The Novel World of Cassius Dio

This article surveys intersections between characteristics of Greek novelistic fiction and Cassius Dio’s Roman History, including ethnogeography, rhetorical set-pieces, archetypal characterization and mirabilia. While such features are common ground for both historiography and novelistic fiction, the novel often displays a particular flair for the egotistical, melodramatic and fantastical. Cassius Dio sometimes does the same, and more often in his contemporary books than elsewhere in his Roman History. That is, Dio writes most like the novelist when treating contemporary events about which he might have had the most accurate knowledge. This change in historiographical method may have been a reaction to and representation of the destabilization felt by the senatorial historian in the third century CE

Archaeology · Art · Historiography · Literature · Politics · Rhetorical question · Classical Antiquity Studies · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · History

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