A New Reading of Book 36 of Cassius Dio's Roman
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Histos () – READING DIACHRONICALLY: A NEW READING OF BOOK OF CASSIUS DIO’S ROMAN HISTORY * Abstract : The recent revision of Cassius Dio (e.g. Lange and Madsen ( b)) has underlined the complexity of his work and the independent interpretations therein, but Book has been studied almost exclusively with a focus on the lex Gabinia (Coudry ( )). In this article, I propose a new approach: to explore Book 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. Keywords : Dio, Roman Republic, competition, institutions, narrative . Introduction he book divisions of ancient authors are increasingly seen as meaningful structural devices. Thus both the books of Cicero’s and TPliny’s letter collections, the historiographical books of Livy and Tacitus, and the poetry books of numerous poets have all been identified as important tools for the respective authors. According to most scholars, these books were mainly used for aesthetic purposes and were at best ‘a blunt instrument’ 1 interpretatively. 2 Nonetheless, the instrumental use of books in a wide range of ancient genres and by numerous authors has recently been demonstrated. However, no such work has been done on the Severan historian Cassius Dio. This is problematic since, in contrast to other * I would like first and foremost to thank Catherine Steel and Christopher Burden- Strevens for their invaluable suggestions for improvements at different stages of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous Histos reviewer for many helpful suggestions. Lastly, I am likewise grateful to the Danish Academy in Rome for support and hospitality during work on this article. All translations of Dio are from Cary ( –F), and for other quoted authors, I have likewise used the Loeb Classical Library. Any adaptations of the translations are noted. 1 Levene () . 2 These are only some examples of a very pervasive trend in scholarship of taking books seriously as important authorial tools: Cicero: Beard () and recently Martelli (F); Pliny the Younger: Gibson and Morello (); Livy: Vasaly () and Oakley (); Tacitus: Strunk ( ) F– ; poetry: Hubbard ( ). ISSN: - Copyright © Mads Ortving Lindholmer October Mads Ortving Lindholmer historians such as Thucydides or Livy, 3 Dio very rarely steps back to present interpretations in his authorial voice. Consequently, scholars have traditionally assumed that Dio lacked political interpretations altogether. Rather than pronounce them clearly, however, Dio in fact interweaves his interpretations into his narrative, and close reading of Dio’s individual books is therefore essential to understanding his broader political interpretations. Until the s, Dio’s work was often thought to be generally devoid of such interpretations both in Anglophone and continental scholarship, 4 which caused Dio to be used far too uncritically in modern works about the Late Republic. 5 However, he remains one of the most frequently used sources for the Late Republic and his is one of the fullest surviving works on Roman history. In the s, by contrast, Dio has increasingly been seen as a more complex source with independent interpretative aims6 although some of the older criticisms of Dio as unoriginal and lacking a compelling causal framework persist. 7 The first reinterpretation of Dio’s Late Republic accorded human nature the central role: Rees greatly developed previous work on human nature in Dio’s Republic 8 to argue that this factor was the central cause for the fall of the Republic in Dio’s eyes. 9 Hereafter, scholars have focused on a number of more specific elements, such as extraordinary commands or φθόνος (jealousy), and their role in the deterioration of the Late Republic. 10 These works view Pompey and Caesar as central to the downfall 3 Dio never presents his interpretation of the fall of the Republic in the explicit fashion of, e.g., Thucydides’ famous assertion (..– ) of the real cause for the Peloponnesian War. 4 This stance essentially bases itself on Millar ( ). Lintott ( F) is perhaps the most negative subsequent work. For Quellenforschung , see, e.g., Sordi ( F); Zecchini ( F); Cipriani ( F); McDougall ( ). See also the general work of Harrington ( F). 5 This use of Dio, without any sustained methodological considerations of his work, is evident in a range of seminal works on the Late Republic: pace Scullard ( ), Gruen ( F), and Millar ( ). Millar’s index (–) even reveals that Dio is the most used historian in his entire work, cited a full forty-two times. This widespread use of Dio highlights the importance of gaining a better understanding of the historian. 6 Rees (); Kemezis (); Burden-Strevens () (a revised version of which is forthcoming); Fromentin et al. ( ); Lange and Madsen ( b); Lindholmer ( ); Burden-Strevens and Lindholmer (). 7 See, e.g., Kemezis () . 8 Hose ( ) ; Sion-Jenkis () –; Kuhn-Chen () – . The latter asserts that human nature could be tempered by education. Sion-Jenkis () – additionally sees the involvement of the people in government as a central problem for Dio. 9 Rees () –F. 10 Burden-Strevens () – ; Coudry ( ) –. See also Kemezis (), who takes a literary approach and focuses on different narrative modes, as well as his later work ( ), which underlines the problem of mendacious rhetoric. A New Reading of Book () of Cassius Dio’s Roman History of Dio’s Republic, and are all heavily focused on Dio’s speeches rather than the general narrative. 11 This focus on individuals and on speeches is clearly evident in the limited scholarship on Book : Burden-Strevens concentrates mainly on the speeches connected to the lex Gabinia ,12 while Coudry presents Pompey’s consequent command 13 as deeply problematic and a ‘serious and irredeemable breach in the system of the traditional magistracies’. 14 The scholarship on Book thus has the lex Gabinia as the unquestioned centrepiece and the rest of Book is mostly ignored. The aforementioned works are undoubtedly important contributions to our understanding of Dio and his Late Republic. However, the common approach to Book is also selective. This is emblematic of scholarship in general, as Dio’s books have never been independently studied as self-contained interpretative units, 15 despite the abovementioned increasing interest in the use of the Book by other authors. In what follows, I propose a change of approach which will yield a new interpretation of Dio’s Late Republic. I will explore Book diachronically from beginning to end, in the fashion that Dio intended, and through this demonstrate how he, via adroit manipulation of the organisation and presentation of his material, created a sophisticated cumulative interrelation between individual parts of Book . This, in turn, was used by Dio to present political competition as the central destructive problem of the Late Republic. This factor, which is constantly in focus throughout Dio’s Book , was not merely tied to Pompey or a few dynasts but was rather an institutionally generated problem. Dio’s interpretation is hereby distinctive in Late Republican historiography. 16 The problem of institutional competition in Dio’s Late Republic has hitherto been practically ignored by scholarship 11 See, e.g., Rees () who focuses extensively on Caesar through speeches or Bertrand and Coudry ( ) and Coudry ( ) whose central focus is Pompey and the speeches around the lex Gabinia . 12 Burden-Strevens () F–F; id. ( ) – . See also Burden-Strevens’ brief examination (() – ) of the use of fable structures in the narrative of Lucullus. 13 Coudry ( ). See also Bertrand and Coudry ( ). 14 Coudry ( ) –. On imperialism and the problem of extraordinary commands, see also Bertrand ( ) –F; Bertrand and Coudry ( ); Burden-Strevens ( ) – F. This focus on the lex Gabinia is again evident in the introduction to the recent French commentary on Book (Lachenaud and Coudry () XIII). 15 Except in commentaries which by their nature are less preoccupied with Dio’s interpretations: See, e.g., Swan () or the more recent commentaries by Lachenaud in Lachenaud and Coudry () and (). 16 For a comparison of Dio with the parallel sources for the Late Republic, see Lindholmer ( ) – and ( a). Mads Ortving Lindholmer but is in fact central to his interpretation of the Late Republic. 17 The two interconnected aims of this article are thus, in short, to show how Dio manipulated and structured his narrative and how this was employed to present a novel interpretation of the problems of the Late Republic, centred on competition. It is important to remember that this political competition for offices and commands highlighted by Dio in Book was institutional in the sense that it was generated by and was part of the institutional foundation of the Republic. By viewing the abundant instances of individual competition in Dio’s narrative as part of a far broader problem emerging from the Republican institutional setup, Dio’s distinctiveness and grander interpretation can be discerned. In the Late Republic, this competition becomes inherently destructive as selfish and problematic politicians are consistently successful, while constitutional and legal tools of competition are powerless—the problems of competition are thus not merely tied to individuals. Competition is central throughout Dio’s Late Republic. 18 Dio, however, uses Book specifically to explore one central aspect of this problem, namely competition tied to commands. Generals used their commands to acquire political influence, prestige, and resources, and the use of commands for personal ends can thus be viewed as part of the broader competition of the Late Republic. This use of commands by destructive dynasts ends in Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and civil war. Yet, against the background of Book , it becomes clear that this is merely the culmination of an important element of institutional competition. Dio incorporates his fundamental exploration of this element in Book , which therefore demands attention.