Roman History
A history of Rome in eighty books, from the city’s beginnings to AD 229, written in Greek by a senator of the early third century. For Domitian’s reign and the Bar Kokhba revolt it survives chiefly in a Byzantine abridgement.
Read the text at penelope.uchicago.edu ↗Greek text (Perseus) ↗
Cassius Dio came from Nicaea in Bithynia, sat in the Roman senate and held the consulship twice, the second time in AD 229 with the emperor Severus Alexander. He wrote a history of Rome from its foundation down to his own day. The books covering the late Republic and the early emperors survive more or less complete. Most of the rest is known only from excerpts and from abridgements made by Byzantine writers, chiefly the eleventh-century monk John Xiphilinus.
That matters for the passages most often cited about Jews and Christians. The notice that Claudius forbade the Jews of Rome to hold meetings (60.6.6) comes from the surviving text. The charge of “atheism” brought under Domitian against Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla and against others who “drifted into Jewish ways” (67.14), and the account of the Jewish revolt under Hadrian (69.12–14), come from the abridgement. Dio wrote more than a century after those events, and what is read today is a shortened version of what he wrote.
Cited in
- 63 BC, firm date
- 40 BC to 37 BC, estimated date
- 27 BC, firm date
- 4 BC, estimated date
- AD 6, firm date
- AD 44, firm date
- about AD 49, estimated date
- about AD 49 to AD 52, estimated date
- AD 64, firm date
- AD 132 to AD 135, estimated date