’s poorly preserved treatment of the three Flavian emperors, which he views as presenting the strengths and weaknesses of monarchical government in microcosm: Vespasian was the first emperor since Augustus to rule as an emperor should rule, but Domitian revived tyranny. Madsen argues that Dio saw this as pointing forward to the Severan rulers in his own day and illustrating the dangers of dynastic succession, and that his reservations about Titus reflect his preference for adoptive succession.
Antonio Pistellato too explores ways in which Dio’s own experience may have influenced his account of earlier reigns, noting parallels between his portrayals of the excesses of Caligula and Commodus and of the senatorial reactions to their assassinations. After Caligula’s death some senators argued for the restoration of ‘democracy’. This was out of the question later, but Commodus’ short-lived successor Pertinax (hardly the senate’s free choice, as Pistellato claims, 132) declared his devotion to the senate by reviving the title of princeps senatus. Pistellato goes on to suggest that the ideal of the civilis princeps ruling in collaboration with the senate may have owed something both to Cicero’s conception of the role of the optimus civis in the De Republica and to Stoic influences, but, in view of its wide currency, such speculations seem superfluous.
The theme of Stoicism is continued in Christopher Noe’s contribution, which seeks to show that Stoic philosophy had a fundamental influence on Dio’s thought. He makes his case through consideration of passages in Maecenas’ speech and in Dio’s account of recent events. Unfortunately, however, he has wholly failed to convince me that any of the passages examined constitutes good evidence for distinctively Stoic thinking.
Andrew Scott has made major contributions to the study of the contemporary part of Dio’s history through a series of insightful papers, a commentary on Dio’s final books and a comprehensive monograph.[5] Here, like Madsen and Pistellato, he focuses on the ‘interconnectedness’ of Dio’s history: ‘Dio’s work’, he observes (p. 165), ‘is rife with correspondences through time, which serve to show the destructive consequences of certain behaviours and political changes, and which thus give Dio’s work an overall interpretive framework.’ Dio shows contemporary emperors, Scott argues, as exhibiting wrong behaviours through misinterpreting the Roman past: Pertinax, for example, sought to re-order the Roman state like Augustus, but failed to realize that this could not safely be done all at once,[6] and Septimius Severus wrongly appealed to Augustus as an exemplar of cruelty (76(75).8.1). Scott goes on to draw a conclusion about the utility Dio may have conceived for his history: ‘Dio may have hoped that those who read it would find proper models to emulate and thus appropriately reform Rome’s degenerated monarchy’ (p. 184).
I must apologize for the long delay in the production of this review.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Christopher Burden-Strevens, Jesper Majbom Madsen and Antonio Pistellato)
‘Ritorno alla monarchia’, tra Cesare e Augusto: le origini del principato in Cassio Dione (Gianpaolo Urso)
Teoria politica e scrittura storiografica nei ‘libri imperiali’ della Storia Romana di Cassio Dione (Martina Bono)
Cassius Dio’s Ideal Government and the Imperial Senate (Mads Lindholmer)
Between Civilitas and Tyranny: Cassius Dio’s Biographical Narrative of the Flavian Dynasty (Jesper Majbom Madsen)
Δημοκρατεῖσθαι or μοναρχεῖσθαι, That is the Question: Cassius Dio and the Senatorial Principate (Antonio Pistellato)
The ‘Age of Iron and Rust’ in Cassius Dio’s Roman History: Influences from Stoic Philosophy (Christopher Noe)
Misunderstanding History: Past and Present in Cassius Dio’s Contemporary Books (Andrew G. Scott)
Notes
[1] C. H. Lange and J. M. Madsen (eds), Cassius Dio: Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician (2016); J. Osgood and C. Baron (eds), Cassius Dio and the Late Roman Republic (2019) (BMCR 2020.05.29); C. H. Lange and A. G. Scott (eds), Cassius Dio: the Impact of Violence, War and Civil War (2020); J. M. Madsen and C. H. Lange (eds), Cassius Dio the Historian: Methods and Approaches (2021); A. M. Kemezis, C. Bailey and B. Poletti (eds), The Intellectual Climate of Cassius Dio: Greek and Roman Pasts (2022).
[2] C. Davenport and C. Mallan (eds), Emperors and Political Culture in Cassius Dio’s Roman History (Cambridge, 2021) (BMCR 2022.02.17).
[3] Urso supports his case with a comparable two-stage analysis of Dio’s conception of the ending of dēmokratia, but this too does not convince: the two sets of oracles on which it is based (45.17.6; 47.40.7) surely both point forward to the battle of Philippi. For a different view of Dio’s triple dating, see now K. V. Markov, in Madsen and Lange, Cassius Dio the Historian, p. 112.
[4] Martina Bono, Alla ricerca della civilitas. Le relazioni tra princeps e aristocrazia nella Storia Romana di Cassio Dione (Besançon, 2022).
[5] A. G. Scott, Emperors and Usurpers. An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s Roman History Books 79)78)-80(80) (AD 27-229) (New York, 2018); An Age of Iron and Rust. Cassius Dio and the History of His Time (Leiden and Boston, 2023).
[6] Dio makes this criticism of Pertinax at 74(73).10.3. Scott could have reinforced his point by citing 52.41.1, where Dio asserts that Augustus did not implement all of Maecenas’ proposals at once ‘fearing that he might meet with some failure, if he sought to change men’s ways completely’.