There is extant an old table of contents of all the books of Livy, of which two only, the hundred and thirty-sixth and the hundred and thirty-seventh, are wanting,—a sort of index for those who wished to search for any thing in the great work, and perhaps nothing more than a collection of the heads which were written in the margin. This epitome bears quite inappropriately the name of Florus. The author is unknown, and it is certainly only the work of some copyist. But to us it is invaluable, as many things have been preserved in it alone.
Well known and much read was the Roman history of Florus in four books, which, written in the reign of Trajan, is a very wretched piece of work. Yet at the side of many glaring mistakes, there is something which may be turned to use. Florus may have written from what he read in Livy; yet there is in one single passage a deviation from him, so that he must have read others also.
Eutropius has evidently every where followed the track of Livy; but he is so bad a writer, that one cannot believe that he has read Livy. I therefore conjecture that there must have existed an abstract besides, forming a sort of medium between the work itself and our epitome; which Orosius no doubt also read, who likewise implicitly follows Livy, but assigns dates which clash with him, a practice quite in keeping with his ignorance in changing the dates by consuls into those by years. Such an abstract was like that of Trogus from Justin. Orosius’ object was simply this, to console his contemporaries in the state in which they were by means of perversions and sophisms in describing the wretchedness of the olden time. Yet there are many points in which his statements have great value, only one must not allow oneself to be misled by him.
The influence which Livy had exercised upon the Romans, in putting an end to every thing like originality in writing history, did not extend to the Greeks. They directed their attention more and more to Roman history, and found in it a theme for rhetorical and elegant composition. One of those who at that time more or less engaged in this task, was Plutarch, who composed his historical works in the reign of Trajan. He had a definite moral purpose, his was a fine soul: yet neither was he a practical man, nor had he a turn for speculative thought, but he was made for quiet and cheerful contemplation, like Montaigne. He had an unaffected aversion to all that was vulgar; and he wrote in this spirit for himself and his friends, the parallels of distinguished Romans and Greeks. He is just to every body. He loves the Greeks and respects the Romans, and this makes his Lives most delightful reading. But his qualities as an historian are of a very secondary order. He is no critic, and does not discriminate between conflicting opinions; but he follows at one time one authority, and at another time another. In Pyrrhus and Camillus, one sees that he has used Dionysius; in Marius and Sylla, Posidonius; and wherever we are able to make this out, his history gains a much more important character for authenticity. The task of ascertaining this point is as yet far from being accomplished. Plutarch, as he himself tells us, understood little of Latin, and was particularly ignorant of the grammar, owing to which mistakes are found in him here and there, though indeed but seldom.
About a generation after Plutarch, Appian wrote. He was a jurist from Alexandria, who in the reigns of Adrian and Antoninus Pius, lived in Rome as an agent for his native town, and had the management of lawsuits. He was greatly befriended by Fronto, and by his interest got the office of a Procurator Cæsaris. Although he had lived a long time at Rome, and had a great opinion of his Latin, yet it is not to be supposed that he was very conversant with that language; as, owing to Adrian’s predilection for Greek, he surely was allowed to plead in it, especially for the transmarini. Having made a fortune at Rome, he returned to Alexandria, and was in his old age treated with much distinction by the Romans. According to one account, he has written twenty-four books on Roman history; among them four on Egypt, in which he treated with particular prolixity of the Lagides. It was not a continuous history, but arranged after the plan of the Origines of Cato. The first book was called Βασιλική, the second Ἰταλική, the third Σαυνιτική. The first twenty-one books of his work went as far as the battle of Actium; then the subsequent times down to Trajan he disposed of in one book Ἑκατονταετία; besides which he wrote a book on the Dacian, and another on the Arabian war of Trajan. He is a compiler, and knew well how to choose his sources. In the earlier history he chiefly follows Dionysius; in the second Punic war, perhaps also in the first, he follows Fabius; then Polybius, and afterwards Posidonius. In using these sources, he displays great ignorance, particularly of geography. Thus, for example, he believes that Britain was quite close to the northern coast of Spain, and he places Saguntum on the northern bank of the Iberus. We must discriminate with regard to him. Wherever he copies without thinking, we find in his work the best sources for history. The greater half of the books of Appian are lost. We possess eleven of them, and besides these, there are extracts in the Eclogæ de Legationibus, and de Virtutibus et Vitiis, collected by Ursinus and Valesius. Spurious is the Παρθική, as Schweighäuser has correctly demonstrated.
There are of Appian, properly speaking, only three editions, those of Stephens, Tollius, and Schweighäuser, the last of them being by far the best. Much remains to be done for the Bellum Illyricum, as Spaletti has kept his collation for it from Schweighäuser. A good source also made use of by the latter, is the Latin version of Petrus Candidus, which though barbarous is faithful.
About eighty years after Appian, wrote Dio Cassius, surnamed Cocceianus, who was born in the reign of Antoninus Pius at Nice in Nicomedia, of a family which was of very high standing in the Roman State. Very likely Dio Chrysostom was his grandfather on the mother’s side. He came as a young man to Rome, at a time when the provincials of the east were already admitted to the highest offices, which was much earlier the case with those of the west. Whilst the latter soon assimilated themselves in language and address to the Romans, the former amalgamated much later, and from sheer necessity. In the eastern provinces they still let the beard grow, as we see from the likeness of the statuary Apollodorus in the Trajan column, the most ancient likeness of an artist. From the time of Adrian the Greeks met in Rome with a different reception from that which they had before; this emperor favoured them, as did also the Antonines. Marcus Antoninus even married one of his daughters to Pompeian a Greek.
Dio came early to Rome, where he lived forty years engaged in business, and then retired to Capua. He wrote, when about forty years old, the history of Commodus, which he dedicated to Severus, who received it with favour, and encouraged him to write the whole Roman history. He became consul under Septimius Severus, and a second time under Alexander Severus. He reached an age of nearly eighty years, and had, according to Fabricius’ computation, already reached that of seventy when he was for the second time invested with the consulship. He spent twelve years in collecting materials, and during ten he worked. If this account be correct, the last books must be a continuation of his work. Being a statesman, he paid attention to many things in history which his predecessors had not cared for. He had a true vocation for writing history, and declared that in his dreams the gods had commanded him to do so. He was a perfect master of the Latin language, thoroughly acquainted with all the Roman affairs, and he felt an interest in political concerns. He is every where at home, in the laws, in the constitution, and in matters connected with warfare. Livy had no idea of either the economy of a state, or of a battle; the commonest rules for the array of an army escape him. Surely he can never have looked on, when the soldiers were drilling at Rome.
For the very earliest times, Dio Cassius draws from the very fountain-heads. He wrote quite independently of Livy from Fabius, and he perfectly understood the old Roman constitution. On the other hand, he is reproached with κακοήθεια, and ἐπιχαιρεκακία, with its being a pleasure to him to bring to light the hollowness of men’s pretensions to political virtue, and such like things. Indeed he is in a bitter mood against the false pretences to virtue in a thoroughly corrupted age; but this is quite different from showing an infamous delight in it. The former only is the real character of Dio Cassius. When a man scoffs at religion, it is the sign of a bad heart; but when he snatches the mask from the face of a hypocrite, he is quite in the right. When one hears the language of so-called patriots of the time of George the First and Second, and then learns how they intrigued for places, how in spite of their boasted integrity they kept up a secret correspondence with the Pretender, and when they came into power did the very self-same things as their predecessors, it is very natural to speak with disgust of such sham patriots. In the time also of Louis XV. such a state of feeling as we find in Dio Cassius was universal. Dio, owing to his experience in a most abandoned age, may have judged many a man too harshly; but at bottom his view of things is sound and enlightened. That he was no friend to tyranny, is shown every where in his history, when one reads it without prejudice. His style, however, is not flowing; his peculiarities are sometimes faults (examples of it are given in the index of Reimarus). He is one of the few who at that time wrote as men really spoke; on which account the study of his language is very instructive. There is no affectation in him, as in Pausanias; his language is the Greek, as it was then used in familiar conversation. His history was much read. It was for a long time a common source of Roman history, and was continued by an anonymous writer to the time of Constantine, as we know from the Excerpta de Legationibus. He himself divided his eighty books into decades. The twentieth book he concluded with the destruction of Carthage; the fortieth went as far as the outbreak of the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey; the sixtieth, to the death of Claudius. Of these there were left in the twelfth century, when Johannes Zonaras wrote, only the first twenty, and from the thirty-sixth to the end. In the tenth century when Constantinus Porphyrogenitus caused the excerpta to be made, the whole was still extant. Afterwards, in the eleventh century, the monk Xiphilinus made extracts beginning from the thirty-sixth book, with the exception of the history of Antoninus Pius, and a part of M. Aurelius’ reign. Whether he had the rest or not, is no more to be ascertained. It is, however, probable, as Zonaras fifty years later had still the first twenty books. It has therefore been unjustly said that the loss of the books of Dio was the fault of Xiphilinus. His manuscript was still complete as regards the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius, where the Venetian is full of gaps. The very late author of the Lexicon Syntacticum, which Bekker has edited, already in all probability had no more the first five and thirty; as from these, in comparison with the other books, he gives scarcely any extracts at all. We have a fragment which is generally thought to be of the thirty-fifth book, but which, according to Reimarus, most likely belongs to the thirty-sixth; then from the thirty-seventh to the fifty-fourth complete, and the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth mutilated. Of the first twenty books we have the abstract of Zonaras, with slight admixtures from Plutarch; of the last forty-five, that of Xiphilinus likewise with admixtures. Of books 78, 79 and 80, we have an important fragment from the Vatican library. In books 55 to 60, the manuscripts are full of gaps: Xiphilinus, however, had yet a complete copy of them. Morelli, an excellent philologist, found these books in the year 1797, when, to console himself for the downfall of his republic, he took to ancient history as a refuge, in a very old manuscript in the library of St. Mark, and discovered that it had formerly been complete, but had suffered much from the destruction of part of the fascicles and leaves; that this was the mother-manuscript for these six books; but that when the copyist in his transcript had come to a stop in some story, and the beginning of the next was mutilated, he had entirely dropped such incomplete narrations, and disguised the gaps. Morelli has collected these defective passages, so that we see how at one place some leaves, at another, whole quaternions are missing. From what he communicated, the remarkable expedition of Ahenobarbus to Germany was first brought to light, which had till then been unknown. Thus also in Diodorus, the halves of two books are entirely wanting, a circumstance which is nowhere noticed. In a third passage, Perizonius and others have discovered it. Such a thing was by no means of rare occurrence among the volatile Greeks of the fifteenth century, who gained their livelihood by copying.—What remains of the three last books of Dio Cassius, has been edited by Fulvius Ursinus. The manuscript is of the seventh or eighth century; yet the centre column only has been preserved entire: the two others along the margins are illegible. Nevertheless something may be gleaned from it. In the excerpta de Legationibus, de Virtutibus et Vitiis, and de Sententiis, many pieces from Dio are to be found. We have also many fragments elsewhere, as Dio was very much read. There are besides the abridgments of Xiphilinus and Zonaras. It is surprising that the latter is not also reprinted in the edition of Reimarus. This Zonaras,[28] under Alexius and Kalojohannes Comnenus, was a man of business, and wrote a history from the beginning of the world to the death of Alexius Comnenus. The first volume of it is an abstract from Josephus, the second from Dio, and the third from several, particularly from Cedrenus, Skylitzes, and others; as to the later books of Dio, he could not procure them in spite of all his inquiries. He was imperial secretary, and commander of the body-guard. Nor was he a fool, though his judgment is exceedingly narrow; but his extracts from Dio, whom he does not mention as his authority, are of the highest importance. He was formerly overlooked, and I was the first to direct attention to him. Freinsheim made use of him where Livy is wanting, but no further. The excerpta de Sententiis especially, show with what accuracy he selected from Dio.
Dio has been edited by Stephens at Basle, and by H. S. Reimarus. A collation of the Venetian manuscript would be infinitely important. The annotations of Fabricius and Reimarus are of extraordinary value in an historical point of view. What is defective in Fabricius, as well as in his son-in-law Reimarus, is grammatical knowledge. Yet this deficiency has not prevented Reimarus from directing the whole of his attention to the index, which is excellent. If he had made the index before the edition was completed, he would have arranged quite differently the strictly philological part of his work. Philological indices are a most useful aid in study, and infinitely heighten the value of an edition. The task of compiling them leads to a great number of questions and inquiries, which otherwise would never have been thought of.[29]