O furor de Fúlvia

Comparing Cassius Dio’s Roman History with other sources from Antiquity, we can identify a particularity inherent to his narrative regarding the actions of Fulvia during the 40-30s B.C. Roman civil wars. Dio, we will argue, is categorical in portraying Fulvia as a cruel and unscrupulous woman. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to raise two possibilities of interpretation regarding this characteristic. Firstly, we seek to argue that the peculiarity of Dio’s work is related, in part, to Augustus’ Memories, the main source he used while writing his work, and to the particular construction of Fulvia’s memory made by Octavian and Mark Antony during the end of the Republic. Next, we claim that this specificity is furthermore closely connected to the context in which Dio produced his book and the criticisms the author had to the civil wars and their leaders.