Dios Rome, Volume 1 | Page 4

and
bloodshed this serious-minded magistrate bethought him to record with
religious exactness what he believed to be the truth respecting the
Kingdom, the Republic, and the Empire of Rome even to his own day.
I desire in conclusion to express especial gratitude and appreciation for
assistance and suggestions to Professor C.W.E. Miller of Johns
Hopkins University, Professors J.H. Wright and A.A. Howard of
Harvard University, and to Mr. A.T. Robinson of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Likewise I must acknowledge my obligations,
in the elucidation of particularly vexed and corrupt passages, to the
illuminative comments of Sturz, or Wagner, or Gros, or Boissée, or all
combined. Additional thanks are due to many others who have helped
or shall yet help to make Dio in English a success.
HERBERT BALDWIN FOSTER.
BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA, June, 1905.

CONCERNING THE ORIGINAL.

A.--THE WRITING.
Cassius Dio Cocceianus, Roman senator and prætor, when about forty
years of age delivered himself of a pamphlet describing the dreams and
omens that had led the general Septimius Severus to hope for the
imperial office which he actually secured. One evening there came to
the author a note of thanks from the prince; and the temporary
satisfaction of the recipient was continued in his dreams, wherein his
guiding angel seemed to urge him to write a detailed account of the
reign of the unworthy Commodus (Book Seventy-two), just ended.
Once again did Dio glow beneath the imperial felicitations and those of
the public. Inoculated with the bacillus of publication and animated by
a strong desire for immortality,--a wish happily realized,--he undertook
the prodigious task of giving to the world a complete account of Roman

events from the beginning to so late a date as Fortune might vouchsafe.
Forthwith he began the accumulation of materials, a task in which ten
active years (A.D. 200 to 210) were utilized. The actual labor of
composition, continued for twelve years more at intervals of respite
from duties of state, brought him in his narrative to the inception of the
reign of his original patron, the first Severus.--All the foregoing facts
are given us as Dio's own statement, in what is at present the
twenty-third chapter of the seventy-second book, by that painter in
miniature, Ioannes Xiphilinus.
It was now the year A.D. 223, Dio was either consul for the first time
(as some assert) or had the consular office behind him, the world was
richer by the loss of Elagabalus, and Alexander Severus reigned in his
stead. Under this emperor the remaining books (Seventy-three to
Eighty, inclusive) must have been composed, for Dio puts the finishing
touches on his history in 229. Since by that time he was nearly eighty
years of age and since he has written of no reign subsequent to
Alexander's, we may conclude that he did not survive his master, who
died in 235. The sum total of his efforts, then, as he left it, consisted of
eighty books, covering a period from 1064 B.C. to 229 A.D. At present
there are extant of that number complete only Books Thirty-six to Sixty
inclusive, treating the events of the years 68 B.C. to 47 A.D. The last
twenty books, Sixty-one to Eighty, appear in fairly reliable excerpts
and epitomes, but for the first thirty-five books we are dependent upon
the merest scraps and fragments. How and by what steps this great
work disintegrated, and in what form it has been preserved to modern
times, this it is to be our next business to trace.
It seems that Dio's work had no immediate influence, but "Time brings
roses", and in the Byzantine age we find that he had come to be
regarded as the canonical example of the way in which Roman History
should be written. Before this desirable result, however, had been
brought to pass, Books Twenty-two to Thirty-five inclusive had
disappeared. These gave the events of the years from the destruction of
Carthage and Corinth (in the middle of the second century B.C.) to the
activity of Lucullus in 69. A like fate befell Books Seventy and
Seventy-one at an early date. The first twenty-one books and the last

forty-five (save the two above noted) seem to have been extant in their
original forms at least as late as the twelfth century. Which end of the
already syncopated composition was the first to go the way of all flesh
(and parchment, too,) it would not be an easy matter to determine. It is
regarded by most scholars as certain that Ioannes Zonaras, who lived in
the twelfth century, had the first twenty-one and the last forty-five for
his epitomes. Hultsch, to be sure, advances the opinion[1] that Books
One to Twenty-one had by that time fallen into a condensed form, the
only one accessible; but the majority of scholars are