Cassius Dio Cocceianus

Cassius Dio (c. 155–c. 235) was a Roman senator and historian who wrote in Greek. Born at Nicaea in Bithynia, the son of a provincial governor, he came to Rome under Commodus, entered the Senate, held the consulship twice and governed Africa, Dalmatia and Pannonia under the Severan emperors before retiring to Bithynia. His Roman History, in eighty books, covered the city from the arrival of Aeneas to the year 229 and took him, he says, ten years of reading and twelve of writing. About a third survives intact, including the fullest account of the early empire, and much of the rest through the Byzantine epitomes of Xiphilinus and Zonaras.