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2022, Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond
Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.
Critical Analysis of Law , 2017
In this essay, I first discuss the Roman concept of civil war and compare it to the Greek concept of internal discord (stasis). I then go on to offer some thoughts on the methodological implications of long-term intellectual history and the role concepts and institutions play in it. The essay concludes by discouraging the hunt for contingency, but encouraging historians to write about the ideas and institutional arrangements that have been devised over the long term in response to the breakdown of political and social order.
The Egyptian Within: A Roman Figuration of Civil War MICHÈLE LOWRIE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO The trope I will call “the Egyptian within” grafts ancient prejudicial stereotypes onto “the enemy within,” a conventional figuration of civil war. This hybrid arose in the context of Egypt’s role in the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, once Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt after Pharsalus in 48 and his heir Octavian pursued Antony and Cleopatra there after Actium in 31. Cicero had vituperated his Roman opponents during the turbulent last twenty years of his life as uncivilized barbarians or accursed monsters lacking “humanitas”. But it is the Augustan poets who developed “the Egyptian within” as a trope by transferring Cicero’s language onto Cleopatra, whom they foreground as the enemy. Although the eclipse of Antony’s representation masks the civil war as foreign and lends a patina of justification to an otherwise horrific bloodbath, the poets create a complex trope for the abject deeply buried within the self. This orientalism has a different aim from the self-justificatory degradation of Easterners in the West analyzed by Said. It projects onto a notional other division within the self and reveals more about internal conflict than about Roman attitudes toward others. It both occludes and represents civil war and thereby offers a strategy for coping with its social and political devastation. Like all figurations, it cannot be contained – it became available for imperialist appropriation and was directed outward. Just as empire and civil war are inextricably linked at Rome as elsewhere, this figuration returns in the tradition to re-inscribe the discord that undergirds expansion. Comparative material from Balzac and Houellebecq shows that this figuration continues to resonate to this day.
2022
The question of how the end of the Western Roman Empire came about has preoccupied scholars for centuries. After introducing some of the most prominent attempts at explanation, the present paper emphasizes the important role played by internal conflicts. The specter of civil war had threatened the Roman Empire since the first century BCE, and as clashes in the western half got out of hand during the fifth century, this led to a gradual disintegration and a weakening of border defenses. In these Roman civil wars, soldiers who had migrated into the empire were used more and more often. A new military elite emerged, and in the end, imperial rule was replaced by warlords filling the power vacuum created by the self-destruction of the central government. The Eastern Roman Empire survived the fifth century; however, after 600 CE the empire in Constantinople lost its stability as well; the subsequent internal and external wars marked the end of antiquity.
This paper investigates the impact of civil war on triumphal rulership for the period from Constantine’s triumph over Maxentius in 312 to Honorius’ triumph over Priscus Attalus in 416. These victory performances mark the starting and ending points of a series of triumphs in the city of Rome that deliberately included dramatic representations of martial achievements in civil war. I argue that the need to celebrate a civil-war victory with performances, monuments, and narratives that were formerly restricted to external victories (e.g., a triumphal procession, a triumphal arch, a battle frieze, etc.) resulted, on the one hand, from significant structural changes of the Roman monarchy in the third and fourth centuries and, on the other, from the fierce rivalry between emperors in the period of late Tetrarchic collegial rule, a situation in which a massive display of the emperor’s military achievements was an important prerequisite for the formation of loyalty and obedience within the imperial apparatus.
Papers of the British School at Rome 81, 67-90., 2013
Many of the wars of the Late Republican period were largely civil conflicts, and there was thus a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimate their power. Most of the rules and conventions relating to triumphs thus appear to have been articulated as the development of Roman warfare brought new issues to the Senate’s attention. This paper will examine these tensions and the ways in which they were resolved. The traditional war-ritual of the triumph and the topic of civil war have both received renewed interest in recent scholarship. However, attempts to define the relationship between them have been hampered by comments in the ancient evidence that suggest the celebration of a triumph for victory in a civil war was contrary to traditional practices. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, a general could expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could be represented also as over a foreign enemy (the civil war aspect of the victory did not have to be denied); only after a victory in an exclusively civil war was this understood to be in breach of traditional practices.
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