This volume focuses on Cassius Dio as a historian – the only historian who allows us to follow the developments of Rome’s political institutions during a more than thousand year period, from the foundation of the city to Cassius Dio’s retirement from public life in 229 CE. The volume explores the Roman historian’s methodology and agendas, all of which influenced his approaches to Rome’s history. It offers a reassessment that rests on a deeper study of his relationship with historiographical traditions as well as his narrative and structural approach to Roman history. It examines Cassius Dio as both a writer in the historiographic tradition with his own agenda for writing The Roman History and a historian with his own ambition to tell the history of Rome.
Jesper Majbom Madsen (PhD Aarhus University, 2006) is Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark and co-editor of Brill’s Historiography of Rome and Its Empire Series. He is the author of Cassius Dio (Bloomsbury, 2020) and From Trophy Towns to City-States: Urban Civilization and Cultural Identities in Roman Pontus (Penn, 2020).
Carsten Hjort Lange (PhD University of Nottingham, 2008) is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark and co-editor of Brill’s Historiography of Rome and Its Empire Series. Publications include two monographs, Res Publica Constituta: Actium, Apollo and the Accomplishment of the Triumviral Assignment (Brill, 2009) and Triumphs in the Age of Civil War: The Late Republic and the Adaptability of Triumphal Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Contributors are: Valérie Fromentin, Mads O. Lindholmer, Christopher Baron, Konstantin V. Markov, Josip Parat, Christopher Burden-Strevens, Adam M. Kemezis, Andrew G. Scott, Jesper M. Madsen, Alex Imrie, Graham Andrews, Eric Adler, Carsten H. Lange, Antonio Pistellato, Jesper Carlsen, Brandon Jones, Julie Langford.
Everyone interested in the study of Cassius Dio, ancient and Roman historiography more broadly will benefit for the chapters in this book.