Brill’s companion to Cassius Dio

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

Cassius Dio’s Roman History, covering all of Roman history from the origins down to the author’s retirement in 229 CE, was one of the most ambitious historiographical projects of antiquity. Recent years have seen a revolution in its study. An extraordinary outpouring of Dio scholarship has included not just editions, commentaries, monographs and articles, but also (between 2016 and 2022) the publication of no fewer than nine collective volumes of essays wholly devoted to Dio. Older scholarship generally took a modest view of Dio’s quality, but a new consensus has now emerged that he is much more deserving of study as literary artist and political thinker, and as an original historian who managed his vast enterprise with considerable success. The production of a Companion to draw all the threads together is thus an eminently worthwhile initiative. Its declared aims are ‘to provide a point of entry to those new to Dio and also to point to ways forward for future studies of him and his work’, and ‘to provide both newcomers to Cassius Dio and experts an up-to-date and analytical approach to key issues surrounding Dio’s work’ (1, 14).

The volume’s editors are admirably qualified for the task: Jesper Majbom Madsen’s publications include a fine short introduction to Dio and he was also the co-founder, with Carsten Lange, of the Cassius Dio Network, which produced six of the collective volumes, while Andrew Scott is the author of definitive publications on Dio’s history of his own time, including a commentary on Dio’s final books and a monograph.[1] Their introduction briskly  despatches several key Dio issues: Dio’s political and literary careers, and the partial preservation of the Roman History (touched on more fully in some chapters in Part 3). On the much-disputed question of the chronology of the history’s composition, they insist that Dio cannot have begun gathering materials until around 201, but leave open whether he began then or around ten years later.

With the ground thus cleared, Part 1 seeks to set Dio in context as ‘Greek intellectual and Roman politician’. The first two chapters focus on Dio as the highly cultivated scion of an aristocratic Greek family from Nicaea, one of the two chief cities of the province of Bithynia. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen provides an excellent overview of Bithynia and Nicaea and of the evidence for the Cassii there and for Dio’s names, and then gives a minimalist estimate of the part played by Bithynia in his history. Sulochana Asirvatham reaches a similarly negative conclusion in her discussion of Dio’s ‘Greek and Roman identity’, arguing cogently that, by comparison with other Greek imperial writers, he shows little trace of pride in the Greek past, and conceives of paideia not as exclusively Greek, but as bilingual, with a particular interest in its possession by Romans.

Luke Pitcher follows with a succinct survey of Dio’s place in Greco-Roman historiography, focusing on his debt to Thucydides (in Pitcher’s view, primarily stylistic) and his adoption of his Roman predecessors’ annalistic format, and stressing the flexibility with which he deployed them both. He makes the intriguing (if perhaps far-fetched) suggestion that Dio’s division of his work into eighty books emulated the alleged eighty books of Rome’s earliest record, the Annales Maximi. Caillan Davenport concludes Part 1 with a lucid discussion of Dio’s portrayal of the senate’s role in government, stressing his conception of the senate as ideally working in effective partnership with the emperor and the ‘curiously voiceless’ way in which he presents his own role. ‘The Roman History’, Davenport concludes (104), ‘is the work of a senator who saw it all, but who only spoke out after he had played his part.’

Part 2 brings together three outstanding chapters on the neglected theme of Dio’s reception. Christopher Mallan combines this with a valuable survey of the fortunes of Dio’s text, first in Byzantium and then in western Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. This includes some recondite material, for example on Dio’s place in early humanists’ libraries or Obadiah Oddy’s abortive plans for an edition, but Mallan also elucidates how Dio’s editors up to the admirable Reimar (1750-2) tackled the task of reconstructing a text of the Roman History from the surviving manuscripts, excerpts and epitomes. It is a pity that space prevented him from continuing the story up to the end of the nineteenth century, when Boissevain’s edition shaped the text into the form in which we still engage with it today. Boissevain sought to reconstitute the text as closely to the original as possible, a goal about which Mallan’s conclusion expresses doubts (128).

Josiah Osgood contributes a brilliant discussion of Gibbon’s use of Dio, analysing his debt to Dio as a source and also to Reimar’s edition, and demonstrating Dio’s influence on, for example, Gibbon’s conception of post-Antonine decline and of the growing power of the army. Gibbon was nonetheless not an admirer of Dio, criticizing him especially, as Osgood shows, for his part in propagating the doctrine that the emperor was freed from the laws, for which Gibbon dubs him ‘that slavish historian’.

This part is concluded by Adam Kemezis’ superb analytical survey of recent scholarship on Dio, comprehensively covering all work published between 2010 and 2021. This chapter provides an invaluable roadmap to the recent outpouring and puts all those interested in any aspect of Dio hugely in Kemezis’ debt.

Part 3 is the Companion’s core, comprising six chapters dealing with successive chronological segments of the Roman History, with a few overlaps and one omission (the civil wars following Nero). Christopher Baron opens with Books 1-35, which cover the period down to 70 BCE and are preserved for us mainly by extracts, chiefly the so-called Constantinian Excerpts, and (down to Book 21) the epitome of Zonaras. Baron devotes most of the chapter to a careful discussion of this material, its presentation by editors, and its evidence for book structure. This provides a helpful guide to the maze, but unfortunately leaves him only brief space for other aspects of these books.

Estelle Bertrand then contributes a stimulating overview of Dio’s treatment of the years 146-31 in Books 21-50. She rightly insists that Dio, organizing his work in decads (ten-book groups), extended his account of the Republic’s collapse across these thirty books, although Books 36-50 (substantially surviving in manuscript) are much better known to us than Books 22-35, for which we lack even Zonaras’ epitome. Bertrand’s discussion highlights the tension between annalistic and thematic organization, the prominence given to dynasteia (‘a power model that Dio opposes to the Republic’), and Dio’s emphasis on the progressive degradation of Roman institutions and the linkage between Roman expansion and the Republic’s fall.

Madsen follows with a discussion of Dio’s treatment of Octavian/Augustus, in which he restates the case he has already made elsewhere that Dio held a ‘biased and idealized’ view of Octavian/Augustus as seeking power merely for the sake of the common good. Dio certainly regarded Augustus’ establishment of monarchy as in the Romans’ best interest and warmly approved of his conduct as ruler. However, Dio never speaks of him as acting only for the common good, as he does of, for example, the younger Cato, and many readers are likely to agree with other scholars that he took a realist view of Augustus’ rise to power as achieved with duplicity and single-minded determination.

The next three chapters deal with Dio’s treatment of emperors from Tiberius on, for which we are mostly dependent on Xiphilinus’ epitome and the Constantinian Excerpts. Eleanor Cowan examines the part played by fear and loathing in his portraits of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and Antonio Pistellato points out recursive features in his account of emperors from Nerva to Commodus. Finally, Scott discusses Dio’s handling of contemporary history from Commodus on, lucidly summarizing interpretations developed in his earlier publications. Dio, he argues, analysed the Roman governmental system in his own day as debased from an Antonine peak above all by reversion to hereditary succession and marginalization of the senate.

Part 4 comprises five chapters on various key themes relating to the Roman History. The first three all deal with the extended and in their content largely invented direct-discourse speeches which are such a notable feature of the work up to the death of Augustus (thereafter speeches appear to have been shorter and less frequent). Earlier scholarship usually took a low view of these speeches as rhetorical display pieces with only limited relation to their context, but recent writers have estimated them much more highly, insisting that they are embedded in their narrative context and that Dio uses them both to serve his dramatic purposes and to develop his interpretation of key historical developments. This assessment is powerfully restated by Marianne Coudry in her chapter on the Republican speeches, and for the most important of all Dio’s speech-episodes, the Agrippa-Maecenas debate, by Christopher Burden-Strevens, who has been a notable champion of this approach, above all in his recent monograph.[2]

Coudry well brings out how Dio selects the occasions for speeches to ‘enable him to underline some moments he considers as turning-points’ and creates thematic echoes between speeches, and by her analyses of speech-episodes like the Lex Gabinia debate and Caesar’s speech quelling mutiny at Vesontio she shows how Dio uses them to bring out fatal flaws in the Republic’s workings. Burden-Strevens eloquently argues that the Agrippa-Maecenas debate ‘condenses Cassius Dio’s entire theoretical framework for the collapse of the Republic, the emergence of monarchical rule, and the means by which that rule may be made durable’ (373). He acknowledges that Dio also uses Maecenas’ speech to make proposals for administrative reform for his own time (375-6, 400), but rather underplays this aspect.

A very different approach is taken by Roger Rees in his discussion of Dio’s two funerary speeches, given by Antony for Caesar and by Tiberius for Augustus. He notes that these are the first known funerary speeches in ancient historiography since Thucydides, and makes interesting observations about them in comparison with each other and with the Roman funerary tradition. However, he does not consider the ironic contrasts here, as in so many of Dio’s other speeches, between the speakers’ claims and the historian’s narrative or how these speeches contributed to Dio’s interpretation of their honorands.

The two final chapters are devoted to major themes which have recently received overdue attention, namely Dio’s treatment of women (Caitlin Gillespie) and of civil war (Carsten Lange). Gillespie provides a comprehensive survey of the part played by women, Roman and foreign, throughout the Roman History as ‘models and anti-models of feminity’, from the legendary figures of early Rome to the imperial women of his own time. Lange, who has published extensively on civil war both in Dio and more widely, here brings together stimulating reflections on the pervasiveness of stasis and civil war across so much of Dio’s history, his terminology for it and portrayal of its multifarious aspects.

If the Companion has a flaw, it is that discussion of some key themes such as Dio’s sources and models and his structuring of the history has been split across the chronological surveys of Part 3, with some resulting patchiness. However, the volume overall is a great success and fully achieves its stated aims. The quality of the individual chapters is high, and many make important contributions. Each chapter includes a survey of recent work on its topic, and this, together with Kemezis’ masterly overview, makes the volume an admirable guide to the recent Dio explosion, to which it is itself a most valuable addition.

Authors and Titles

Introduction

Reviewing Cassius Dio (Jesper Majbom Madsen and Andrew G. Scott)

Part 1. Cassius Dio, Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician

1. Cassius Dio’s Bithynian Background (Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen)
2. Cassius Dio’s Greek and Roman Identity (Sulochana R. Asirvatham)
3. Cassius Dio and Greco-Roman Historiography (Luke Pitcher)
4. The Senator’s Story (Caillan Davenport)

Part 2. Text and Reception

5. From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: Cassius Dio’s Roman History in Western Europe, 1421-1750 (Christopher T. Mallan)
6. Cassius Dio in Gibbon (Josiah Osgood)
7. A Survey of Recent Scholarship on Cassius Dio (Adam M. Kemezis)

Part 3. Chronological Surveys

8. The Lost Books of Cassius Dio’s Roman History (1-35) (Christopher Baron)
9. Cassius Dio and the Last Decad(e)s of the Roman Republic: Understanding the Collapse of the Republican Regime (Books 21-50) (Estelle Bertrand)
10. The Almost Flawless Princeps: Cassius Dio’s Idealized Portrait of Octavian/Augustus (Jesper Majbom Madsen)
11. Cassius Dio and the Julio-Claudians: Fear and Loathing in the Early Principate (Eleanor Cowan)
12. Cassius Dio and the Emperors: From the Flavians to the Antonines (Antonio Pistellato)
13. Cassius Dio and the Age of Iron and Rust (Andrew G. Scott)

Part 4. Key Themes

14. The Republican Speeches (Marianne Coudry)
15. The Agrippa-Maecenas Debate (Christopher Burden-Strevens)
16. “To Bury Caesar”: The Poetics and Polemics of Funerary Oratory in Cassius Dio (Roger Rees)
17. Women, Politics, and Morality in Cassius Dio’s Roman History (Caitlin Gillespie)
18. Cassius Dio on Civil War: Between History and Theory (Carsten H. Lange)

Notes

[1] Madsen, Cassius Dio (London, 2020); Scott, Emperors and Usurpers. An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s Roman History Books 79(78) -80(80) (AD 217-229), New York; Scott, An Age of Iron and Rust: Cassius Dio and the History of His Time (Leiden and Boston, 2023).

[2] C. Burden-Strevens, Cassius Dio’s Speeches and the Collapse of the Roman Republic (Leiden and Boston, 2020).