S.'s many recent contributions to Dio scholarship are now capped with a monograph tackling the last eight of the author's eighty books, covering the period from the assassination of Commodus in 192 ce to the end of Dio's political career in 229. S. provides a convincing reading of the narrative, and his book will surely become the standard work on the subject and starting point for further scholarship.
Scholarship on this part of Dio has not always given the historian much credit. Unlike his fully extant books on the late Republic and the Augustan period, the contemporary narrative, which exists mostly in fragments and epitomes, has often been seen as a serially written expression of the historian's likes and dislikes, filtered through his civil-war experiences along with a generalised senatorial nostalgia for the Antonine age and disgust with the later Severans. S. gives us a very different Dio, a reflective figure with well-developed ideas about what is wrong with his own time. The book's thesis might be summed up thus: Dio's contemporary books are a unified narrative in which the author presents his own era as one of unmitigated political dysfunction and the Severan dynasty as a failure. In particular, Septimius Severus proved unable to achieve the restoration of order that had always come out of Roman civil wars previously, and his various successors failed even to live up to his legacy, leaving the Roman political structure to lose all harmony among its key constituencies (Senate, army, bureaucracy etc.).
After an introduction that briefly surveys existing scholarship, provides some methodological considerations and an initial thesis statement, S. moves into three background chapters framing Dio as author and political thinker. Chapter 1, ‘Dio's Literary Career’, deals with the chronology of his surviving and lost works. S. prefers the ‘late’ dating, proposed independently by C. Letta and T.D. Barnes, that sees Dio's surviving magnum opus as a product of the 210s–230s rather than (as has always been the majority view) of the 190s–210s. In S.'s view, Dio thus writes his last books ‘at a remove’ (p. 36), seemingly during his final years in Bithynia in the 230s, without responding to one particular emperor or political moment, but instead writing a thought-out analysis aimed at a Thucydidean audience in far posterity.
Chapter 2 gives a sense of Dio's larger historiographical project. For S., Dio is the heir of a republican annalistic tradition, as adapted by authors of the early Principate and influenced by biographical elements. He marries this with a Thucydidean sense of invariant human nature and a broader Greek tradition of constitutional analysis. S. also deals with the tropes of writing history in exile, in line with his earlier sketch of Dio's career. Chapter 3 then sets out the political analysis that for S. is at the thematic heart of Dio's work. S. follows the common view of Dio as a ’monarchist’ whose presentation of the late Republic serves in large part to throw a positive light on Augustus’ establishment of stable monarchy. Dio's views of individual emperors are conventional, but, in S.'s view, ‘Dio's contribution is the particular framing of the monarchy as one of decline and rebirth, a setting that occurred through civil war, just as it had after Actium’ (p. 87). Past civil wars and political crises had been the catalysts for beneficent rule by Augustus, Vespasian and Nerva, which then, however, degenerated. Thus, argues S., Dio establishes a reader expectation that the monarchy that came out of the wars of the 190s would restore order. Dio's systematic confounding of that expectation in his final books is the material of S.'s remaining chapters.
In Chapter 4, on Marcus and Commodus, S. demonstrates Dio's rhetorical techniques for idealising the father at the son's expense and stressing his own status as an eyewitness in order to authorise vivid descriptions of Commodus’ excesses and the terror they inspired, above all in senators, which in turn establishes his reign as a watershed in Rome's political decline. Chapter 5 considers Septimius Severus. Again S. sees Dio's rhetoric and compositional choices as colouring Severus in artificially negative tones and building himself up as an ideal eyewitness narrator, able to deconstruct Severus’ tendentious ‘Augustan’ self-presentation: ‘Dio … undercuts Severus’ stance as a civilis princeps, an able commander, and head of a stable and prosperous house’ (p. 135).
Chapter 6 addresses Dio's more ambiguous portraits, those of Macrinus, Pertinax and Severus, specifically in his death notice (77[76].16–17). This last S. reads as part of Dio's larger negative portrait: it shows the civilis princeps that Severus tried and failed to be. S.'s reading of Pertinax acknowledges Dio's obvious admiration for the man but gives more weight to his final verdict (74[73].10.3) that the three-months’ emperor tried to reform Commodus’ abuses too quickly. For Macrinus, S. sees Dio as willing to concede some good points but not enough to compensate for Macrinus being an equestrian upstart who came to the throne by assassination.
The key point of Chapter 7, on Caracalla, is to establish that Dio's invective against that ruler is not simply spleen-venting but has a larger thematic significance, particularly as a critique of heredity and dynastic ideology. Chapter 8 returns to Macrinus and continues through Elagabalus to Alexander with considerable attention to Julia Domna. For S. these are further variations on the theme of dynastic ineffectiveness, as unsuitable and ineffectual figures try to use Severus’ dubious legacy as legitimation while losing all contact with earlier paradigms of what an emperor ought to be.
The main strength of the book is how compelling a picture it paints of Dio and the story he told. The readings of Severus and Pertinax were highlights for me, but S.'s argument is based on the cumulative evidence of the whole text rather than of one or a few key passages. He skilfully recognises and traces consistent threads to give a clear exposition of the pattern they form. This leads to a good deal of content summary, which is necessary given that Dio's contemporary narrative is still often read piecemeal rather than as a single structured whole. The result, though, is that detailed close readings are fewer than one would like, though important detail-level observations are frequent (e.g. pp. 109–10 on Pompeius, Glabrio and eyesight).
S.'s reading of Dio's text as a systematic condemnation of the Severan regime will likely find wide adherence, both as convincing in itself and because no alternative has yet appeared beyond F. Millar's picture of a shrewd but shallow chronicler. Not everyone will agree, however, with the picture that S. paints of the author and his career. It relies too much on a late dating, and S. does not fully address either the cogent scholarly objections to that view or the several methodological and autobiographical passages that led Millar et al. to see Dio as they did. S. might also have done more to acknowledge the fragmentary state of the text, especially when making arguments about structure (e.g. pp. 114–15 on Septimius Severus). His estimate that we have ‘nearly two-thirds’ of Dio's original Books 57–80 (p. 11) is the most optimistic I know of: other analyses suggest 50% at most, likely lower. None of this seriously undermines S.'s argument, which rests on a solid understanding of the text as we have it as well as a thorough knowledge of the scholarly literature that has grown immensely in the last ten years. S. has turned Dio's contemporary narrative into a recognisable literary work with thematic unity and structure. Our understanding of this historian and our basis for future study are much enriched.
