Table Of ContentCAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS
IMPERIAL LIBRARY
GENERAL EDITORS
Proressor E. J. KENNEY
Peterhouse, Cambridge
AND
ProFessor P. E. EASTERLING
University College London
DIO CHRYSOSTOM.
ORATIONS
VII, XII AND XXXVI
EDITED BY
D. A. RUSSELL
Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature
and Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford
Tam. Wom C AMBRIDGE
ig UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cB2 rrp
40 West 20th Street, New York, Nv 10011-4211, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3166, Australia
(Ὁ Cambridge University Press 1992
First published 1992
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Woolnough Bookbinding, Irthlingborough, Northants
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Dio, Chrysostom.
[Speeches. Selections]
Orations VII, XII, and XXXVI - Dio Chrysostom; edited by D. A.
Russell.
p. cm. - (Cambridge Greek and Latin classics. Imperial
library)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 248) and indexes.
Contents: Euboicus (VII) - Olympicus (XII) - Borystheniticus
(XXXVI).
ISBN Ο 521 37548 7 (hardback). - isBN 0 521 37696 3 (pbk.)
1. Speeches, addresses, etc., Greek. 2. Speeches, addresses,
etc., Greek - History and criticism. I. Russell, D. A. (Donald)
PA3965.D2 1992
885'.01- dc20 91-36260 ciP
ISBN O 521 37548 7 hardback
ISBN Ο 521 37696 4 paperback
AQ
CONTENTS
Preface
Page vii
Abbreviations
viii
Introduction
I
1 Dio's world
I
2 Dio's life
3
3 Dio's works
7
4 Euboicus
8
5 Olympicus
14
6 Borystheniticus
19
7 Text
23
8 Manuscripts and editions 25
DIO CHRYSOSTOM: ORATIONS
7 Euboicus
29
12 Olympicus
62
36 Borystheniticus
89
Commentary 109
Bibliography
248
Indexes
254
ι General
254
2 Proper names
256
3 Greek words 258
4 Passages cited 261
PREFACE
The narrative part of Dio’s Euboicus has always been popular; I recall
using it many years ago as a confidence-building text with first- and
second-year undergraduates. The opening narrative of the Borysthen-
ilicus has similar charms. The rest of this volume illustrates other sides
of Dio's art: his moral and theological earnestness and his epideictic
virtuosity. I hope that the selection here offered will thus make an
attractive introduction not only to Dio, but to some important aspects
of first-century thought and literature in general - the prevailing philo-
sophical religiosity, the linguistic and historical classicism, and the
burgeoning sophistic exuberance that mark this phase of Graeco-
Roman culture.
My debts are many. Various friends in various places where I have
worked on this project - at Chapel Hill and Stanford as well as Oxford -
have helped me enormously by discussion and advice. Dr M. B. Trapp
read and commented on the whole, and made many useful contribu-
tions. Rachel Woodrow and Stephen Colvin made my manuscript
readable. Susan Moore’s invaluable copy-editing made it ready for the
typesetter. Dr. D. C. Innes read the proofs, and saved me from much
error. The editors of the series have been a source of help and
encouragement from beginning to end. The flaws and faults that remain
are all my own work.
D.A.R.
vii
ABBREVIATIONS
Arndt- W. F. Arndt and R. Kühner,
Gingrich F. W. Gingrich, Ausführliche .
A Greek— English Grammatik der
lexicon of the New griechischen Sprache?
Testament,‘ ini, revised by.
Cambridge 1957. B. Gerth (Hanover
Blass- F. Blass and 1898-1904)
Debrunner A. Debrunner, NTG L. Radermacher,
Grammatik des Neutestamentliche
neutestamentlichen Grammattk,
Griechisch, Tubingen 1925.
Gottingen 1949. Reallexikon für Antike
FGrHist F. Jacoby, Die und Christentum,
Fragmente der Stuttgart
griechischen Historiker, SVF H. von Arnim,
Leiden 1923. Stoicorum Veterum
W. W. Goodwin, Fragmenta, Leipzig
A Greek grammar?, 1903-24 (reprint
London 1894. Stuttgart 1964)
GMT W. W. Goodwin, WS H. Weir Smyth,
Syntax of the moods Greek grammar?,
and tenses of the Greek Cambridge, Mass.
verb, London 1897. 1956.
Inscr. Olb T. N. Knipovic
and E. I. Levi,
Inscriptiones Olbiae,
Leningrad 1968.
viii
INTRODUCTION
l. DIO'S WORLD
Of the three speeches in this volume, the work of the foremost Greek
orator of the first century A.D., one (36, Bor.) was delivered in his native
city, Prusa in the Roman province of Bithynia, one (12, Ol.) at the great
Hellenic religious centre of Olympia, and one (7, Eub.) probably,
though not certainly, in Rome (see on 7.145). This neatly symbolizes
the three loyalties that Dio, like Plutarch and many others of his
contemporaries, felt and reconciled. To his native city, he owed the
duties of advice and generous use of his means and abilities for the public
good; to Hellas at large the duty to proclaim its values and nurture its
pride, even in its subjection to Rome; and to the Romans, the duties of
a client and an educator. Inseparable from these, there was for Dio --
as, again, for Plutarch — an obligation often felt to address all his
audiences in a philosophical mode, imparting moral and theological
doctrines of universal concern and relevance.
In all this, Dio is typical of the Greek men of letters who practised in
the world of the Roman Empire, though not all, of course, shared his
moral seriousness. They addressed themselves both to Greek and to
Roman audiences. This had been going on for a long time. Since the
second century B.c., it had been common ground that Greek was a
necessary part of the education of Romans of standing. As patrons and
figures of power, such people naturally became the addressees of Greek
poets, philosophers, and historians. Indeed, many of them (like Dio's
Stoic mentor, Musonius Rufus) themselves wrote in Greek as well as in
Latin. The literature of the Empire is thus bilingual: Dio belongs to the
same literary culture not only as Plutarch, but as Pliny and Tacitus.!
It is important to keep in mind that, on the Greek side, this culture
expressed itself, both linguistically and in choice of subjects, in very
classical terms. At least since the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
who taught rhetoric and wrote history at Rome under Augustus, the
1 This perspective is now clearly seen in the synthesis by A. Dihle, Die
griechische und lateinische Literatur der Kaiserzat (Munich 1989; Eng. translation in
preparation).
2 INTRODUCTION
principal vehicle in which Hellenic patdera was conveyed was a studied
reproduction of the language and style of the Attic orators, historians,
and philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries. In varying degrees,
most of the Greek authors of the following period tried to write like
Xenophon, Plato, Demosthenes, or Thucydides, while Homer and
classical drama were assumed to be *what every schoolboy knows'. Dio
is one of the closer followers of classical models — very different in this
from Plutarch -- and he clearly had a marvellous ear for the cadences
and idioms of fourth-century prose. It is entirely characteristic that he
is supposed to have taken two books only on his wanderings: Plato's
Phaedo and Demosthenes' On the false embassy. In fact his debt to other
works of Plato - especially Republic and Laws - and to Xenophon is more
conspicuous; but the story is well invented none the less, and much
in the taste of the sophists of the second century, of whose linguistic
purism Dio is, in some ways, a precursor. Dio also quotes the poets --
we shall hear him on Homer and Euripides - but not more recent ones.
In his only extant work that deals with rhetorical teaching (Or. 18),
he emphasizes Xenophon, and only very tentatively suggests some
modern orators for study ‘because we are not enslaved in our judgement
before we approach them’. This is odd, and stands out as something
controversial.
This use of an ancient idiom, removed from ordinary speech and to
some extent also from the speech of the cultured in academic contexts,
did not prevent these writers from presenting moral and social lessons
appropriate to their own time. Archaism is as old as Greek literature,
and was never in itself a bar to profundity or originality of thought. For
Dio and his classicizing or archaizing contemporaries, some ‘dressing
up’ of contemporary things was demanded, as it were, by the genre-
rule: Roman governors were ‘satraps’, the emperor basileus with
overtones of the Persian monarchy. But Dio, like most of his fellow
orators, was involved in local and sometimes in imperial affairs, and
was as acutely conscious as, say, Seneca or Tacitus, of the moral,
political, and ideological issues of the age.
Yet ‘Longinus’ - probably Dio's contemporary, and certainly a
sharer of his broadly Stoic philosophy - complains of the ‘cosmic dearth’
of any kind of literature that he could call ‘sublime’.? And he was surely
3. De sublimitate 44.
