The Portrayal of Women in Cassius Dio's 'Roman History'

Scholars have interpreted the opening decades of the third century as a period when the imperial women of the Severan dynasty held substantial political power. These decades coincided with the end of the supposed renaissance of Greek letters, known then as now as the Second Sophistic. It was during this political and cultural climate that the senatorial historian Cassius Dio wrote his ambitious and influential Roman History. The portrayals of politically involved Roman women were important literary components of Dio’s historical project. This thesis is an attempt to analyse these portrayals from historiographical and narratological standpoints. As is demonstrated throughout this enquiry, the individual Roman women portrayed in Dio’s History fulfil several moralizing and narrative functions. It is argued that from these representations of women it is possible to gauge Dio’s beliefs concerning the role of women in relation to political power and how Dio constructed models of appropriate and inappropriate feminine behaviour