(25) More a pornographic farrago than a work of historical fiction, (26) Child of the Sun outstrips
Dio Cassius's Roman History and the Historia Augusta in sheer erotic inventiveness.
While Roman historian
Dio Cassius exaggerates the destruction wrought by the Roman forces in putting down the rebellion, there is no doubt that the devastation merited the rabbinic inclusion of the fall of Betar into the same category of national disaster as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples.
According to
Dio Cassius, Hadrian "declared he had seen a star which he took to be that of Antinous" and which in fact "had come into being from the spirit of Antinous."
Following Pontanus' account closely, he first gives full credit to the horse-riding Batavians, quoting Plutarch (Vita Othonis 12.5), Tacitus (Historiae 4.12.3) and
Dio Cassius (55.24.7).
The gluttons that flank the burning chair represent a talionic punishment often found in medieval representations of hell, and which, since it has no scriptural basis, probably has its roots in the account (by
Dio Cassius) of how Crassus met his end (Plutarch's more sober version has him beheaded): 'And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery; for though a man of vast wealth, he had set so great store by money as to pity those who could not support an enrolled legion from their own means, regarding them as poor men.'(5) Equally talionic would be the notion of a burning chair.
They discuss elite movement, namely the escorted movements of Roman aristocrats, the physical appearance of foreign embassies, the movements of the empress Livia Drusilla, the Republican public movement of the elite and descriptions by imperial authors like
Dio Cassius and Herodian, and the immobility and potential movements of aristocratic, Christian virgins, then movement in ancient literature, including the use of movement by Roman and Greek historians to explain and construct moral lessons from violent events, Horace's Satirae 1.0, Varro's etymological typography in De lingua latina, and Augustan literary tours.
He deftly summarizes source analyses (Quellenforschung) that identify three main sources for the historical Elagabalus: roughly contemporary third-century narratives by
Dio Cassius, preserved in Byzantine epitomes; a Roman history by Herodian; and the fourth-century biography Vita Heliogabali, whose credible sections derive from an earlier lost source but which is otherwise a farrago of anecdotes about the emperor's alleged cruelty, religiosity, and unbridled eroticism.
Sure, the chances of the real emperor Commodus resembling Joachim Phoenix are slim, but then so are the chances of him resembling his ancient marble portrait-bust from the Esquiline Hill in Rome, which shows him in the guise of Hercules, or indeed his portrayal in primary sources such as
Dio Cassius, Herodian and the Augustan History.
Our earliest authority,
Dio Cassius, explained the system in the 3rd century A.D.
ii begins in Greek with lives of the emperors excerpted from
Dio Cassius of Nicaea (together with Xiphilinus' eleventh-century epitome of the lost books of ~Dion') and Herodian of Syria's [tau][caret][eta][sigma] [mu][epsilon][tau][alpha] [mu][alpha][rho][kappa][omicron][[nu] [beta][alpha][sigma][iota][lambda][epsilon][iota][alpha][sigma] [iota][sigma][tau][omicron][rho][iota][alpha][iota].
Millar's first book was on
Dio Cassius, an author he rated more highly than Tacitus.