The Roman past in the age of the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian.

The era of Septimius Severus and his successors (AD 193-235) began with civil war and saw the breakdown of the consensus-based Roman elite that had dominated the previous Antonine age. The Severan period also saw a revival of Greco-Roman historiography, seen in works that deal partly or wholly with contemporary events. This new historiography puts aside traditionalist precepts of the previous decades and incorporates new imaginative and analytic devices to describe the dramatic shift in perception of the Empire that the authors had experienced in their own lifetimes. The three Greek-language authors studied here all lived from the 170s into at least the 230s, and seem to have written in their old age. They are Cassius Dio, the author of a massive 80-book history of Rome from its foundation to his own day; Philostratus, who wrote biographies of intellectual and religious figures from Nero's time to Caracalla's; and Herodian, whose eight-book history covers the years 180 to 238. These three are close contemporaries, but have never been studied as the product of one generational experience. All three men wrote against a background of official Severan presentation of the Empire that stressed much that was different from the Antonines. In particular the Emperor was increasingly distancing himself from the elite in symbolic terms and emphasizing the dynastic and military sides of his persona. Dio responds with a vision of the Roman Empire that emphasizes the continuity of institutions, especially the Senate, as opposed to personalities: this is done especially in non-narrative episodes of his history. Philostratus' biographies make their subjects, especially Herodes Atticus and Apollonius of Tyana, and the Greek culture they represent, into the central element of the Roman world, with Emperors as important but peripheral. Each author uses narrative self-portraiture as a technique for identifying himself with what he sees as the defining feature of his Roman world. Herodian shares the others' sense of crisis, but sees the Empire as now utterly dysfunctional, and his narrative of recent history emphasizes a breakdown of standard ideas of cultural geography and of the customary function of rhetoric.Ph.D.Ancient historyClassical literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126071/2/3224920.pd