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COMMEMORATION OF THE ANTONINE ARISTOCRACY IN CASSIUS DIO AND THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA*

Cassius Dio is very unusual among surviving ancient historians in that he gives us meaningful information about his own father. Cassius Apronianus, as we learn from his son, served as a legate in Cilicia and in Dalmatia; this makes it highly probable he was a consul in the early years of Commodus’ reign (180–192), though this is not mentioned in surviving Dio.1 Dio does not make his father out to have been a significant historical actor: in all three cases where Apronianus is mentioned, it is incidentally in a passage where Dio is giving the reason he himself knows a piece of information about some other topic. None the less, it is notable that in all of those instances Apronianus is shown in his role as senator and imperial administrator. This is a small example of the phenomenon to be examined in this article, namely how Dio commemorates the senatorial elite of the generations immediately before his own. Any reader of Dio will realize how much he identifies with the order into which he was born, and it is also generally agreed that Dio, born in the 160s and writing in the first decades of the third century, feels a particular nostalgia for the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180), and a corresponding disillusionment with the situation since that emperor’s death. It is to be expected, therefore, that his history includes much data on the Senate as it was from his father’s youth down to his own. The stories he tells and the judgements he makes are a crucial witness to the self-image of the high Imperial elite, and how it was affected by the dynastic upheavals after Marcus’ death. I will be examining his account both in itself, for how Dio constructs the ideology of senatorial identity, and also against the evidence both of modern prosopographical research and of the parallel surviving literary accounts, notably that of the Historia Augusta, which I will argue preserves a very different kind of senatorial tradition. My starting point is a statement Dio makes early in his account of the reign of Commodus, as he is about to describe the first senatorial plot against that emperor. We have only Xiphilinus’ epitome at this point, and it is difficult to see exactly how Dio’s various topics follow from one another, but he begins by noting that there were a great many plots against Commodus, and that the emperor himself killed a great many people; in fact, as Dio says, he eliminated ὡς εἰπεῖν πάντας τοὺς ἐπὶ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτοῦ καὶ ἐπ̓ αὐτοῦ ἐκείνου ἀνθήσαντας, πλὴν τοῦ τε Πομπηιανοῦ καὶ τοῦ Περτίνακος καὶ τοῦ Οὐικτωρίνου: τούτους γὰρ οὐκ οἶδ̓