Alain M. Gowing

The triumviral narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio

The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio is a study of the two principal, surviving historical accounts of the years 44-35 BC, the period of civil war intervening the assassination of Julius Caesar and the installation of Augustus, the rst Roman emperor, when Rome was ruled by a triumvirate composed of Lepidus, Mark Antony and Octavian (later called Augustus). The authors of these accounts, Appian (ca. AD 92-165) and Cassius Dio (ca. AD 162-239), were both Easterners (from, respectively, what are now Egypt and Turkey), both served in the Roman Imperial bureaucracy, and both wrote comprehensive histories of Rome in Greek. As virtually the only sources for this turning point in Roman history, they provide invaluable information on such famous characters as Mark Antony, Cicero, Caesars assassins M. Brutus and C. Cassius Longinus, and of course Augustus himself. This book is not, however, simply a reexamination of the role played by these individuals in Roman history, but rather a comparison of how Appian and Dio depict them and, more generally, an analysis of how they wrote history. To that end the book also entails an examination of battles, speeches, and other events as they are presented by the two historians. The central aim of the book is to demonstrate that in writing of the triumviral period, both Appian and Dio were profoundly a ected by the political, literary, and and social milieu in which they lived and worked; and that their respective triumviral narratives re ect an evolution in historical writing between the second and third centuries AD, when the Roman empire passed from the period of its greatest prosperity to that of irreversible decline.

Cassius Dio and the City of Rome

The presence of the physical city of Rome in Livy and Tacitus in particular has been discussed in the scholarship (e.g., Jaeger 1997, Ash 2007, Rouveret 1991), but despite the fact that he references the monuments and buildings of Rome more frequently than his Latin predecessors, Dio’s interest in the city has not received similar attention. This paper argues that an appreciation of Dio’s perspective on Rome, and of how the city works itself into his narrative, deepens our understanding not only of Dio’s experience of Rome, but also of the ways in which this important historian draws on the Roman historiographical tradition in which he worked…and the ways in which he departed from it. The significance of Rome and its buildings for Dio is seen to lie chiefly in their function as both a symbol and theater of power; as a place where divine displeasure may be made manifest; and as a device for establishing Dio’s own authority, as he impresses on the reader that he is describing the city from personal experience of the place in which the action occurs, in narratives of both his own time and of the past (e.g., 55.8.4; 74[73].1.3–5; 74[73].4.3; 75[74].4.6–7; cf. 73[72].18.4). Because he lived in Rome under Septimius Severus and the greatest transformation of the city since the time of Augustus, whose building program Severus is believed to have consciously imitated (e.g., Cooley 2007, Barnes 2008), Dio’s experience of Rome must have had something in common with that of Livy (cf. 77[76].16.3) and yet the city does not imprint itself on his History in precisely the same way as Livy’s did on his.

Rome and the Ruin of Memory

My own work on memory in Roman culture has only created for me many more questions than it has answered. One direction it has prompted me to pursue further is the connection in the Roman mind between buildings or monuments and memory. I am by no means an archaeologist or material culturist, but among other things, many years of teaching Roman topography in Rome have made me acutely aware of the importance of understanding physical context. Thus in my current project I have turned more explicitly to the city of Rome and what it meant to Romans, but especially as we encounter Rome in Livy and Tacitus. The question I have posed to myself is a simple one: under what circumstances and to what ends do these historians identify, evoke, or otherwise deem important a particular space or structure in the city? In this talk, however, I want to think a bit more expansively about Rome and in particular about the value of its ruins to appreciating memory; in order to flesh this out, I turn to Livy and his take on Rome and ruins. In the process the connection beWhen Rebecca first contacted me, I was of course immediately intrigued by the topic, commemoration in antiquity, but equally so by the suggestion that the choice of topic seems to have been influenced by the fact that the University of Alberta is celebrating its Centenary, an event that naturally invites us to reflect on the past—and on why we should reflect on the past. Thus there seems to be a happy confluence of interest in what memory meant to Greeks and Romans ... and similarly in what it means to us.