The Wolf and the Hare: Boudica's Political Bodies in Tacitus and Dio
This article analyzes how Tacitus and Dio use the concept of exemplarity in their narratives of Boudica’s revolt in order to present the queen as a complex model of female leadership. Tacitus’ Boudica assimilates herself to positive Roman models from Livy; Dio’s Boudica separates herself from Herodotean anti-models, as well as from the imperial women of Rome. In her condemnation of Nero, Dio’s Boudica criticizes the populace for succumbing to the influence of a negative model of leadership. Exempla contribute to each author’s characterization of Boudica; a comparative reading reveals significant differences in each author’s position on the efficacy of exempla in historiography.
TAKING STOCK OF CASSIUS DIO
assius Dio was assuredly not an artist of the miniature. He is known for only one partially preserved work, but its scale and variety are formidable, intimidating, and often unappreciated in modern scholarship. To do him justice in a single collection requires an uncommon depth of engagement with his text and breadth of scholarly resources. This collection, with nearly 900 pages, five editors, and forty-eight articles by thirty-one authors, is well fitted for the task. The insights it produces will gratify specialists greatly, while allowing Roman historians of many periods to make much more sophisticated use of a crucial source. The volume is the fruit of a grant-supported project, titled Dioneia, which aimed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Fergus Millar’s foundational and still indispensable monograph on Dio by opening new avenues of scholarship not explored in that book or the subsequent literature. Thus the book is not a typical essay collection whose topics are primarily dictated by the contributors’ interests. It follows a preconceived editorial plan, but it is also not a ‘companion volume’ in the sense of a comprehensive selection of overview pieces on ‘[xyz topic] in Dio’. Rather it falls into several focused sections of essays on large subfields within the study of Dio. These include: the Byzantine sources of Dio’s fragmentary text; the structure and narrative technique of his work; his literary relationship with earlier historical traditions; and, above all, his treatment, both descriptive and analytical, of Roman political institutions and practices. The book does not present itself as the first or last word on all questions one may have about Dio, and in their desire to find new approaches, the editors have stayed away from many of the better-trodden scholarly paths. But the areas the volume does tackle in depth are judiciously chosen, and its admirably thorough contributions stake out significant new territory for the
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.