It can no longer be said that Cassius Dio is a neglected historian. Indeed, if the current scholarly trends are maintained, there is a good chance that Dio will be for the 2010s and 2020s what Plutarch was for the 1980s and 1990s. This is not, I hasten to add, a bad thing. The reality is that much of Dio's 80-book Roman History survives, both in the direct and the indirect manuscript traditions, so there is plenty of material with which to work. Furthermore, as Dio emerges from the shadow of Tacitus and other Latin writers of Roman history, scholars are starting to realise that Dio not only has interesting things to say, but often interprets events in interesting and well-informed ways.
This fine volume of thirteen studies, ably edited by Osgood and Baron, focuses on a part of Dio's narrative that is well preserved in the manuscripts and is thus a part of Dio's history where we are reading actual Dio, rather than Dio through the distorting lenses of his Byzantine epitomators. Dio's account of the years 68/67 bc down to Augustus’ seventh consulship in 27 bc represents the fullest and most sophisticated attempt at making sense of the period to survive from antiquity. Moreover, the history of this transformative period of Roman history was clearly an important part of Dio's narrative. The senatorial historian devotes considerable time and attention to this period, not only in terms of narrative detail, but also in terms of the insertion of elaborate speeches and other rhetorical set pieces.
The studies collected here are divided into three sections. The first, ‘Narrative Themes and Texture’, begins with E. Bertrand's discussion of Dio's attitude towards imperial expansion in the late Republic. Bertrand notes the general uniformity of Dio's portrayal of the motivations of the leading generals, which is couched in a valuable discussion of πλεονεξία. Bertrand's focus is less on Dio's attitude to expansion in and of itself than on the detrimental effect this expansion had on Roman institutions. (Although Bertrand does not stray beyond the republican narrative, one may wonder to what extent this judgement was shaped by or shaped Dio's critique of Severan military expansion.)
This institutional focus is developed further by M. Coudry, in a delicately argued essay on bribery and senatorial auctoritas (Chapter 3), and M.O. Lindholmer, who draws out the theme of institutional competition through a comparison of Dio's account with those of Appian and other writers of republican history (Chapter 5). Almost acting as a counterbalance to these chapters, K. Welch's contribution draws us into the world of Dio's ethical vocabulary and in particular his use of the four cardinal virtues (Chapter 6). Close to the heart of Welch's approach to the text is the question of Dio's sources, and the (tacit) desire to find in Dio's narrative a substratum of first-century material, something that she shares with the fine essay by G. Urso in the following section (Chapter 9).
Perhaps the most original contribution to this strong first section is Baron's chapter (Chapter 4). Dio's occasionally loose presentation of chronology within his annalistic framework has traditionally drawn criticism from modern historians. Using these critiques as a starting point, Baron, through a careful analysis of Books 37 and 43, shows how a narratological reading of the text can enhance not only our appreciation of Dio's narrative strategies, but also our understanding of the occasionally idiosyncratic presentation of chronology in the Roman History. Dio may have yet to benefit fully from the ‘literary turn’ that has underpinned much of the contemporary scholarship on ancient historiography, but Baron's chapter offers a clue as to the direction one of those turns may take.
The second section, ‘Characters, Institutions, and Episodes’, carries on in much the same mode as the former section. (Indeed, one may note that several of the contributions could easily fit in the prior section, and vice versa.) Ostensibly there is little to connect these chapters, which range from Dio's view of the dictatorship (C. Burden-Strevens, Chapter 7), Dio on gladiators and games (J. Carlsen, Chapter 8), Dio's account of the Catilinarian conspiracy (Urso, Chapter 9), to the famous episode of the reading of the Sibylline Oracle in 56 bc (Osgood, Chapter 10). Yet what does emerge across these studies is the unity and independence of Dio's thought and, at times, the validity of his historical opinions.
The final section, ‘Civil War and the Victory of Augustus’, presents us with a further four essays, dealing with the more well-trodden periods of late Republican history: the period between Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon and the establishment of the principate of Augustus. Even so, by prioritising the perspective offered by Dio's narrative, the results are often stimulating. This is a period of historical and historiographical cruces, from the conduct of Julius Caesar (A.G. Scott, Chapter 11) or his heir (J.M. Madsen, Chapter 13; K.V. Markov, Chapter 14) to (Chapter 12) the objectives of Sextus Pompeius in his dealings with the Triumviri, where C.H. Lange, viewing Dio's narrative through the lens of modern international relations theory, mounts something of a rebuttal to the arguments for Pompeius’ ‘republicanism’ put forward in K. Welch's Magnus Pius (2012).
As a whole, this book has many of the virtues and few of the vices one associates with edited collections. There are some instances of repetition: for example, Dio's account of the Catilinarian conspiracy appears in several essays, as does the speech of Q. Fufius Calenus (Cass. Dio 46.1.1–28.6), but in both instances the contributors add valuable commentary. The editors have also assembled a helpful index.
The book represents a number of scholarly approaches to the text, and there is no apparent attempt to impose an editorial orthodoxy. This is not in itself a problem. It does mean, however, that certain tensions may be traced throughout the essays, which are never resolved. This is seen most clearly in the ways in which the contributors handle the question of Dio's use of his source material.
As a tool, Quellenforschung has its uses. Yet, for Dio's Roman History its utility, as F. Millar argued long ago, is limited. Not all have followed Millar's approach – and sometimes with profit. But the fact remains that Dio rarely cites his sources, and opportunities to recover fragments or traces of lost sources are vanishingly rare. Most of the contributors in this volume avoid the problem of Dio's sources by seeing Dio as a historian who chose freely from his sources and transformed the material to suit his own narrative agendas. What matters for these contributors is the text that we have, rather than the texts that we do not have. For others (e.g. Welch and Urso) there is the understandable temptation to try to recover traces of contemporary republican-era sources beneath the surface of Dio's narrative. Obviously, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive approaches; all works of historiography (ancient and modern) fall somewhere between the two extremes: that is between the entirely derivative and the essentially novel.
As an illustration of this mixture of the derivative and the novel, take Dio 45.1.2, where Dio speaks of Julius Caesar's intention to leave Octavian as ‘the successor to his name, power and sole-rule’ (τοῦ ὀνόματος καὶ ἐξουσίας τῆς τε μοναρχίας διάδοχον). Madsen adds ‘The idea of hereditary monarchy is Dio's own … By giving Octavian the hereditary right to succeed Caesar as Rome's supreme ruler, he not only justifies the role Octavian played in the civil war but also gives it a gloss of legitimacy’ (p. 270). As a reading of Dio's narrative, this judgement is unexceptionable, and while it is also true that no other extant author puts it quite in the same way as Dio, the idea that Octavian derived his authority and legitimacy from being Caesar's son and ‘successor’ (διάδοχος) is something we can trace back to the historiography of the Augustan era, certainly as early as Nicolaus of Damascus’ Life of Caesar. Now, if we suppose Dio's (unidentified) source couched Octavian's claims to legitimacy in similar terms as Nicolaus, we may see Dio's narrative reproducing and elaborating on the attitude of this putative first-century source. Yet even if we acknowledge this, I am inclined to think (like Madsen) that the more productive lines of inquiry consist in the analysis of how Dio's narrative works, rather than the attempt to identify the possible origins of his opinions.
Connected to the source problem are the lingering questions of Dio's method of composition, which are touched upon by several contributors but never fully addressed (e.g. p. 91). Did Dio write his narrative by essentially following one source at a time, or did he work from a synthesis of material, perhaps in the form of a detailed and well-curated set of notes (cf. Burden-Streven's note, p. 143 n. 50)? How did he reconcile annalistic and non-annalistic sources? Finally, what role did Dio's own historically informed imagination play in the refashioning of material? How one answers these questions plays a significant role in how one should best approach the text. We are still to have clear answers to these questions.
One of the other recurring themes across these studies is the place of individuals and individual characterisation in Dio's history. Some of the volume's contributors assert that institutions mattered much more than individuals in Dio's conception of history, and that the model of moral decadence, so congenial to Sallust and others, had little to do with Dio's overall conception of the fall of the Republic and the transition to monarchy. Other contributors assert (albeit tacitly) the opposite, that individuals and individual virtues (and vices) mattered, and that for Dio human nature, and even human agency, were driving forces of history. We can see the latter in action in the extract cited above. Had Caesar not desired to pass on his ‘name, power and sole-rule’, we would, in Dio's mind, not have Augustus. Both of these issues are significant and deserve further elaboration and justification. Again, there is a via media that allows for both in Dio's historiographical vision. But an edited volume is not necessarily the place where such ideas can be cogently or fully articulated.
Nevertheless, this volume makes a valuable contribution to our appreciation of the history of the late Republic while going some way to explicating the inner logic that drives the narrative of Dio's Roman History. Moreover, as a whole, the volume represents a valuable snapshot of current scholarly approaches to Cassius Dio's work.
