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Augustus the Ironic Paradigm: Cassius Dio's Portrayal of the Lex Julia and Lex Papia

Poppaea
Author(s): Adam M. Kemezis
Source: Phoenix, Vol. 61, No. 3/4 (Fall - Winter, 2007), pp. 270-285
Published by: Classical Association of Canada
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20304659
Accessed: 16-11-2017 18:08 UTC

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AUGUSTUS THE IRONIC PARADIGM: CASSIUS DIO'S
PORTRAYAL OF THE LEX JULIA AND LEXPAPIA POPPAEA

Adam M. Kemezis

V^assius dio's history of Rome covers nearly a thousand years of history in


eighty books: ofthat history, nearly a sixth, twelve of the eighty books, is devoted
to the fifty-seven-year career of one man, the emperor Augustus. While scholars
are naturally grateful that this is the case, since no more complete narrative of
those years has survived, the question remains of why the third-century historian
chose to emphasize this one figure so much.1 It is easy to see how Dio could see
the civil wars of the late republic as analogous to those of his own day, and how
this outlook might lead to a positive view of Augustus as a bringer of peace and
order. However, his portrait of Augustus is quite complex, as are his views on
the state of Rome in his own day, and his assessment of the first princeps is far
from straightforwardly positive. What I will explore here is one short example of
Dio's ambiguity: his account of Augustus' legislation on marriage. In describing
the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Papia Poppaea, Dio, through
compositional choices more than than through direct comment, contrasts the
emperor's sanctimonious public moralizing with the disastrous state of his family
life. The effect is to place Augustus in a strangely ironic light. However, I shall
argue, Dio's purpose is not to undermine his hero, but instead to show readers
how to interpret him correctly as a historical paradigm for the Severan age.

I. DIO'S AUGUSTUS AS PARADIGM

Cassius Dio was a conservative senator and deeply attached to tradition, but he
leaves his readers in no doubt that by the time of Augustus monarchy was the only
appropriate form of government for the Roman empire, and that its establishment
marked the return of stability after decades of civil discord. This thesis is made
through explicit argument, but it is also expressed by the form of his narrative
as a whole.2 The work of Bernd Manuwald and more recently Alain Gowing

An earlier version of this article was read at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Philological
Association in Montreal. I would like to thank the participants in that panel, as well as Bruce Frier,
David Potter, and the anonymous readers o? Phoenix for their many helpful suggestions.
I have used Boissevain's 1898 edition of Cassius Dio. Where Boissevain's book numbers differ
from the traditional (Leunclavius) numbering, I have listed Boissevain's number first and Leunclavius's
afterwards in square brackets. Because of the difficulties of section numbering in Dio, I have in several
instances included volume and page references to Cary's 1914 Loeb edition. For other authors I have
generally used the most recent Teubner editions. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
For the fullest recent bibliography, see Swan 2004: 389-400. For the purposes of this article,
the most significant works, in addition to Swan 2004, are Manuwald 1979; Gabba 1984: 70-75; Rich
1989; Reinhold and Swan 1990; and Gowing 1992: 19-38, 57-93.
2 See Dio 44.2, 47.39.4-5, 52.15-17 for explicit arguments (the first two in propria persona, the
last by Maecenas) as to how republican government had ceased to be viable by the time of Caesar.

270
PHOENIX, VOL. 61 (2007) 3-4.

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 271

has made clear how teleological Dio makes his account of the civil wars after 44
b.c.: due to the historian's selectivity and emphasis, the narrative becomes the
story of how Octavian vanquished his enemies one by one until he was the only
contender left, and could turn Rome into a monarchy.3 Most current scholarship
also agrees that when Dio includes long passages of political-theoretical material
in his account of Augustus, he is laying out an idealized vision of how the Roman
monarchy should work.4
Some recent scholars, especially Meyer Reinhold and P. M. Swan, have seen
this idealization also in the narrative portions of the history and in the figure of
Augustus himself.5 In their view, Dio is not simply embracing monarchy faute
de mieux, because the republic is no longer viable. Rather, he is committed to
an ideology of enlightened kingship in which a virtuous man rules by legally
sanctioned means and with the welcome assistance of the aristocracy. Dio sees
all of the emperors after Marcus Aurelius as in one way or another failing to live
up to this ideal, and presents Augustus as the model of everything they should be
and are not. Augustus' example is seen as all the more relevant in that he put an
end to a period of civil war analogous to what Dio perceives in his own troubled
times. For convenience, I will refer to this view as the "paradigm thesis."
While this thesis provides a compelling answer to the question of Dio's
overemphasis on Augustus, it does not sufficiently account for the ambivalence
that earlier scholars have recognized in the text. Simply put, Dio's Augustus is
not nearly as heroic as he might have been. During the years from 44 to 31, Dio's
Octavian is just as power-hungry and dissembling as his enemies: if anything,
the constant narrative focus on him serves only to highlight his unscrupulous
ambition. Dio has no doubt that from first to last Caesar's heir sought supreme
power or, as he phrases it, "strove for the same sort of things for which Caesar had
been murdered" (45.4.3: h?\ xoicuka ?Sp^naev scj)' o?? o xe Ka?aap ?7ie(|>?v?uxo).
The historian records and does not refute the contemporary charge that Octavian
was responsible for the deaths of the consuls Hirtius and Pansa at the Battle of
Mutina (46.39.1), and asserts positively that before the battle Octavian pretended
to make peace with Decimus Brutus simply to keep him out of the way until he
could deal with Antony (45.14.3-15.1). Dio portrays the civil wars as the prelude
to Augustus' reign, but that does not mean he makes Octavian into a paladin on a
quest to save the res publica: he is on the contrary the leader of a faction, just like
all the other main characters.6

3 See Manuwald 1979: 27-76 and Gowing 1992 passim, but esp. 91-93.
4 Much of the work has focused on Book 52, which consists almost entirely of a debate between
Agrippa and Maecenas on whether Rome should become a monarchy. Dio's own political advocacy
was posited at least as early as Meyer 1891. The argument for Book 52 as a "political pamphlet"
was most influentially made by Millar (1964: 102-118). For more recent and highly divergent
readings, see Escribano 1999 and Schmidt 1999. Other extended theoretical passages include the
"clemency-dialogue" between Augustus and Livia in Book 55 (14-22) and Tiberius' funeral oration
for his predecessor in Book 56 (35-41).
5 Originally argued in Reinhold and Swan 1990, recently expanded on in Swan 2004: 13-17.
6 For the departure from the standard Augustan line, see Manuwald 1979: 66-70.

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272 PHOENIX

Once Augustus is emperor, he becomes a more likeable character, but still far
from wholly idealized. He is generally correct in his relations with the Senate, but
there are exceptions: in particular, the question of whether or not a given emperor
ever executed senators is to Dio something of a litmus test for good emperors, and
by that measure even the post-Actium Augustus does not come off as perfect.7
Dio also describes him as prone to anger and to philandering.8
If Dio had wanted to idealize Augustus more fully, nothing prevented him from
doing so. He would certainly have had ample sources, even if he were reluctant
to use such obvious contemporary propaganda as Augustus' autobiography or
the life of him written by Nicolaus of Damascus. The "fitting talents" (decora
ingenia) that Tacitus identifies as narrating the reign of Augustus (Ann. 1.1.2),
as well as the more adulatory works that apparently succeeded them, must still
have been available to a Rome-based author of Dio's wealth and prestige. There
is no consensus at all as to the identity of Dio's main sources for these or any
other years, in part because of his failure to display a consistent bias either for
or against Octavian.9 So, for example, he follows to some extent the tradition
also found in Velleius (2.66.1-2), that Octavian was less enthusiastic about the
proscriptions than either of his colleagues.10 Velleius, naturally, makes the best
defense of Octavian he can: the young triumvir is heavily coerced, and is made to
seem nearly as much a victim as the people who actually die. For Dio, however,
Octavian's motives are less exalted. Being a younger man, he has fewer enemies
than the others, and he has learned from Julius Caesar that pointless atrocities are
bad politics. Thus he is unscrupulous but not actually cruel or vicious, as Antony
is in Dio. Whether the two historians share a source or. what that source said
is not at issue. Dio could have taken the same strong pro-Augustan line that
Velleius did, and chose not to do so.
His reasons for this choice seem evident enough: Dio did not believe Augustus'
version of events and did not want to reproduce it in his own history. It is at
this point that the paradigm thesis comes up against another influential reading
of Dio, which is that he was a skeptical historian in the tradition of Thucydides
or Tacitus, with an acute understanding of the difference between appearance

See, for example, Dio 55.10.15. Swan (2004: 110) notes that Dio has if anything exaggerated
the number of men executed in connection with the elder Julia's fall. Dio makes the "litmus test"
explicit at 75. [74].2.1 (= Cary 1914: 9.162), noting that Septimius Severus made, and promptly broke,
the same promise that had been given to the Senate by "previous good emperors" (oi 7ipcpnv ayaGoi
a?TOKpauope?). For other literary references to such imperial promises, see Birley 1962.
8 See, for example, Dio 55.7.1-3 (Augustus' temper and Maecenas' restraining effect on it);
54.19.3 (Augustus' affair with Maecenas' wife); 58.2.5 (his affairs in general and Livia's toleration of
them).
9 See the conclusion of Manuwald (1979: 273-284) after a very long source-critical section in
which he eliminates each of the major possibilities for Dio's "one main source," in particular Livy.
Dio 47.7.1-3. The idea of Octavian as reluctant to begin proscriptions is also found in Suetonius
(Div. Aug. 27.1), although with the addition that once the proscriptions began, he was the harshest
of the three.

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 273

and reality, the Thucydidean X?y? (lev ... spy? ??.11 As with the paradigm
thesis, the evidence for this position is plentiful and easy to locate, but the two
are not easy to reconcile. It seems as if Dio has not quite decided whether he
wants to be Velleius or Tacitus; at some times he shares the latter's willingness to
speak without pretense of the realities of power, but sometimes, above all in his
speeches, he writes idealizing passages that might have come from the former,
without any assertion or clear implication on Dio's part that the speaker is wrong.
This has led J. W. Rich, among others, to detect contradictions in the text that
"are the product of the tension between two different facets of Dio's persona as a
historian?the realist seeking to expose the truth about men's nature and actions
and the political moralist who saw in Augustus the embodiment of the ideal
emperor."12
My aim in examining Dio's portrait of the marriage-laws is to come up
with a reading of the text in which its paradigmatic and its skeptical aspects
are complementary rather than unresolvedly opposed. Dio's Augustus is indeed
meant to be seen as a model, but not in a straightforwardly imitative sense.
Rather, the historian wants us to read this emperor in a particular way, and to
make a distinction between his questionable character as an individual and his
immense institutional achievement as founder of a stable monarchy. The latter is
much more important to Dio, who in Book 52 and 53 goes into long theoretical
and descriptive digressions to explain it. The episode of the marriage-laws is
an example of the narrative reinforcing that distinction. It is in this sense that
Augustus is an ironic paradigm. The episode means quite different things at
different levels of reading. In isolation, it is a story of an unsuccessful but worthy
attempt to deal with a social problem; in its immediate context, it becomes that
of a hypocritical ruler trying by legislation to set standards that he undermines by
his own example; in the overall scheme of Dio's work, it describes the working of
a new political system, and the soundness of that system in spite of the failings
of the individuals who operate it. The disjunction between these levels of reading
generates an irony that is fundamental to Dio's view of historical narrative. It
allows him to take a skeptical or even hostile view of his emperors without
disparaging as a whole the Roman order, in which our historian is very much
invested. Instead, by spending so much time on individuals only to disparage their
achievement, Dio is able to throw into sharp relief what he believes to be the real
greatness of Rome, and the real political problems of his own time.

II. THE LAWS AND THE TEXT

The Augustan marriage legislation consisted mainly of two separate laws,


passed twenty-five years apart, but, given that Roman jurists most often treated

nSeeManuwald 1979: 73-76; 282; Rich 1989; Hose 1994: 380-385, 433-436; Escribano 1999.
12 Rich 1989:108. Similarly Manuwald (1979: 281-284) relates Dio's combination of paradigmatic
moralizing and skepticism to his experiences under Commodus and the Severans.

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274 PHOENIX

them for practical purposes as one law, it is not always easy to distinguish the
provisions of one from the other or to place them in a historical relationship.
The first law, the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus of 18 b.c., represented a major
increase in. state regulation of citizens' family lives. It penalized, although it did
not absolutely invalidate, marriages across wide gaps in social status, notably of
freed persons to members of senatorial families. Acceptable marriages, on the
other hand, were promoted through a series of carrots and sticks that gave legal
privileges to married people of both sexes while imposing disabilities on those
who either did not marry, or married socially unacceptable partners, or failed to
remarry after divorce or the death of a spouse. The law also included at least some
incentives to have children.13
In a.D. 9, amid protests from the upper classes alleging that the previous law
was causing distress, the emperor put through the Lex Papia Poppaea. This law
made several adjustments to the Lex Julia, including extending to Vestal Virgins
the privileges enjoyed by mothers of three children; lengthening the amount
of time a woman was given to remarry after divorce or being widowed; and
increasing the rights of former masters to inherit from childless freed persons. It
may have limited the length of time for which engaged persons were allowed to
enjoy the legal privileges of the married. It also established that the married but
childless should suffer penalties in the area of inheritance law, penalties lighter
than similar ones imposed on the unmarried by the Lex Julia. Since is not clear
how the married childless were dealt with in the Lex Julia, there remains dispute
over whether the Lex Papia Poppaea represented a relaxation or a tightening of
the rules in this respect, and thus over how Augustus responded to his subjects'
protests, if that was indeed his motivation for the second law.14

13 Legal sources are collected in Riccobono 1945: 1.166-198, and the two essays of J?rs (1882;
1894) represent the most complete attempt to establish a historical context for the laws including
legal, historiographical, and poetical sources. For recent scholarly treatments, see Brunt 1971:
558-566; Wallace-Hadrill 1981; Mette-Dittmann 1991: 131-186; Treggiari 1991: 60-80; Astolfi
1995; McGinn 1998: 70-84; Swan 2004: 225-235.
14J?rs (1882: 30-31) argues that the married childless had not been penalized before the Lex Papia
Poppaea, based on Gaius' statement {Inst. 2.286&) that orbi, married childless persons, "by the Lex
Papia, on account of the fact that they have no children, lose a half part of inheritances and legacies"
(per legem Papiam ob id, quod ?iberos non habent, dimidias partes hereditatum legatorumque perdunt),
and Severy (2003: 200-202) concurs, noting that when Tacitus in passing mentions the Lex Papia
Poppaea (Ann. 3.25, 3.28.3) he makes it sound like a tightening rather than a loosening of control, and
complains that it increased the prevalence of informers. An alternate reading is that the Lex Julia had
penalized the unmarried and the married childless indiscriminately, and that the Lex Papia Poppaea
mitigated the disabilities of the latter: see Brunt 1971: 560; Mette-Dittman 1991: 162-164. Treggiari
(1991: 60) also considers the Lex Papia Poppaea to have been overall a relaxation of the Lex Julia.
Swan (2004: 232-234) finds it unusual that protests should suddenly have arisen in A.D. 9 over a law
that had been in effect for more than twenty-five years. He proposes rather that the Lex Julia did not
penalize the married childless at all, and that thus the Lex Papia Poppaea was a toughening of the law.
On this interpretation, the protests came only after Augustus announced a draft version of the law, in
which he intended to expose the married childless to the same penalties as the unmarried. It was the

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 275

Dio's account of the first law and the circumstances of its passage is quite
brief (54.16). He notes its content as part of a catalog of laws for that year,
with little preamble as to Augustus' motives or anything immediate that might
have spurred him to legislate. There follows a longer account of the negative
reaction in the Senate, and of a stratagem employed to get around the law. The
account of the Lex Papia Poppaea is much longer (56.1-10). It starts with a
public demonstration at the games by the ?quit?s, seeking the repeal of a law on
marriage, presumably the Lex Julia.. Augustus responds by gathering the protesters
in the Forum, dividing the married from the bachelors, and treating them to two
direct-discourse speeches, which make up the great majority of the whole account,
one praising the married men, fathers and childless alike, another castigating the
bachelors, and then proceeds to put through the Lex Papia Poppaea. Dio then
sets forth the terms of the new law in brief and rather vague terms, and finishes
by noting that both of the consuls for whom the law was named were in fact
bachelors.
Our basic question, then, is: why did Dio place so much more emphasis on the
second law than on the first? The choice seems counter-intuitive: it was customary
by Dio's time to think of the two laws as one, which jurists often referred to as the
Lex Julia et Papia.15 The earlier law set the precedent and established the basic
framework with which the later one simply tinkered; in addition, it bore the name
of the emperor rather than those of two placeholder consuls. The speeches that
Dio gives Augustus in Book 56 are both highly general in nature and might just as
easily have been given in support of the earlier law as of the later one. If anything,
they would make more sense in connection with the Lex Julia since, although
one main point of concern with the Lex Papia Poppaea was the status of married
people with no children, Dio has Augustus speak of marriage and procreation as
an indivisible package, without apparently realizing that each can exist without
the other.
It appears that Dio wrote a set-piece passage about Augustus and marriage,
which he could have put anywhere, and he chose, at some cost in rhetorical
verisimilitude, to put it in Book 56. This is all the more odd in that the episode
would have gone some way to enlivening Book 54, which as it is has no speeches
at all and consists entirely of somewhat tedious annalistic narrative, whereas Book

protests that caused him to make a distinction between the two classes (cf. Dio 56.10.1: "[Augustus]
distinguished the married from the unmarried by a difference in penalties," xo?? 5? ysyafiriKOxa? ?no
tc?v ?yuvcov xcp xcov ?7uxiu?a>v ?ia(|>opcp ?iexcopiae) by imposing only a half-penalty on the married
childless.
For full details of the jurists' naming practices, see the comments of Riccobono (1945: 1.166
168). One factor in Dio's decision may have been the piquancy of the fact that both of the eponymous
senators of the Lex Papia Poppaea were bachelors. However, the moral point of this irony does not
seem significant enough to dictate a compositional choice as important as where to insert two long
speeches: the point would after all still hold good even if the account of the Lex Papia Poppaea were
the shorter of the two.

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276 PHOENIX

56 is if anything overstuffed with such highlights as Varus' German disaster of


a.D. 9 and the various episodes surrounding the death of Augustus.
Source-based explanations for the choice are not promising. It is very unlikely
that Dio's main sources for 18 b.c. were the same as those for a.d. 9, but there is
no reason to assume either that the latter were more detailed or that there was a
general tradition of greater emphasis on the second law.16 In fact, what we know
of the tradition indicates that, as one might expect, it was the Lex Julia that was
treated as more significant. Specifically, both Livy and Suetonius mention that
Augustus, as support for the Lex Julia, read out and published the speech De prole
augenda of Metellus Macedonicus, originally delivered in 131 b.c.17 In Suetonius'
account of the Lex Papia Poppaea (Div. Aug. 34.2), Augustus responds to the
demonstrations against the Lex Julia with a simple gesture: he pointedly calls his
great-grandchildren to join him and Germanicus, and poses in a family tableau.
The episode is related at no great length and with no speech-making.
If we cannot ascribe Dio's compositional choice to his sources, or to the actual
content of the historical events, we can more fruitfully examine the overall narrative
contexts of the two episodes, specifically the deteriorating family situation of the
princeps. In 18 b.c., when the Lex Julia was passed, Augustus had a reasonable
claim to be a successful paterfamilias. While he had no son, his daughter had
given him one grandson and would give him two more, and the principle of direct
family succession seemed to be working. By a.d. 9, the picture was quite different:
Gaius and Lucius were dead, Agrippa Postumus and the Younger Julia were

16 The most recent complete study of Dio's sources for this period is that of Manuwald (1979; for
summary, see 275-278), whose conclusion is that little can be known about Dio's main sources except
that Livy was not an important one among them, and that for the later years of the reign the annalistic
tradition was not very rich, so that Dio had to supplement it from several other authors. None of the
the major theories that have been suggested involves Dio having the same main source for 18 b.c. and
A.D. 9. Manuwald's agnostic approach has been followed by successors, with the modification that
Swan (1987) has demonstrated that Dio's annalistic sources were actually quite full, and may well have
been the same as those of Tacitus and Suetonius.
Neither source actually refers to the Lex Julia by name, but it must be to that law that they refer.
Per. 59 of Livy says of Metellus that extat oratio eius, quam Augustus Caesar, cum de maritandis ordinibus
ageret, velut in haec t?mpora scriptam in senatu recitavit ("there exists an oration of his that Augustus
Caesar, when he was legislating on marriage and social rank, read out in the Senate as if written for
the present occasion"). The phrase de maritandis ordinibus is applied in legal sources only to the Lex
Julia (see D. 37.14.6.4 = ADA 1.178), not to the Lex Papia Poppaea or to the notional Lex Julia et
Papia. Moreover, on any dating it is highly unlikely that Book 59 of Livy was written after a.d. 9.
Suetonius (Div. Aug. 89.2) says that Augustus on separate occasions read out and published both
Metellus' speech and one by Rutilius on building regulations quo magis persuaderet utramque rem non
a se primo animadversam, sed antiquis iam tune curae fuisse ("the better to make the case that in neither
instance was he the first to give attention to the matter, but that even then both matters had been of
concern to previous generations"). Evidently, Augustus anticipated that the law in question would be
condemned as an innovation, which is far more likely to have been the case with the Lex Julia than
with the later measure. Apparently his publication of the speech was successful enough that it was still
being read by Aulus Gellius and his friends nearly 200 years later (NA 1.6), although Gellius believes
the speech to be by Metellus Numidicus.

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 277

on prison-islands, and the heir apparent was an adopted son, Tiberius, whose
previous relations with Augustus had been less than smooth.18 Dio is of course
well aware of Augustus' domestic travails and elsewhere makes no attempt to
disguise them. He refers without comment to the rumors that Livia had a hand in
the deaths of Gaius and Lucius (55.10a.10). Agrippa Postumus is also seen as an
enemy of Livia in particular, in addition to his general ill nature. We do not have
Dio's account of the younger Julia's exile: assuming that it occurred in a.d. 8, it
has fallen into the same manuscript lacuna as almost all the domestic business of
that year.19 It would thus still have been very much in readers' minds as they came
to Augustus' sermons on family life. The Augustus who lost his only daughter
and four of his five grandchildren to disgraced exile or suspicious death is a very
different figure from the proud great-grandfather in the story told by Suetonius.
We can be sure that Dio was aware of the contrast between the two periods of
Augustus' life, and thus, in the absence of any other reason, his emphasis on the
later period is most likely designed to bring out the contrast between the emperor's
public posturing and his private distress. This interpretation gets support from
Dio's treatment of the earlier Lex Julia. There, he has recalcitrant senators make
veiled references to Augustus' own philandering, and they sarcastically enquire
what kind of admonitions ?it princeps uses to correct Livia (54.16.3-5). So when,
in his later speeches, Augustus claims that a wife can "restrain the passionate nature
of the youth and temper the old man's ill-timed harshness" (56.3.3: too xe v?oo
xr]v 8jLi|iavf? (|)i)0"iv KaOe?p?ai Kai too Trpea?oxepoo xrjv e^copov a?)axr|p?xr|xa
KCpacai), the audience is surely supposed to remember that Livia inflamed rather
than cooled Augustus' nature in youth, and may well have hardened him in old

18 In Dio's account (55.9.5-8), Tiberius went to Rhodes because he was afraid of angering Gaius
and Lucius. Dio explicidy attributes the situation to Augustus' bungling, but does not refute in detail
all of the various other explanations for Tiberius' move, in particular that he was expelled by Augustus;
that he was angry at not being made Caesar; or that he could no longer stand to live with Julia. In
narrating Tiberius' recall (55.13.2), Dio says that Augustus made him adopt Germanicus "because he
suspected that [Tiberius] might somehow become mentally unbalanced, and he was afraid he might
even attempt a coup" (auxov eicewov imoTtxe?aac 7tr| 8K(j)povr|a8tv, Kai ^o?nGeic [ir\ Kai veoxuaan
Xl)
For Postumus, see Dio 55.32.2. The manuscript says that he xf)v 'IouXiav cb? (inxpuiav
oie?a?Aev ("abused Julia for being a stepmother"). Lipsius emended 'IouAiav to Aiouiav, an
emendation that Boissevain applauds but does not print. It is very difficult to see what Postumus could
have meant by referring to his exiled mother or soon-to-be-exiled sister as "stepmother," whereas Livia
makes perfect sense in the context of Postumus being deprived of his "birthright" in favor of Tiberius.
The dating of Julia's exile to a.D. 8 assumes that Tacitus is being precise when, in his account of the
year A.D. 28 (Ann. 4.71.4), he says that Julia died that year after twenty years in exile. Since it is very
unlikely that Dio would have let Julia's fall pass without comment, we may presume the account has
been lost: there are four gaps in Books 55 and 56 of Dio, of which the last covers A.D. 8. The next
latest covers A.D. 2-4, evidendy too early for Julia's banishment. See Swan 2004: 183-185. Williams
(1978: 59-61) links the exile with the Lex Papia Poppaea, arguing that Augustus felt the need to
set his own house in order before introducing the new law, which Williams sees as continuing and
intensifying the program of the Lex Julia.

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278 PHOENIX

age against his family. It is also likely that, when Augustus warns of the extinction
of the noble republican gentes and their replacement by provincials and Greeks
(56.7.5-6), the audience is meant to realize that both these events did subsequently
happen, without leading to the ruin of the empire. On the contrary, they made
possible the career of Cassius Dio himself, a second-generation consular whose
roots were in Bithynia.20

III. DIO'S EXEMPLARY AUGUSTUS

Thus far, my reading of the marriage-laws episode has been predominantly


ironic. By his compositional choices, Dio is deliberately refuting the surface
implication that Augustus' interference with his subjects' family lives reflected
his own superior moral character. On this level Augustus was a failure, both
because?at least where sex and family were concerned?he had no superior
moral character to reflect, and because ultimately his policy was not successful in
its objectives. Dio refers in passing to the tactics that were developed to evade
the marriage-laws (54.16.7), and since the Augustan laws were still in force two
hundred years later, his audience would have known that they did not in fact result
in greater fertility among the elite, which Dio claims was Augustus' objective.
Does this leave any room for the paradigm thesis? It does, but in a narrower
form. The most complete one-sentence statement of the thesis, by its original
proponents, Meyer Reinhold and P. M. Swan, is that "for Dio, not only was
Augustus the founding father of the indispensable monarchy and a paradigm
of the good ruler for the Sever?n age, but the Augustan system figured as the
normative form of monarchy in its constitutional and social modalities."21 The
marriage-laws episode does not disprove this thesis, but it does show that the
second half of it is considerably more significant than the first. Dio gives us
a great deal of information about Augustus the man, but what matters most
is not his personality but his achievements, particularly in the areas of building
institutions and establishing lasting, productive relationships between monarch
and aristocracy.22
A key text is the very long speech in Book 52 where Maecenas lays out the
case why Augustus should found a permanent monarchy, and describes what that
monarchy should look like. The most striking thing about this speech is that,
unlike Dio Chrysostom's orations on kingship and similar quasi-philosophical
texts on the "good ruler," it has very little to say about the personal character of
the ideal monarch.23 Instead, it is mostly an account of what the institutions of
the new monarchical state should be: what should be the jobs of magistrates, the

20 For consideration of Dio's antecedents and his father's career, see Barnes 1984: 241-242.
21 Reinhold and Swan 1990: 156.
22 See on this point Gabba 1984: 72-74.
See, however, De Blois 1994 for Dio's Maecenas as part of a tradition of prescriptive kingship
literature starting with Isocrates' Evagoras and Xenophon's Agesilaus, extending to Dio Chrysostom,

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 279

Senate, the equestrians, the army, and so forth, followed by a description of the
monarch's own role. As far as Maecenas is concerned, the main job of a good
monarch is to establish proper relations with his subjects such that they run the
empire competently for him; as long as these relations work, the deeper ethical
causes of that behavior are irrelevant.24 Since the actual governing of Maecenas'
state is done by the upper classes, and since the monarch's main job is to appoint
the right people and make sure they do their jobs, the implication is that the
system can sustain itself, at least for a time, whatever havoc the occasional bad
emperor may wreak on it. Thus Augustus' achievement was so great precisely
because he designed a state that could keep functioning in spite of the lesser
talents and despicable character of many of his successors.
Looked at from this perspective, Augustus' marriage laws are much less of a
failure. None of Dio's irony should obscure the fact that he thinks that Augustus
is on the right side of the issue and that the resistant senators are wrong. In
Dio's greater narrative, the laws represent part of'theprinceps attempt to turn the
nobility of the late republic into a respectable aristocracy that will put the good
of the state as a whole before personal concerns or feuds. Dio has little sympathy
or respect for the Senate of the late republic. When the First Triumvirate
is established, he writes with evident disgust about the collapse of senatorial
integrity in the rush to curry favor with the new powers: he claims that "of
the men ofthat time, none except Cato engaged in public business from pure
motives or without some personal ambition for gain" (37.57.3: KaBapco? fi?v y?p
Kai aveu tivo? i?ia? 7i?,eov?^ia? ou?ei? to>v tots Ta Koiv? nkr\v tou Koitcovo?
87ipaTT8v). Even when the aristocrats do have the backbone to resist the dynasts,
their motives are purely selfish and they provide no decent alternative. According
to Dio, the Optimates who opposed Pompey's command against the pirates in 67
"preferred to suffer anything whatsoever from the pirates rather than to entrust
so great a command to him [sc. Pompey]" (36.24.1: amr\ [f\ yepooaia] yap
Tiav OTiouv U71? TCDV enarco v TcaGe?v juaM-ov f\ sKsivco ToaaOTrjv f|ysjLiov?av
?yxeipicrai fipeiTo). Taken as a whole, Dio's view of the late republican political
system is that it was broken beyond repair.
Evidently, the marriage-laws did not present an immediate solution to the
problem. That solution is rather to be found in Books 52 and 53, where Dio lays
out what he sees as the political foundations of the newly monarchical Roman

Aelius Aristides, Philostratus, and the author of ps.-Aristides' Eis Basilea. Dorandi (1985) sees links
between Maecenas and Philodemus' On the Good King in Homer.
24 See 52.26.2: "The best ruler, one. who does any good, must not only himself do all that is
appropriate, but also have forethought for others, so they may become the best they possibly can"
(x?v y?p ?tpxovxa x?v ?piaxov, ou x? xi ofyeX?c, ?axi, ?e? urj u?vov aox?v Ti?vG' ? 7cpoar|K8i rcoie?v,
uXkcL Kai xcov ?XX&v, ?7ico? ? ?xi ?eXxiaxot y?yvcovxai, Tipovoe?v). There had, of course, always
been a tradition in kingship literature that good rulers get the best out of their subjects, but with
Cassius Dio that quality has become virtually the sole determinant of whether a ruler is good, and all
the rulers other personal characteristics are judged in terms of how well they contribute to that end.

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280 PHOENIX

state. However, the marriage-laws are by no means irrelevant to the political


settlement. The narrative of the Lex Julia is introduced as part of an extended
section on Augustus' dealings with the Senate in 18 b.c., which included a review
of the senatorial roster and the removal of many unsuitable men (54.13-14) as well
as a new law on electoral bribery (54.16.1), both of which Dio views as entirely
necessary, although he seems to think that the first was imperfectly executed. He
also acknowledges that the marriage-laws addressed a real problem: he treats it
as fact that there was a gender imbalance among the upper classes in favor of
males (54.16.2), that among the equestrians bachelors were more common than
married men (56.1.2), and that it was something of a scandal that neither of
the consuls for whom the Lex Papia Poppaea was named had a wife (56.10.3),
a detail that allows Dio to underscore the problem while maintaining his ironic
stance.25 Augustus' speeches, especially that to the bachelors, focus very much
on the issue of patriotic, markedly Roman, duty as against private pleasure. At
the outset, he asserts that the bachelors cannot be called Romans, since they "are
trying to abolish that name completely" (56.4.2: akX eTcixeipe?xe to ?vofia xooxo
KaxaA,6aai), and uses Romulus and Hersilia as examples of how anxious their
ancestors were to ensure future generations (56.5.4-6). According to Augustus,
the bachelors are claiming that they live "unencumbered" (eu?covov) and "free"
(sA,?U0epov) lives, while in reality they are seeking "license for [their] outrageous
and unruly behavior" (56.6.6-7.1: e^ouaiav Kai u?piCeiv Kai aae^ya?veiv).
By speaking of abuse of libertas for selfish reasons, Augustus is equating the
bachelors' behavior with the general anarchic behavior of the upper classes that
brought the republic down, and in Dio's ideological terms he is placing himself in
the right. In the immediate context, his measure is a failure. As it turned out, the
nobility would be perpetuated from the provincial elites from which Dio sprang.
Presumably the historian sees the resulting Antonine aristocracy, the Senate of his
idealized youth, as being a realization by other means of what Augustus had hoped
to achieve by direct succession: certainly there is little evidence that Dio wished
there were fewer people like himself in the Senate and more descendants of great

25 Dio says that the gender imbalance affected xoG euyevou?, which, along with its cognates, he
elsewhere uses to mean anything from "patrician" (37.51.1) to "free-born" (55.31.1): Cary (1914) gives
"nobility." Brunt (1971: 558) and Rich (1990: 193) note that it cannot here mean "senators" on the
grounds of internal logic, since senatorial are specifically excluded from the permission to marry freed
persons: both suggest the word is here equivalent to the Latin ingenui. However, this is open to the
same objection. Dio sees the Lex Julia as relaxing the regulations regarding freed persons' marriage:
the new law must, at least in his mind, have permitted marriages between freed persons and some
other class of persons who were previously prohibited or strongly discouraged from such marriages.
It is unlikely that, either in reality or for Dio, all ingenui were previously forbidden from marrying
all freed persons: see Treggiari 1991: 64 and McGinn 1998: 85-86. It seems more likely that Dio
refers here to a broad upper class: see 56.7.2, where Augustus, addressing the equestrians, claims to
have given permission to those of his audience who were not of the senatorial order. See also 48.45.8,
where Dio, needing to be precise in referring to ingenui, uses a periphrasis rather than a single word.

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 281

republican families.26 This distinction between short-term failure and long-term


success complements the distinction between Augustus' personal character and
his institutional achievement. Dio assuredly sees Augustus as a model, but only in
one respect. Thus the need to point up the princeps personal failings. By treating
Augustus' character and actions with ironic scorn, the historian is paradoxically
vindicating what he sees as his hero's one great positive quality. Panegyric or
hagiography would only obscure that quality in a mass of personal virtues that
Dio probably thought of as being unteachable in any case.2 Instead he is making
a specific point about what the Roman state is and what should be the monarch's
role in it.

IV. DIO'S CONTEMPORARY WORLD

In closing, it is worth looking at this case study against the specifically Severan
background of Dio's writing. His history as we have it was probably mostly
written in the 210s and perhaps revised over the course of the 220s.28 This period
saw Septimius Severus (193-211) succeeded by two adult sons, followed quickly
by the murder of one by the other. Although Caracalla (211-217) went on to
make himself hateful to both the aristocracy and the bureaucracy, his dynastic
associations retained power after his death, especially with the army. Elagabalus
(218-222) and later Alexander (222-235) had very little claim to power other
than through the name, connections, and money of the Severan dynasty and
its relations by marriage in Syria.29 Septimius Severus had given unprecedented
prominence to his wife and children in his public self-presentation. Under the

26It is interesting to compare on this point Dio 62.[61]. 17.4-5 (= Cary 1914: 8.74), where Dio
tells how in the reign of Nero several descendants of famous republican families went on the stage
in pantomimes. Dio imagines provincials in the audience recognizing them: Macedonians point to a
descendant of Aemilius Paullus, Greeks to a Mummius, and so forth.
27 While Dio naturally approves of rulers receiving a good education, he is under no illusion that
such education is a sufficient condition for enlightened rule. Commodus (72.[71].36.4) and Caracalla
(78. [77].11.3), two of Dio's least favorite rulers, are both noted as having been well educated. On the
other hand, Trajan is one of Dio's heroes, and is said to have lacked education (68.7.4) but nonetheless
to have "showed its practical effect in his understanding and actions" (to ye ur|V epydv a?xfi? [se.
7cai?eia?] Kai r|7r?axaxo Kai ?rco?ei). Similarly, Marcus Aurelius, Dio's most idealized emperor in
terms of personal virtue, was of course well educated, but more stress is explicitly laid on his innate
gifts (72.[71].35.1-2).
28 The chronology of Dio's writings is a disputed question. See Swan 2004: 28-33 for discussion
and full bibliography. The most common view places his writing in the 200s and 210s, for which see
Millar 1964: 28-32, 193-194. A minority opinion, argued on different grounds by Letta (1979) and
Barnes (1984), prefers to have Dio writing well into the 230s. My own view is that the early dating
is basically correct, but that the text was subject to substantial later revisions, as argued by Murison
(1999: 8-12). The text we are looking at here may well have been composed in the 210s, but we can
assume its content still reflected its author's views by 230.
29 See Baharal 1996: 52-66 for continuation of Severan dynastic propaganda under the later
members of the dynasty.

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282 PHOENIX

Antonines, there had always been an underlying principle of succession within


an extended family, but by the 200s hereditary succession had been openly and
officially endorsed.
Dio is unlikely to have seen this as a positive development. His way of
presenting Augustus' succession problems in ironic conjunction with his marriage
laws implies that it is futile to expect the chances of biology to produce consistently
enlightened government. More generally, however, Dio's entire portrait of
Augustus engages with trends in the Severan monarchy. The early 200s saw
the start of what would be an ever-increasing isolation of the emperor from
the Roman elite. The Senate in particular saw its formally sanctioned authority
being diminished in favor of the unofficial influence and raw power of the army,
court, and bureaucracy, while emperors placed more and more emphasis on their
military prowess or dynastic claims to power. Amid such trends, Dio's vision of
history, in which institutions and relationships matter more than the characters
of individuals, looks unfashionable to say the least.
Dio certainly realized that his stance on the meaning of the Roman past
ran contrary to what the emperors of his day had in mind. This is seen most
clearly when he shows us Septimius Severus himself trying to use Augustus as his
exemplar. As Dio tells it, when Severus returned from the last battle of his civil
wars, a particularly bloody battle at Lyon against Clodius Albinus, he became
increasingly harsh toward the Senate. This change was accompanied by two gross
manipulations of the past (76. [75].7.4-8.3): first, Severus proclaimed that he was
in fact the adopted son of Marcus Aurelius. This led him, among other things,
to rehabilitate the memory of his new brother Commodus, which in turn meant
an attack on the senators who had hated Commodus and connived at his murder.
This was in spite of Severus' own former self-representation as the avenger of
Commodus' successor Pertinax. Dio takes it for granted that the change flew in
the face of all reason and that nobody, at least among the elite, was fooled or
impressed.
Severus' second manipulation is in its way even stranger. Dio says that as part
of his oration in the Senate in praise of Commodus, the emperor "praised the
harshness and cruelty of Sulla, Marius, and Augustus, as being the safer course,
while he deplored the mildness of Pompey and Caesar, as having been fatal to
both of those men" (76.[75].8.1: xrjv jisv ZvXXov Kai Mapiou Kai Auyouaxou
a?axrjpiav xe Kai ?juioxrjxa d)? ?a^a^eax?pav ?Tiaivcav, xfjv ?? no|i7tr|iou Kai

30 In reality, Severus' self-adoption into the Antonine dynasty was clearly not as sudden a move
as one would gather from Dio or from the Historia Augusta (Sev. 10.3-6, 11.3, 12.8). Numismatic
and epigraphic evidence shows that the idea was put about at least as early as 195 and may have been
anticipated since the start of Severus' campaigns: see Baharal 1996: 21-42. Presumably, though,
Dio and the HA must reflect some surprise felt by contemporaries: it may be that after Severus' final
military victory in 197 the association between his family and the Antonines was suddenly played up
more emphatically and explicitly. No surviving source makes it clear whether Severus really came up
with a detailed narrative of how Marcus had adopted him at a specific time during his lifetime.

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DIO ON THE AUGUSTAN MARRIAGE LAWS 283

Kaiaapo? 87cis?Ketav ob? ?XeGpiav a?xo?? eKsivoi? yeyevrijLi?vriv KaKi?oov).31


Even if we do not know for certain whether Severus really did make that
comparison, in the context it is clear what Dio is saying by quoting it. It is an easy
thing for those in power to manipulate the past: for all their virtues, Marcus and
Augustus had no way to prevent Severus from using their symbolic authority to
justify his crimes. If history is made of nothing but a series of exemplary stories
about the personal characteristics of individuals, then it becomes all too easy for
a Severus to distort it. Dio's long narrative, with its ideological unity and its
theoretical excursuses, represents an intellectual correction to the ever-changing
versions of the past put out by the emperors. When Dio uses his literary skills to
emphasize institutions and continuity over the virtues and deeds of individuals, he
is also vindicating himself as an author, as the inheritor of the Roman and Greek
historical traditions and of the Senate's role as judge and keeper of the empire's
past.
Department of History and Classics
University of Alberta
2-28 Henry Marshall Tory Building
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2H4 kemezis@ualberta.ca

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