Dio's Rome

Roman History #2

by Cassius Dio

Second part of an historical narrative originally composed in Greek during the reigns of Septimus Severus.

220 pages, Paperback

Published January 28, 2008

About the author

Cassius Dio or Dio Cassius (c. 155 – c. 235) was a Roman statesman and historian of Greek origin. He published 80 volumes of history on ancient Rome, beginning with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy.

Reviews

[Jenn Phizacklea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book - which could loosely be described as the Rise & Fall of Julius Caesar - as this is a period I have been reading about very recently, after revisiting the Penguin Plutarch collection called ‘The Fall of Rome’, which included the lives of all the main players during this period. I must say that this was a fortuitous coincidence, as Dio writes with the strong assumption that the reader can fill in the blanks, and he leaves many.

That being said, I found he offered a different perspective on many key events - he writes as neither for or against Caesar, I felt, but just allowed a bit of both in his text. I appreciated that after all the anti-Caesar sentiments in other ancient accounts, Plutarch in particular.

This particular translation is not the best - the editing leaves something to be desired, and I often had to re-read sections multiple times in consequence to make sense of what I was reading - but for all that, I cannot say it’s not worth battling through.