The ‘Age of Iron and Rust’ in Cassius Dio’s Roman History: Influences from Stoic Philosophy

This paper discusses the impact of Stoic philosophy on Cassius Dio’s imperial books of his Roman History. It is demonstrated how fundamental Stoic ideas influenced Dio’s constitutional discussions and the role of the emperor as in the Agrippa-Maecenas debate in book 52, and how Dio evaluated political environments as well as political developments in the Empire with inspirations from Stoic logic. Moreover, this paper argues that the iron age in his contemporary narrative from the emperor Commodus to Caracalla is also fundamentally an iron age on the basis of Stoic values.

Δημοκρατεῖσθαι or μοναρχεῖσθαι, That is the Question: Cassius Dio and the Senatorial Principate

Cassius Dio’s account of Caligula’s principate pivots on the divide between Caligula’s ‘democratic’ debut and his later decline into despotism. As Dio reports, the murder of the emperor in 41 CE polarised the Senate on the question of whether to abolish the Principate or to confirm it. It is likely that Dio’s interest in such a crucial passage depends on his own experience of the end of Commodus and the accession of Pertinax in 192-193 CE. The underpinning of his political thought is Stoic: when the relationship between the princeps and the Senate collapses, the solution is not so much ‘republicanism’ as a ‘republican spirit’, to be intended as a fruitful cooperation between the two.

Teoria politica e scrittura storiografica nei ‘libri imperiali’ della Storia Romana di Cassio Dione

This paper investigates to what extent the emergence of the princeps shapes Dio’s narrative. The best fitting passages for investigating this topic are the so called “anectodical-biographical sections”, which cannot be utterly dismissed as pieces of imperial biography: it would be better to consider those sections as devoted to the evaluation of the emperor’s praxis of government on a very concrete (rather that moralistic) ground. These narrative proceedings betray the existence of a well-structured framework lying beneath the work’s building in terms of political thought. In fact, Dio develops a consistent perspective about the relationship he expected between the princeps and the senate, fashioned, to my mind, by the princeps civilis model. This paradigm is sustained by a very classical political theory, although remoulded: the ‘mixed constitution’ theory.

Cassius Dio’s Ideal Government and the Imperial Senate

This chapter argues that Dio envisioned a surprisingly minimalist role for the Senate in his ideal government: magistrates and advisors were drawn from the senators, but the emperor should hold absolute power and the Senate should not constitute an important forum of genuine deliberation or advice. Instead, in Dio’s ideal government, the consilium was the key forum of debate informing imperial policy. Dio’s ideal government, and the place of the Senate therein, is distinctive as it broke with a long tradition of senatorial writing which idealised a system of government where the Senate played a central role. This nuances the widespread view of Dio as a ‘senatorial historian’.

Between Civilitas and Tyranny: Cassius Dio’s Biographical Narrative of the Flavian Dynasty

In Cassius Dio’s account of imperial Rome, the Flavian Dynasty represents all the strengths and weaknesses of monarchical rule. The strength is represented with Vespasian, his display of modesty and understanding of the need to cooperate and share power with the senatorial elite. The weakness is described through the nepotism, betrayal, and uncontrolled ambition for glory and prestige that helped Domitian to power and forced the return of tyrannical rule upon the Romans. In this chapter, I shall discuss the way in which the Flavian narrative serves as a microcosm in the Roman History to demonstrate the reason for which dynastic succession was incapable of providing the stability needed for monarchical rule to reach its full constitutional and political potential.

‘Ritorno alla monarchia’, tra Cesare e Augusto: le origini del principato in Cassio Dione

For Cassius Dio, there was no continuity between Republic and Principate. The Republic ended between 43 (institution of the triumvirate) and 42 BC (battle of Philippi); the ‘monarchy’ was established between 29 (Octavianus Imperator) and 27 (speech to the senators in January). The founder of the imperial monarchy, however, was not Augustus, but Caesar: his dictatorship was already a means to exert the same monarchic power of his adoptive son. In its inner complexity, such a representation of the transition from the Republic to the Principate is consistent with the way Dio reconstructed the origins of the Republic, in the first (lost) books of his Roman History.

Misunderstanding History: Past and Present Cassius Dio’s Contemporary Books

At the heart of Cassius Dio’s Roman History was the charting of changes in government from the early kings to the monarchy established by Augustus, with particular emphasis on the decline of the Republic and the transition to monarchy. Throughout Dio’s analysis we observe certain individuals who serve as examples to be emulated or avoided. In Dio’s own age, emperors generally misunderstood or misinterpreted, willingly or unwillingly, these examples from the past. These failures allow us to consider Dio’s understanding of the function of historiography and his ideas about the utility of his own work. While this may lead us to the negative conclusion that Dio believed all forms of government eventually degenerate, it also leaves open the possibility that Dio considered the writing of history, and thus the guarantee of a proper understanding of the past, to have positive, transformative consequences for Rome’s monarchy.