Ixxvi
DION CASSIUS.
side.7 He came to Rome as a young man, at a period when it
was already common for the provincials of the East to obtain
the highest offices, a distinction which had been enjoyed by
those of the West at a much earlier time. The latter soou
accommodated themselves to the Romans in language and dress;
but the former did not submit to this necessity till later. In
the eastern provinces men let their beards grow, as we see from
the portrait of the sculptor Apollodorus, on the column of
Trajan, the most ancient portrait of an artist. From the time
of Hadrian, the Greeks were received at Rome very differently
from what they had been before, as that emperor favoured
them, and his example was followed by the Antonines.
M. Aurelius even gave one of his daughters in marriage to a
Greek of the name of Pompeianus.
At Rome Dion spent forty years, engaged in active business,
and afterwards withdrew to Capua. It was not till he had
reached the age of about forty, that he wrote a history of the
reign of Commodus, which he dedicated to the emperor Seve-
rus, who received the work favorably, and encouraged him to
write a complete history of Rome. Ifdreamsstimulated him,
as he himself says, to write the history of the Roman empire,
they were certainly sent by good spirits, for he had
a real vocation as an historian. He was raised to the
consulship under Septimius Severus, and a second time under
Alexander Severus, a.d. 229. He spent twelve years in
collecting materials for his work, and ten more in composing
it. If his statement is correct, the last books must have been
a continuation of his work. According to the judicious cal-
culation of J A. Fabricius, Dion must have been about seventy
years old when he obtained his second consulship, and he
probably lived to the age of nearly eighty. Being a statesman,
he paid attention to many things which his predecessors had
been unconcerned about. He must have been a perfect master
of the Latin language; for he resided at Rome as a senator
during a period of from thirty to forty years. He felt an
interest in, and made himself thoroughly acquainted with,
the political history of Rome, a thing which no rhetorician
ever did. Livy, for instance, has no idea either of a state, or of
tactics, and when, as in the eighth chapter of the eighth book,
he speaks of battles, it is evident that he has no conception of
7 Reimarus, De vita et scriptis Dionis, § 3.
DION CASSIUS.
Ixxvii
the most ordinary rules of drawing up the legions in battle
array : he had perhaps never seen a legion going through its
exercises, and hence the arrangement which he describes is
utterly impossible.8 Dion, on the other hand, finds himself
at home everywhere, in constitutional matters and the civil
law, as well as in tactics.
He did not acquiesce in the information he gathered from
Livy: he went to the sources themselves; he wrote the early
period of Roman history quite independently of his prede-
cessors, and only took Fabius for his guide.9 The early con-
stitution was perfectly clear to him, and when he speaks of
it, he is very careful in his expressions. He has been accused
of κaκoηθeιa and e∙πι.χaιpeκaκla in those parts of his work
where he exposes the false pretensions of certain persons to
political virtue; and it cannot indeed be denied that he was
influenced by bitter feelings against feigned pretensions to
virtue in a thoroughly corrupt age; but when in going
through the history of the so-called English patriots in the
reigns of George I. and George H., we hear their claims to
patriotism, and afterwards learn how they hunt after and
intrigue for offices ; how, notwithstanding their loud assurances
of their noble sentiments, they keep up a secret correspondence
with the Pretender, and that when they obtain power they
act just in the same manner as their predecessors, we see a
state of things analogous to that of Rome in the time of Dion
Cassius; and we cannot wonder at his speaking with in-
dignation of such patriots, whose reputation was acquired by
fraud and hypocrisy. Similar feelings existed in France, in
the time of Louis XV. The case would be different if he
showed a diabolical delight in proving that virtue did not
exist; but when a man drags the mask from a villain, he does
what is right; and this is all that Dion Cassius does. I
believe indeed that he mistrusted many a man’s sincerity, and
judged harshly of him in consequence; but at the bottom of
all this, there lies a view of human life, bitter indeed, yet
sound; and amidst the corruption of his age he could not
judge otherwise.10 He was no friend of tyranny, as every
page of his history shows if read with an unbiassed mind;
8 Compare vol iii. ρ.98, foil.
9 Compare vol.ii. p.12, voLiii. p.426; LebensnacIirichteTi iιberB. G. Niebuhrt
ɪh. ρ. 187. lt, Compare vol. hi. note 846.