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
On Historical Fragments and Epitomes
The modern historian of Greece and Rome often depends for his information on writings whose reliability is no greater, though often much less, than that of the histories, now lost in whole or part, which their authors followed. The quality of these histories can sometimes be detected from the internal evidence of the extant derivative accounts, even when we cannot name the historians with any certainty.