Cassius Dio's speeches and the collapse of the Roman Republic

This thesis argues that Cassius Dio used his speeches of his Late Republican and Augustan narratives as a means of historical explanation. I suggest that the interpretative framework which the historian applied to the causes and success of constitutional change can be most clearly identified in the speeches. The discussion is divided into eight chapters over two sections. Chapter 1 (Introduction) sets out the historical, paideutic, and compositional issues which have traditionally served as a basis for rejecting the explanatory and interpretative value of the speeches in Dio’s work and for criticising his Roman History more generally. Section 1 consists of three methodological chapters which respond to these issues. In Chapter 2 (Speeches and Sources) I argue that Dio’s prosopopoeiai approximate more closely with the political oratory of that period than has traditionally been recognised. Chapter 3 (Dio and the Sophistic) argues that Cassius Dio viewed the artifice of rhetoric as a particular danger in his own time. I demonstrate that this preoccupation informed, credibly, his presentation of political oratory in the Late Republic and of its destructive consequences. Chapter 4 (Dio and the Progymnasmata) argues that although the texts of the progymnasmata in which Dio will have been educated clearly encouraged invention with a strongly moralising focus, it is precisely his reliance on these aspects of rhetorical education which would have rendered his interpretations persuasive to a contemporary audience. Section 2 is formed of three case-studies. In Chapter 5 (The Defence of the Republic) I explore how Dio placed speeches-in-character at three Republican constitutional crises to set out an imagined case for the preservation of that system. This case, I argue, is deliberately unconvincing: the historian uses these to elaborate the problems of the distribution of power and the noxious influence of φθόνος and φιλοτιμία. Chapter 6 (The Enemies of the Republic) examines the explanatory role of Dio’s speeches from the opposite perspective. It investigates Dio’s placement of dishonest speech into the mouths of military figures to make his own distinctive argument about the role of imperialism in the fragmentation of the res publica. Chapter 7 (Speech after the Settlement) argues that Cassius Dio used his three speeches of the Augustan age to demonstrate how a distinctive combination of Augustan virtues directly counteracted the negative aspects of Republican political and rhetorical culture which the previous two case-studies had explored. Indeed, in Dio’s account of Augustus the failures of the res publica are reinvented as positive forces which work in concert with Augustan ἀρετή to secure beneficial constitutional change.

State-narco networks and the ‘War on Drugs’ in post-transition Bolivia, with special reference to 1989-1993

This thesis examines the development of state-narco networks in post-transition Bolivia. Mainstream discourses of drugs tend to undertheorise such relationships, holding illicit economies, weak states and violence as synergistic phenomena. Such assumptions fail to capture the nuanced relations that emerge between the state and the drug trade in different contexts, their underlying logics and diverse effects. As an understudied case, Bolivia offers novel insights into these dynamics. Bolivian military authoritarian governments (1964-1982), for example, integrated drug rents into clientelistic systems of governance, helping to establish factional coalitions and reinforce regime authority. Following democratic transition in 1982 and the escalation of US counterdrug efforts, these stable modes of exchange between the state and the coca-cocaine economy fragmented. Bolivia, though, continued to experience lower levels of drug-related violence than its Andean neighbours, and sustained democratisation despite being a major drug producer. Focusing on the introduction of the Andean Initiative (1989-1993), I explore state-narco interactions during this period of flux: from authoritarianism to (formal) democracy, and from Cold War to Drug War. As such, the thesis transcends the conventional analyses of the drugs literature and orthodox readings of Latin American narco-violence, providing insights into the relationship between illicit economies and democratic transition, the regional role of the US, and the (unintended) consequences of drug policy interventions. I utilise a mixed methods approach to offer discrete perspectives on the object of study. Drawing on documentary and secondary sources, I argue that state-narco networks were interwoven with Bolivia’s post-transition political settlement. Uneven democratisation ensured pockets of informalism, as clientelistic and authoritarian practices continued. This included police and military autonomy, and tolerance of drug corruption within both institutions. Non-enforcement of democratic norms of accountability and transparency was linked to the maintenance of fragile political equilibrium. Interviews with key US and Bolivian elite actors also revealed differing interpretations of state-narco interactions. These exposed competing agendas, and were folded into alternative paradigms and narratives of the ‘war on drugs’. The extension of US Drug War goals and the targeting of ‘corrupt’ local power structures, clashed with local ambivalence towards the drug trade, opposition to destabilising, ‘Colombianised’ policies and the claimed ‘democratising mission’ of the Bolivian government. In contrasting these US and Bolivian accounts, the thesis shows how real and perceived state-narco webs were understood and navigated by different actors in distinct ways. ‘Drug corruption’ held significance beyond simple economic transaction or institutional failure. Contestation around state-narco interactions was enmeshed in US-Bolivian relations of power and control.