Cassius Dio on Violence, Stasis, and Civil War: the Early Years

Any attempt to trace the historical development in the early books of Cassius Dio is hampered by their fragmentary state. Nevertheless, it appears that in addition to excursus on magistracies and the triumph, Dio used these books to explore the phenomena of stasis and general tendencies connected to internal struggle. Libourel (1974) rightly emphasises that the early books contain more violence than our parallel evidence. Yet it is unclear why this is so. Cassius Dio was not simply projecting contemporary patterns onto the past, but describing the origins of specific phenomena. In doing so, he emulated Thucydides and his model of stasis (Thuc. 3.81.4-5), including Thucydides’ views on human nature. Dio wanted to understand Roman history on its own terms and in the light of long-term experience, including civil strife as part of the realities of power. This article proposes to examine stasis in Dio, asking whether “stasis” refers to any form of internal violence, or specifically to what in Latin would be a bellum civile. In the later Republican books of Dio, stasis and dynasteia appear as alternating phenomena: as individual dynasteiai do not create stable government, they inevitably create the conditions for stasis. Interestingly, the roots of these tendencies toward internal strife may go back to the founding of the city, as an integral part of Rome’s legacy.