Ixxviii
DION CASSIUS.
but a man who, in such circumstances, insists upon destroying
by force that which is wrong, only wastes his own strength.
What places Dion in a less advantageous light, is his style,
which is neither eloquent nor beautiful. His language is full
of peculiarities, some of which are real faults, and shew the
degenerate state of the language. Examples of this may be
seen in the Index of Eeimarus. Dion wrote the vulgar Greek
just as it was spoken at the time; and there is in him no
affectation or elegance acquired artificially, as is the case with
Pausanias. Hence the study of his language is very instructive.
His history was, for a long time, very much read, and was a
common source of information concerning the history of Rome.
It was continued by an anonymous writer, as we know
from the Excerpta de Legationibus, and carried down to
the time of Constantine. Dion himself divided his work
into eighty books and into decads. In the twelfth century of
our era, when Zonaras wrote, there existed only the first
twenty books, and from the thirty-sixth book to the end. In
the tenth century, when Constantinus Porphyrogenitus ordered
excerpta to be made from it, the whole work was still extant.
In the eleventh century, a monk, of the name of Joannes
Xiphilinus, made extracts from the latter portion of the work,
from the thirty-sixth to the eightieth book, except that part
containing the history of Antoninus Pius, and a portion of that
of M. Aurelius. Whether Xiphilinus was not in possession of
the first twenty books, or whether he merely passed them over,
I cannot say; but I suspect that they did exist in the imperial
library, as Zonaras, fifty years later, still used them ; whence it
is wrong to say that Xiphilinus is the cause of the loss of Dion’s
books. His MS, containing the history of Augustus, Tiberius
and Claudius, was complete; whereas, at present, the Venetian
MS of that part is full of gaps. The very late author of the
Lexicon Syntacticum1 edited by Bekker, probably had not seen
the first thirty-five books, as he gives scarcely any extracts from
them. We possess a fragment, which is believed to belong to
the thirty-fifth book; but, according to Reimarus, it is in all
probability a part of the thirty-sixth. The portion which we
find complete, is from the thirty-seventh to the fifty-fourth book.
The fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth books are mutilated, and those
from fifty-seven to sixty still more so, and are full of gaps. Of
the first twenty books, we have the abridgment made by
Xiphilinus—zonaras.
Ixxix
Zonaras, probably with additions derived from Plutarch ; and of
the books from the thirty-sixth to the eightieth, that of Xiphi-
linus, likewise mixed with other authorities ; he had a complete
copy of books fifty-five to sixty. Besides these, there are con-
siderable fragments of the seventy-eighth, seventy-ninth, and
eightieth books, in the Vatican library. The first of these
fragments was published by Fulvius Ursinus, from a very old
manuscript, which cannot have been made later than the eighth
century. It is written in three columns, but is in such a muti-
lated state, that only the middle column is legible. Manyother
fragments are preserved in the Excerpta of Constantinus Por-
phyrogenitus “De Legationibus," “ De Virtutibus et Vitiis,”
and “ De Sententiis," and also a number of scattered fragments.
It is surprising that Zonaras has not, like Xiphilinus, been
printed in Keimarus' edition of Dion Cassius. Zonaras11 was a
practical man, and lived under Alexius Comnenus and Calo-
joannes Comncnus. He wrote a history from the creation of
the world down to the death of Alexius Comnenus. The first
part is made up of extracts from Josephus; the second contains
the history of Rome from Dion Cassius; and the third was
compiled from several authors, especially Cedrenus, Scylitzes,
and others; the later books of Dion, he could not procure,
although he took some trouble to do so. He was private
secretary to the emperor, and commander of the imperial guards.
His own judgment is extremely feeble ; but still he is not a fool
like many others : he is a sensible and learned man, but with
limited intellectual powers. His extracts from Dion Cassius,
though he does not name him as his authority, are of immense
importance ; he copied very faithfully, and especially in writing
the history of times in which one might expect to find him in
the greatest perplexities. But his extracts have been very little
used; Freinsheim is almost the only man who availed himself
of them for the periods on which the history of Livy is lost,
and I was the first to draw attention to the importance of
Zonaras. The Excerpta de Sententiis especially shew how
accurately he copied from Dion.12
u Zonaras is a modem Greek name, and must therefore be pronounced
Zonaras, not Zonaras; it is altogether wrong to pronounce the modem names
according to the ancient Greek fashion.—N.
12 In tlɪe early part of the history of Rome, Zonaras borrowed not only from
Dion, but also from some lives of Plutarch, such as those of Romulus, Numa,
Valerius PublicoIa; and it is probably this circumstance which led a singular