Cassius Dio

Cassius Dio wrote a history of Rome in eighty books covering nearly a thousand years, and for large stretches of the early empire he is the only continuous narrative that survives. He was a Greek-speaking senator from Nicaea in Bithynia, the son of a governor, and he held the offices he wrote about: praetor, suffect consul, governor of Africa, Dalmatia and Upper Pannonia, and consul for the second time in 229 as colleague of the emperor Severus Alexander. He says he was moved to write by a dream and spent ten years collecting and twelve composing. What he offers that nobody else does is the view from inside the senate under emperors he served and feared: his account of Commodus in the arena, watched by senators forced to chant, is that of a man who was in the seats. He is the main source for the reign of Augustus, for Boudica's revolt, and for the Severan period he lived through. His method is annalistic and his speeches are composed, in the Greek manner, which is why he is read alongside Tacitus rather than instead of him. Only about a third survives directly; the rest is known through Byzantine epitomes made by Xiphilinus and Zonaras, which is a reminder of how much of this depends on what monks chose to copy. He wrote in Greek about a Latin empire, which was normal for an eastern senator and is a reminder that the imperial elite was bilingual by his day. He records being present when Commodus held up the severed head of an ostrich and grinned at the senators, and says he chewed a laurel leaf to stop himself laughing, because laughing would have been fatal. It is the single most quoted passage in the work and the best illustration of what a senatorial source is worth.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history