Teoria politica e scrittura storiografica nei ‘libri imperiali’ della Storia Romana di Cassio Dione

Abstract

This paper investigates to what extent the emergence of the princeps shapes Dio’s narrative. The best fitting passages for investigating this topic are the so called “anectodical-biographical sections”, which cannot be utterly dismissed as pieces of imperial biography: it would be better to consider those sections as devoted to the evaluation of the emperor’s praxis of government on a very concrete (rather that moralistic) ground. These narrative proceedings betray the existence of a well-structured framework lying beneath the work’s building in terms of political thought. In fact, Dio develops a consistent perspective about the relationship he expected between the princeps and the senate, fashioned, to my mind, by the princeps civilis model. This paradigm is sustained by a very classical political theory, although remoulded: the ‘mixed constitution’ theory.