Cassius Dio: The Impact of Violence, War, and Civil War

Cassius Dio: The Impact of Violence, War, and Civil War is part of a renewed interest in the Roman historian Cassius Dio. This volume focuses on Dio’s approaches to foreign war and stasis as well as civil war. The impact of war on Rome as well as on the history of Rome has long be recognised by scholars, and adding to that, recent years have seen an increasing interest in the impact of civil war on Roman society. Dio’s views on violence, war, and civil war are an inter-related part of his overall project, which sought to understand Roman history on its own historical and historiographical terms and within a long-range view of the Roman past that investigated the realities of power.

Carsten Hjort Lange (PhD University of Nottingham, 2008) is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Publications include two monographs, Res Publica Constituta: Actium, Apollo and the Accomplishment of the Triumviral Assignment (Brill, 2009) and Triumphs in the Age of Civil War: The Late Republic and the Adaptability of Triumphal Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has co-edited a volume on the Roman republican triumph with Frederik J. Vervaet (The Roman Republican Triumph: Beyond the Spectacle, Quasar 2014), a volume on Cassius Dio (Cassius Dio: Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician, Brill 2016) with Jesper M. Madsen, as well as a volume on historiography and civil war with Frederik J. Vervaet (The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War, Brill 2019).
Andrew G. Scott (PhD Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 2008) is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Emperors and Usurpers: an historical commentary on Cassius Dio's Roman history, books 79(78)-80(80) (217-229 CE) (2018), and has written numerous articles and book chapters on the histories of Cassius Dio and Herodian, as well as on various aspects of Spartan social history. He is co-editor (with Jesper M. Madsen) of the forthcoming Brill’s Companion to Cassius Dio and is currently working on a monograph on books 73[72]-80[80] of Cassius Dio’s Roman history.

Contributors are: Carsten H. Lange, Andrew G. Scott, Piotr Berdowski, Joel Allen, John Rich, Mads O. Lindholmer, Estelle Bertrand, Wolfgang Havener, Alex Imrie, Ayelet Peer, Konstantin V. Markov, Adam M. Kemezis, Sulochana R. Asirvatham and Josiah Osgood.

" As a group these collective volumes, and two further monographs, represent an important movement to better understand Dio as both an agent in and reporter of Rome's history. [...] Our knowledge of Roman history from the late Republic through the early third century CE is heavily dependent upon Cassius Dio. Hence the importance for all areas of Roman studies of volumes such as this one, which help us to a better understanding of how Dio's thinking shaped the way he constructed his narrative." David S. Potter, SEHEPUNKTE - Ausgabe 21 (2021), Nr. 4.