Fictitious Speeches, Envy, and the Habituation to Authority

Writing the Collapse of the Roman Republic

Bibliographic Data

ID20072961
AuthorsChristopher Burden-Strevens (corresponding author)
Year2016
Pages191-216
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCassius Dio (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/9789004335318_012
OpenAlexW2406365548
ISBN9789004335318
LanguageEN
Citations received6

In this paper, I explore Cassius Dio’s use of his speeches as a means of historical explanation. From an analysis of several speeches of the Late Republic and how they are consonant with the narrative material surrounding them, I argue that Dio made these compositions consistent with a causal framework that he applied to the decline of the res publica. This framework appears to be distinctively the historian’s own. These compositions, I suggest, were embedded within Dio’s account of these years to explain the causes, and consequences, of two fundamental historical problems. The first is the ‘habituation to command’ (imperii consuetudo) of ambitious commanders; the second is the centrality of envy (φθóνος) to political life. I demonstrate that although these issues do not disappear entirely from Dio’s later account, the historian viewed them as especially Late Republican and as historically significant drivers of constitutional change. Even where they are demonstrably fabricated, Cassius Dio nevertheless used the speeches to reflect upon these issues, to predict their later political ramifications, and to posit remedies later followed by the Augustan Principate

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Habituation · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Principate · The Republic · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy · Psychology

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Open DOIOpen Access