Reviewing Cassius Dio

Cassius Dio and the Late Roman Republic (Brill), 2019

Cassius Dio’s Roman History is an essential, yet still undervalued, source for modern historians of the late Roman Republic. The papers in this volume show how his account can be used to gain new perspectives on such topics as the memory of the conspirator Catiline, debates over leadership in Rome, and the nature of alliance formation in civil war. Contributors also establish Dio as fully in command of his narrative, shaping it to suit his own interests as a senator, a political theorist, and, above all, a historian. Sophisticated use of chronology, manipulation of annalistic form, and engagement with Thucydides are just some of the ways Dio engages with the rich tradition of Greco-Roman historiography to advance his own interpretations.

Studia Dionea novissima_Historical Narrative, Interpretations of the Past and Political Contexts of Cassius Dio’s “Roman History”. Part I, 2022

This article provides a general overview of the current state of research on Cassius Dio and focuses on some current trends and issues of debate in the field. The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a real breakthrough in Dio scholarship, which has greatly advanced in many respects through increasing diversification of research topics, innovative approaches, posing new questions and producing important conceptual generalizations. International projects and wide academic collaborations, above all the Dioneia project (Lire Cassius Dion: cinquante ans après Fergus Millar: bilans et perspectives) and the Cassius Dio Network: Cassius Dio, Between History and Politics, have contributed greatly to this process. This intensive academic activity has resulted in new editions, translations and commentaries of Dio’s Roman History, numerous dissertations and monographs, which make Cassius Dio a much better understood historian than twenty or even five years ago. But there are still not a few issues of controversy and debate, including the historian’s approach to causation, particularly his vision of human nature as a factor of history. An analytical survey of the ongoing studies of that issue shows that Dio is treated as an author who independently elaborated on the themes he dealt with, without being entirely dependent on the interpretative models derived from Thucydides or elsewhere. This supports the status of Dio as a historian with his own voice.

Histos, 2018

The recent revision of Cassius Dio (e.g. Lange and Madsen (2016b)) has underlined the complexity of his work and the independent interpretations therein, but Book 36 has been studied almost exclusively with a focus on the lex Gabinia (Coudry (2016)). In this article, I propose a new approach: to explore Book 36 diachronically from beginning to end and through this to demonstrate Dio’s skilful structuring of his narrative with the purpose of presenting political competition as the central destructive factor of the Late Republic. Dio presents this competition as an institutional problem, rather than a moral one, and his explanation of the decline of the Republic is thereby distinctive.

Вестник древней истории / Journal of Ancient History, 2022

The article, continuing the overview of current Cassius Dio scholarship, focuses on the debates surrounding issues of narrative modes and patterns of his Roman History, including the role of various speeches in their dramatic context, the correlation between annalistic and biographical techniques, Dio’s treatment of Roman public institutions and especially their evolution within the transition from the Republic to Principate. The discussions concerning Dio’s political and literary career, his political thinking, and the constitutional debate in Book 52 also are under consideration. The present survey demonstrates that modern scholars have completely abandoned the outdated preconception of Dio as a ‘copyist’ or a ‘compiler’. Currently, this historian is treated as an author who had a distinct narrative strategy, elaborated the structure of his work and made deliberate choices between historiographic methods and techniques. Recent studies show, on the one hand, the diversity of methodological agendas applied to different parts of Dio’s work, and on the other hand, a number of recurrent themes and issues. The majority of these elements of consistency belong to the sphere of the author’s political agenda, with the entire conceptual framework of Dio’s narrative being closely connected to the demonstration of paradigms of proper political leadership.

Byzantine attitudes to and uses of the Roman past through the reception of Dio's Roman History. Though this study will focus on the tenth to twelfth centuries, it is best that we begin with the patriarch Photius (c. 810after 893) and his summaries and evaluations of ancient and early Byzantine historians in the Bibliotheca as this can provide us with valuable insights into how these authors and their histories were perceived in ninth-century Byzantium. 2 II From Photius to Constantine VII Photius, a classical scholar and avid reader of Greek and Roman historians, had read, among others, Herodotus (60), Theopompus (176), Flavius Josephus (48), Diodorus Siculus (70 and 244), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (83), Appian (57), Arrian (91) and Cassius Dio (71). As gleaned from the selection and varying lengths of his entries, the patriarch's interests primarily lay in Eastern Roman/early Byzantine history, that is, the period from Constantine I, the first Christian emperor, to the ninth century. At the same time he devotes special attention to ancient Near Eastern and Macedonian history (e.g. Ktesias, Persica 72; Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 91), shows some interest in the early and Republican history of Rome (see the entry for Appian 57 and the extended epitomes of Diodorus Siculus 244 and Memnon of Heraclea 224) 3 but seems somewhat indifferent to the imperial period (i.e. from Augustus to Constantine). In his brief notice for Dio's Roman History, Photius merely notes the lengthy time covered by the history-'from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy. .. to the murder of Antoninus'and comments the following on style rather than substance (Phot. Bib. cod. 71): His style is grandiose and bombastic, reflecting the consciousness of mighty events. His language is full of antiquated constructions, and of words in keeping with the importance of the events described. His periods are full of protracted parentheses and ill-timed inversions. The rhythm and the abrupt interruptions, being carefully employed, owing to the general clearness, escape the notice of the casual reader. The speeches, after the style of those in Thucydides, but clearer, are excellent. In almost everything else also Thucydides is his model. 4

J.M. Madsen & C.H. Lange (eds.) Cassius Dio the Historian: Methods and Approaches (Brill), 2021

The aim of this paper is to answer the following questions. Can we really detect in Dio’s work an elaborate structure consisting of four relatively distinct parts, as Kemezis has suggested? Are such periods as democracy, “dynasteiai”, monarchy, and Dio’s contemporary period represented as “narrative domains” providing independent methodological agendas? What kind of correlation (if any) lies between the obvious methodological dissimilarity of the different parts of Dio’s work and his periodization of the history of Rome? The answer to these questions is presented in the two parts of this paper. The first deals with Dio’s perception of history as a sequence of forms of government and explores the literary origins of this perception. At the same time the conceptual significance of Dio’s reflections on these historical periods has been examined, as well as the political meaning of the terminology he uses to explore them. The second part takes as its focus the various literary techniques employed by the author in different parts of his work; it demon-strates that the methodological diversity of Dio’s Roman History was determined by certain narrative patterns which the historian applied to periods and episodes of similar nature. These questions promise to shed light on Dio’s interpretative skill as an historian and the general perceptions he had in mind when composing his opus.