Nicaea is now İznik, Turkey. Cilicia was in south-eastern Asia Minor, on the Mediterranean coast. Smyrna is now İzmir, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Pergamum, now Bergama, is about 50 miles north of Smyrna. The province governed by Dio, called Africa, was a belt of land — broadly, north-eastern Algeria, most of Tunisia and a ribbon of territory along the coast of Libya — on the Mediterranean.
The province of Dalmatia faced Italy across the Adriatic. These two principles, as applied by Dio, have resulted all too frequently in a somewhat vague, impressionistic picture of events, in which precisely those data which the modern historian eagerly looks for are either largely wanting p. Thus names, numbers, and exact dates are often omitted; geographical details are scanty; and even the distinctive features of the various battles are passed over in great part in favour of rhetorical commonplaces, culled from Thucydides and other models, thus robbing the battles of all or much of their individuality.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the speeches, which in Dio occupy a disproportionate amount of space averaging one long speech or debate to the book , seem even farther removed from the realm of actual history than those of the ancient historians generally. Again, the speech which Dio makes Caesar deliver to his officers not his troops before the battle with Ariovistus has almost nothing in common with the address reported by Caesar himself.
The problem of Dio's sources for the periods before his own day has been investigated by various scholars with widely divergent results. It is clear that he has much in common with Livy, but the tendency of early investigators was to overrate Livy's influence. Schwartz has shown that down to the end of the Second Punic War Dio holds an independent course between the various traditions known to us.
After this there is apparent an increasing similarity between his account and that of Livy, which becomes most marked in the period of the civil war, and the natural inference is that Livy was here used directly as a principal source. There are important agreements also with Polybius, but no conclusive evidence of direct dependence. Sallust was almost certainly not among Dio's sources, and it is not probable that Caesar's Commentaries were used, at least to any extent.
For the period of the empire Tacitus has been confidently claimed by some as an important source, particularly for the Roman and p. A few isolated parallels between Dio and Sallust, also Pliny the Elder, have been pointed out; but they are not of sufficient importance to establish any direct influence.
In a few instances Dio refers to the memoirs of emperors Augustus, Hadrian, and Severus , as if he had consulted them. He excels the other historians of Rome in the attention paid to constitutional and administrative matters, and it has been argued that he must have consulted some of the public records, at least the lists of magistrates.
Unfortunately he was not always equal to the task of reconciling the discrepancies in his sources and thus manages to contradict himself at times. Dio's point of view is thoroughly Roman. He writes from the standpoint of a senator who, while jealous of the prerogatives of his order, is at the same time a thorough believer in the monarchy; in fact he makes the relations of the emperors to the senate the central idea in his account of the empire.
His impatience with all opposition to the monarchy is probably responsible for the almost p. He has a poor opinion of the common people, and he resents the great power and influence of the praetorian guard. In style and diction the history is modelled on Thucydides. Not alone the long involved periods of the Athenian historian, but also a multitude of single words, constructions, and phrases either peculiar to him or shared with a few other writers, reappear in these pages.
It would seem that Dio steeped himself in the vocabulary and thoughts of his great model until he could think almost unconsciously in the words of the other. Dio exerted no appreciable influence on his immediate successors in the field of Roman history. But among the Byzantines he became the standard authority on the subject, a circumstance to which we doubtless owe the preservation of such a large portion of his work.
About one third of Dio's History has come down to us intact. The quotations of the first class may be supposed to give, as a rule, the very words of Dio, subject of course to necessary changes in phraseology at the beginning, and sometimes at the end, and to occasional omission elsewhere of portions unessential to the excerptor's purpose.
These constitute the Fragments of our author in the strict sense of the term. The Epitomes, on the other hand, while they often repeat entire sentences of Dio verbatim, or nearly so as may readily be seen by comparing extant portions of the histories with Zonaras or Xiphilinus , must, nevertheless, be regarded as essentially paraphrases. It was first published in by Henri de Valois, whence the fragments are sometimes called Excerpta Valesiana , as well as Peiresciana.
The collection consists at present of quotations from fourteen historians, extending from Herodotus to Malalas. From Dio p. The Ms. Angelo Mai, who first published the collection in , employed chemical reagents to bring out the letters and even then had to despair of many passages. Since his use of the Ms. The excerpts attributed to Dio are drawn from nearly all periods of Roman history, and fall into two groups, the first extending down to B. That the former set of fragments is taken from Dio none will deny.
The later collection, extends much beyond the reign of Alexander Severus, where Dio ended his history; furthermore, the style and diction are considerably different from Dio's own. It is now generally agreed that all the excerpts of this second set were the work of one man, whom Boissevain, following Niebuhr, would identify with Petrus Patricius, a historian of the sixth century.
Many of his 80 books have survived intact, or as fragments, providing modern scholars with a detailed perspective on Roman history. Byzantine tradition maintains that Dio's mother was the daughter or sister of the Greek orator and philosopher, Dio Chrysostom ; however, this relationship has been disputed. Lucius is often identified as Dio's praenomen , but a Macedonian inscription, published in , reveals the abbreviation, "Cl.
Although Dio was a Roman citizen , he wrote in Greek. Dio always maintained a love for his hometown of Nicaea, calling it "his home", as opposed to his description of his villa in Italy "my residence in Italy".
For the greater part of his life, Dio was a member of the public service. He was a senator under Commodus and governor of Smyrna following the death of Septimius Severus ; he became a suffect consul in approximately the year Dio was also proconsul in Africa and Pannonia. Severus Alexander held Dio in the highest esteem and reappointed him to the position of consul, even though his caustic nature irritated the Praetorian Guards , who demanded his life.
Taking a spear too to add to her effect upon the entire audience. Cleopatra had, it was believed, enslaved Mark Antony She came to entertain the hope that she would rule the Romans as well as the Egyptians The Romans were willing to believe that Antony would hand over the city of Rome to Cleopatra and transfer the seat of government to Egypt.
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