Page:Dio's Roman History, tr. Cary - Volume 1.djvu/21

 bitter hostility shown towards Cicero. He has a poor opinion of the common people, and he resents the great power and influence of the praetorian guard.

In style and diction the history is modelled on Thucydides. Not alone the long involved periods of the Athenian historian, but also a multitude of single words, constructions, and phrases either peculiar to him or shared with a few other writers, reappear in these pages. It would seem that Dio steeped himself in the vocabulary and thoughts of his great model until he could think almost unconsciously in the words of the other.

Dio exerted no appreciable influence on his immediate successors in the field of Roman history. But among the Byzantines he became the standard authority on the subject, a circumstance to which we doubtless owe the preservation of such a large portion of his work.

About one third of Dio's History has come down to us intact. The extant portions are: (a) Books XXXIV-LX (in large part), contained in eleven Mss.; (b) Book LXXVIII with part of LXXIX (or LXXIX with part of LXXX according to Boissevain's division), preserved in a single Ms.; (c) the Paris fragments describing events of the years 207-200 B.C, recovered from the binding of a Strabo Ms.