Reconstructing Republican Oratory in Cassius Dio’s Roman History

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the way in which Cassius Dio—a third-century Greek historian of the Roman Republic—used published oratory of the late Republic as a basis for his own historiographical speeches. It argues that, far from belonging in a sophistic thought-world divorced from their depicted historical context, Cassius Dio’s historiographical speeches display a marked attention for preserving not only specific arguments, but also the rhetorical strategies and turns of phrase used to make those arguments in the oratory of the first century ad. While Cicero inevitably appears to predominate in Dio’s register of sources for Roman oratory, this chapter nevertheless demonstrates Dio’s awareness of non-Ciceronian oratory—such as the speeches of Catulus, Hortensius, and M. Antonius—preserved in quoted material and testimonies of these orators in Ciceronian texts, which the historian reproduced accordingly.