Casio Dion 68.4 y la Autobiografía de Adriano. Íber, Ítalo e italiota: a la búsqueda de una identidad imperial.

Cassius Dio has never been held in high esteem by historians dedicated to Roman History. As a Greek, he was considered unable to understand the Roman Empire. As a Roman senator, he was blamed for showing little respect for the phylogeny of the emperor Trajan when he wrote that the first provincial emperor was «an Iberian, and neither an Italian nor even an Italiot». In this paper I propose a new interpretation of this text. I will try to show that the source of this text is Hadrian’s Autobiography, now lost. Hadrian devised a multicultural and multiracial identity for himself, and also for the Roman Empire, in an attempt to integrate the diversity of its regions and peoples.