Dionysius was a Greek from the city of Halicarnassus
who traveled to Rome in the late first century
B.C., when civil war was transforming the Republic
into the Roman Empire.He worked as a teacher
for some time but soon turned to writing history.
Unlike other classical historians who wrote during
the reign of the Roman Emperors, among
them PLUTARCH or LUCAN, Dionysius does not focus
on simply telling a good story or extolling the
virtues of the noble man. His writing engages social
history, and he was particularly concerned
with the question of the origin of Rome and its
connections with Greece. He did not think highly
of historians who chose to write about useless subjects,
and he criticized those who were careless in
how they obtained their information. For Dionysius,
writing history was a serious business.
In his best-known work, The Roman Antiquities,
Dionysius analyzes the various claims made by
previous historians concerning the rise of Rome.
He provides historical details of Rome to 264 B.C.
and of the Etruscans, who inhabited Italy before
the rise of Rome. This information is invaluable to
modern historians, as the works of many writers
whom Dionysius mentions have disappeared, and
their contents are known only through him.
Dionysius believed that the founders of Rome
were, in fact, Greeks. By popularizing this theory,
he attempted to spread the idea that the Greeks
and Romans were one people. Similarly, VIRGIL’s
Aeniad portrays Trojans as the founders of Rome.
Dionysius wanted to represent the Roman Empire
not as a conquering force but as a universal Greco-
Roman civilization.
In addition to his history, Dionysius also wrote
The Arrangement of Words, Commentaries on the
Attic Orators, and On Imitation. These works about
rhetoric and composition were not as popular as his
historical writing at the time, but they provide an
important insight into Roman culture and thought.
Three literary letters that survive are also much
studied as examples of Dionysius’s critical thought.
Dionysius pioneered techniques still used by
modern historians. Extremely careful in the use of
his sources, he believed in the study of cause and
effect, and he believed a strong knowledge of history
was important to society at large.
English Versions of Works by
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Critical Essays. Translated
by Stephen Usher. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1976.
On Thucydides. Translated by Kendrick Pritchett.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.
The Roman Antiquities. Translated by Earnest Cary.
Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1974.
Works about Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Bonner, Stanley. The Literary Treatises of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus: A Study in the Development of Critical
Method. Amsterdam: Adolf M.Hakkert, 1969.
Gabba, Emilio. Dionysius and the History of Archaic
Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991.
Roberts, W. Rhys. Dionysius of Halicarnassus: The
Three Literary Letters. New York: Garland Publishers,
1988.