Page:Dio's Roman History, tr. Cary - Volume 1.djvu/23

 alone there are 415 excerpts, and the Ms. originally contained still more.

The Excerpts De Senteniiis (M) are contained in a Vatican palimpsest (Vaticanus Graecus 73) of the tenth or eleventh century. The Ms. is in very bad condition; numerous leaves were discarded and the others disarranged when the Ms. was used for the second writing. Angelo Mai, who first published the collection in 1826, employed chemical reagents to bring out the letters and even then had to despair of many passages. Since his use of the Ms. the letters have naturally faded still more, and parts of some leaves have been covered in the work of repair. The excerpts attributed to Dio are drawn from nearly all periods of Roman history, and fall into two groups, the first extending down to 216 B.C., the other from 40 B.C. to the reign of Constantine; between the two portions several leaves, and probably entire quaternions, have been lost from the Ms. That the former set of fragments is taken from Dio none will deny. The later collection, however, extends much beyond the reign of Alexander Severus, where Dio ended his history; furthermore, the style and diction are considerably different from Dio's own. It is now generally agreed that all the excerpts of this second set were the work of one man, whom Boissevain, following Niebuhr, would identify with Petrus Patricius, a historian of the sixth century. Nevertheless, though not direct