Dio of Prusa (Dio Chrysostom) is nowadays mostly read only as a historical source for the Graeco-Roman world of the late first and early second centuries A.D. But he is of course one of the relatively few Greek writers of the early Imperial era who are worth reading at all and his career raises important questions of a more general kind: how valid is it to analyse a writer's or philosopher's life in terms of conversion and how firm a line can be drawn between the activities of the philosopher and those of the sophist? In this paper I shall argue that the theory of Dio's conversion is not borne out by the facts of his career, and that the originator of the theory was not Synesius of Cyrene but Dio himself, who found it a convenient way both of suppressing the memory of his early time-serving attacks on philosophy under Vespasian and of gratifying his personal taste for self-dramatization. The discussion falls into five parts. Part 1 consists of some general remarks on the methodology of conversion-analysis intended to emphasize some of the dangers of me approach. In Part 2 I consider the evidence of Synesius and of the facts, as far as they can be established, of Dio's early career.
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