Civil War and the (Almost) Forgotten Pact of Brundisium

This is an article about civil war; or, more precisely, an article on the impact of civil war on Roman society and Roman culture in general during the Late Republic, especially during the early days of the triumvirate. It is also an article about those evolutions in political discourse which related to civil war, its justification and its ideology, during the period. Ancient civil war remains an insufficiently understood phenomenon. Only in recent years have scholars begun to fathom what civil war can tell us about the internal cohesion of ancient societies, about processes of identity formation, social conflict, disintegration and reintegration and so forth: in other words, its profound impact (Osgood 2006; 2014; Breed et al. 2010; Welch 2012; Wienand 2012; Börm 2013; Börm et al. 2016; Eckert 2016; Havener 2016; Lange 2016; Armitage 2017a; Ginsberg 2017; Ginsberg & Krasne 2018; Maschek 2018; Omissi 2018; Rosenblitt 2019; Lange & Vervaet 2019b).