The Pursuit of Consensus in Roman Civil War (Writing): Thoughts on Hindsight / OPEN ACCESS

A basic question in Roman politics and historiography of the Late Republic was how to conceptualise Rome’s internal and civil wars within the already-existing framework of Roman political language – including, unsurprisingly, that of foreign war – and how to (re)develop that framework at the same time. Predictably, one key mode of justification was writing.1 The terms “retrospective” and “hindsight”
are often used to describe such writings; but this, or so I will claim, offers too narrow an approach. To talk simply of “retrospective” justifications in civil-war writing or to suggest that historians look at events in hindsight makes us take our eyes off the ball. Political agents unsurprisingly reused narratives current during the general circumstances of a conflict even as they looked back on it. They reused past justifications and slogans. Similarly, when writing about the past historians, too, used contemporary sources when writing their narratives.2 This ought to be a discussion about the quality of our evidence, not (only) one about hindsight.