Escaping Cicero: “Dionysius” and the Limits of the Archive

This article uses Cicero’s letters to explore the limits of Roman prosopography, a discipline that catalogues each name that appears in text in the ancient world. Prosopography is dependent on the appearance of named individuals in sources, but many Romans, especially those who were enslaved, were not granted nomina sufficient to securely identify them. We will look at one name, Dionysius, whose unstable identification within Cicero’s correspondence has caused problems for centuries. New theoretical turns in the study of enslavement, particularly those from Black studies, allow us to understand such figures as more than a footnote in history, reading Dionysius’ story as a call to take a different approach toward the minor figures of the past.