Cassius Dio by Jesper Majbom Madsen

Author:Jesper Majbom Madsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350033399
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Democracy fails

As shown in chapter 1, Dio describes the Late Republic as a time when war and political violence became a fully integrated part of Roman politics. The political system was dysfunctional, and life in the city resembled that of a military camp. Members of the political elite used the armies and the Roman people as tools in the struggle to win as much power and prestige as possible. One of the claims Dio makes is that essentially no members of the elite were in politics for reasons other than to do what was in their own best interests, except Cato the Younger. But it is however worth noticing that Cato, a righteous man in Dio’s narrative who did his best to speak up against more ambitious men such as Pompey and Caesar, comes across as a man who falls short of his own ideals (Dio 37.57.3). Not only was he unable to make a difference in his opposition against Caesar when the latter moved forward with his land reform, but Cato became what is merely a parenthesis in Rome’s political history. In the way Dio shapes his story, Cato lost his integrity when he opposed Caesar, not because he found any fault with the reform or did not recognize the need to do something about the concentration of land, but because he feared that Caesar would become too popular should he manage to carry through the bill (Dio 38.3).

To prove his hypothesis of how no member of Rome’s politics was doing what was in the best interests of the Commonwealth, Dio draws up a narrative that focuses almost exclusively on how Rome’s elite fought for power and influence over the decision-making process. To show that democracy was both chaotic and dangerous, Dio devoted nine books, 36 through to 44, to examples that illustrate how the most influential men in Roman politics promoted their own interests but also how hard they had to fight to maintain their hard-won position in the war zone Roman politics was turning into.

Dio’s description of the political climate in Late Republican Rome makes it clear that violence and strife between members of the political elite intensified as the political culture degenerated and forced those involved to be still more ruthless and uncompromising in the attempt to stay in power or to make their way to the centre of the decision-making process. As we shall see, Dio believed that the result of what he saw as unmanaged competition, and the influence of the people, was a stage of continuous civil unrest culminating in three full-scale civil wars in the course of just five decades. Each war had devastating consequences for Rome, either because the wars were fought in Rome or in central Italy, or because Roman soldiers were forced to fight and kill each other, or because fighting between citizens unleashed an almost unparalleled hatred, similar or worse than the feelings known from wars between foreign enemies (Dio frg. 83.2–4 and Dio frg. 109).

Even if the

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