Historiography and Civil War

This volume is part of a burgeoning new trend that focuses on the great impact of stasis and civil war on Roman society, including mass violence (Osgood 2006; 2014; Breed et al. 2010; Welch 2012; Wienand 2012; Börm 2013; Börm et al. 2016; Havener 2016; Lange 2016; Armitage 2017; Ginsberg 2017; Maschek 2018; Omissi 2018; and, most recently, Ginsberg & Krasne 2018 ). However we approach the Late Republic – numerous possibilities include ‘crisis’, ‘fall’, and ‘transition’ – there is no denying that (political) violence, stasis, factional strife, and civil war were an integrated part of the story of the period of the outgoing Republic. Civil war was the most extreme expression of these interconnected phenomena. Consequently, civil war remains a defining factor of the period. Furthermore, its ramifications never extend only to political life: focusing on stasis and civil war as interrelated phenomena – rather than just focusing on the Late Republic as a series of unrelated (civil) wars – may help us realise that the impact of civil war goes far beyond the belligerents, the protagonists, and their armies. This is perhaps most visible in the Emphylia of Appian. He remarks in the preface that Rome came, through the process of empire-building, to a period of stasis and discord followed by constitutional change (App. B Civ. 1.6.1): “[T]he Roman state came through from multifarious civil disorders (staseis) to concord (homonoia) and monarchy”. More specifically, the basic idea of this present volume is to look at developments and discussions concerning the concept of civil war in the late republican and early imperial historiography of the late Republic, originating in the period from Sulla to the Severan emperors. This volume is not a companion. Our objective has been to gather together individual studies which focus on one ancient historiographer in detail and attempt to answer one or more of the following central questions: how do the respective ancient historiographers approach civil war as a major feature of late republican Roman history, including the question of the inherent permanency of (the risk of) civil war? How does the treatment of late republican civil war fit within the ancient author’s larger historiographical and narrative approach, if at all? Last but not least, what impact does the historiographer’s individual agenda have on representation and historicity?