painter in miniature, Ioannes Xiphilinus.

It was now the year A.D. 223, Dio was either consul for the first time
(as some assert) or had the consular office behind him, the world was
richer by the loss of Elagabalus, and Alexander Severus reigned in his
stead. Under this emperor the remaining books (Seventy-three to
Eighty, inclusive) must have been composed, for Dio puts the finishing
touches on his history in 229. Since by that time he was nearly eighty
years of age and since he has written of no reign subsequent to
Alexander's, we may conclude that he did not survive his master, who
died in 235. The sum total of his efforts, then, as he left it,
consisted of eighty books, covering a period from 1064 B.C. to 229
A.D. At present there are extant of that number complete only Books
Thirty-six to Sixty inclusive, treating the events of the years 68
B.C. to 47 A.D. The last twenty books, Sixty-one to Eighty, appear in
fairly reliable excerpts and epitomes, but for the first thirty-five
books we are dependent upon the merest scraps and fragments. How and
by what steps this great work disintegrated, and in what form it has
been preserved to modern times, this it is to be our next business to
trace.

It seems that Dio's work had no immediate influence, but "Time brings
roses", and in the Byzantine age we find that he had come to be
regarded as the canonical example of the way in which Roman History
should be written. Before this desirable result, however, had been
brought to pass, Books Twenty-two to Thirty-five inclusive had
disappeared. These gave the events of the years from the destruction
of Carthage and Corinth (in the middle of the second century B.C.) to
the activity of Lucullus in 69. A like fate befell Books Seventy and
Seventy-one at an early date. The first twenty-one books and the last