Breed, Damon & Rossi (Eds), Citizens of Discord. Rome and Its Civil Wars, OUP 2010 PDF

Citizens of Discord
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Citizens of Discord
Rome and Its Civil Wars
Edited by
brian w. breed
cynthia damon
andreola rossi
1
2010
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Citizens of discord : Rome and its civil wars / edited by Brian W. Breed, Cynthia Damon, and Andreola
Rossi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–538957–9
1. Rome—History—Mithridatic Wars, 88–63 b.c. 2. Rome—History—Civil War,
49–45 b.c. 3. Rome—History—Civil War, 43–31 b.c. 4. Rome—History—Civil War, 68–69.
5. Rome—History—Mithridatic Wars, 88–63 b.c.—Historiography. 6. Rome—History—Civil War,
49–45 b.c.—Historiography. 7. Rome—History—Civil War, 43–31 b.c.—Historiography.
8. Rome—History—Civil War, 68–69—Historiography. 9. Rome—History—Mithridatic Wars,
88–63 b.c.—Literature and the war. 10. Rome—History—Civil War, 49–45 b.c.—Literature and
the war. 11. Rome—History—Civil War, 43–31 b.c.—Literature and the war.
12. Rome—History—Civil War, 68–69—Literature and the war. I. Breed, Brian W.
II. Damon, Cynthia, 1957- III. Rossi, Andreola, 1963-
DG254.2.C57 2010
937’.05—dc22 2009042641
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
Preface
The essays included in this volume all derive from a conference held at
Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst in
November 2007. We are grateful for the support of the departments of
classics of UMass Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, and Mt.
Holyoke College; the Amherst College Lecture Fund and Faculty Research
Awards Program; Joel Martin and Lee Edwards, present and former deans
of humanities and fine arts, UMass Amherst; Paul Kostecki, vice provost
for research, UMass Amherst; and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.
Geoff Sumi, Elizabeth Keitel, Richard Tarrant, and Chris Kraus served as
respondents at the conference and subsequently shared their thoughts and
questions with the contributors, for which generous service we thank
them. In organizing the conference and preparing this volume we have
benefited from the help of many, including Rex Wallace, Becky Sinos,
Thalia Pandiri, Geoff Sumi, Lisa Marie Smith, Sarah Upton, Laurie Moran,
Michelle Barron, Andrew Carroll, Patrick McGrath, Joanna Rifkin,
Whitney Wade, Kathleen Coleman, John Bodel, and Corey Brennan. Jen
Gerrish contributed editorial assistance. The work has been characterized
always by concordia.
Contents
Contributors, xi
Introduction, 3
Brian W. Breed, Cynthia Damon, and Andreola Rossi
part i Beginnings, Endings
1. The Two-Headed State: How Romans Explained Civil War, 25

T. P. Wiseman
2. Word at War: The Prequel, 45

William W. Batstone
3. Rome’s First Civil War and the Fragility of Republican

Political Culture, 73
Harriet I. Flower
4. Civil War? What Civil War? Usurpers in the Historia Augusta, 87

Cam Grey
viii contents
part ii Cycles
5. “Learning from that violent schoolmaster”: Thucydidean Intertextuality and

Some Greek Views of Roman Civil War, 105
Christopher Pelling
6. Tarda Moles Civilis Belli: The Weight of the Past in

Tacitus’ Histories, 119
Rhiannon Ash
7. Aeacidae Pyrrhi: Patterns of Myth and History in Aeneid 1–6, 133

David Quint
8. Ab Urbe Condita: Roman History on the Shield of Aeneas, 145

Andreola Rossi
part iii Aftermath
9. Creating a Grand Coalition of True Roman Citizens:

On Caesar’s Political Strategy in the Civil War, 159
Kurt A. Raaflaub
10. Spurius Maelius: Dictatorship and the Homo Sacer, 171

Michèle Lowrie
11. Representations and Re-presentations of the Battle of Actium, 187

Barbara Kellum
12. Discordia Fratrum: Aspects of Lucan’s Conception of Civil War, 207

Elaine Fantham
part iv Afterlife
13. “Dionysiac Poetics” and the Memory of Civil War in

Horace’s Cleopatra Ode, 223
Andrew Feldherr
14. Propertius on Not Writing about Civil Wars, 233

Brian W. Breed
15. “Caesar grabs my pen”: Writing Civil War under Tiberius, 249
Alain M. Gowing
contents ix
16. Intestinum Scelus: Preemptive Execution in Tacitus’ Annals, 261

Cynthia Damon
17. Doing the Numbers: The Roman Mathematics of Civil War in Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra, 273
Denis Feeney
18. “My brother got killed in the war”: Internecine Intertextuality, 293
Richard Thomas
Abbreviations, 309
Bibliography, 311
Index, 329
Contributors
rhiannon ash teaches classics at Merton College, Oxford University. She

has published various books and articles on Tacitus and Roman historiog-
raphy, including Ordering Anarchy: Armies and Leaders in Tacitus’ Histories
(1999), and a commentary, Tacitus Histories II (2007). In addition, she has
research interests in Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and Pliny the Younger. Her
next major project is a commentary on Tacitus’ Annals 15.
william w. batstone is professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State

University. He has published widely on both the poetry and prose of the
Republic. His most recent publications include Caesar’s Civil War (coau-
thored with Cynthia Damon, 2006) and a forthcoming translation of
Sallust for the Oxford World’s Classics series.
brian w. breed is associate professor of classics at the University of

Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Pastoral Inscriptions: Reading
and Writing Virgil’s Eclogues (2006), and with Andreola Rossi he previously
edited Ennius and the Invention of Roman Epic (Arethusa 39.3: 2006).
cynthia damon is professor of classical studies at the University of

Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of
Roman Patronage (1997), a commentary on Tacitus, Histories I (2003), and,
with Will Batstone, Caesar’s Civil War (2006). Current projects are a criti-
cal edition of and commentary on Caesar’s Bellum civile (with Kurt
Raaflaub and Gregory Bucher) and a translation of Tacitus’ Annals.
xii contributors
elaine fantham is Giger Professor of Latin Emerita, Princeton University. She is

the author of numerous books and commentaries, including Julia Augusti. The
Emperor’s Daughter (2006), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2004), The Roman World of
Cicero’s De oratore (2004), Ovid, Fasti IV (1998), Lucan, De bello civili Book 2 (1992),
and Seneca Troades (1982).
denis feeney is Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University. He is the author

of The Gods in Epic (1991), Literature and Religion at Rome (1998), and Caesar’s
Calendar (2007).
andrew feldherr is professor of classics at Princeton University. He is the author

of Spectacle and Society in Livy’s History (1998), Playing Gods: The Politics of Fiction
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (forthcoming, 2010), and articles on Latin poetry and
historiography.
harriet i. flower is professor of classics at Princeton University, where she teaches

Roman social, cultural, and political history. She has published Ancestor Masks and
Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (1996) and The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and
Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (2006). A study of periodization in republican
Rome entitled Roman Republics appeared in 2009.
alain m. gowing is professor of classics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

His chief interests lie in the area of Roman historiography and literature, especially
of the imperial period. His most recent book is Empire and Memory: The
Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (2005). He is currently at
work on a book about the city of Rome in the Latin histories.
cam grey is an assistant professor in the department of classical studies at the

University of Pennsylvania. He studies the social, economic, and cultural history of
late antiquity and has published various articles using the written sources to access
the experience of nonelite populations in the period. The present contribution is
part of a project assessing the usefulness of the Historia Augusta in reconstructing
the history of the third century ce.
barbara kellum teaches Roman art and architecture at Smith College. She has
written a number of articles on the monuments of Augustan Rome and on systems
of representation at Pompeii.
contributors xiii
michèle lowrie is professor of classics at the University of Chicago. She is author

of Horace’s Narrative Odes (1997) and Writing, Performance, and Authority in
Augustan Rome (2009) and has edited Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Horace’s
Odes and Epodes (2009) and coedited, with Sarah Spence, The Aesthetics of Empire
and the Reception of Vergil (Literary Imagination 8.3: 2006).
christopher pelling is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. His books

include a commentary on Plutarch, Antony (1988), Literary Texts and the Greek
Historian (2000), and Plutarch and History (2002). He has published papers on sev-
eral other Greek and Latin biographers and historians, especially Herodotus,
Thucydides, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio, and Appian. He is just finishing a commentary
on Plutarch, Caesar, for the Clarendon Ancient History series.
david quint is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale

University, where he specializes in the literature of the European Renaissance. His
books include Epic and Empire (1993), Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy (1998),
and Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote (2003). He is
working on a book on the figure of chiasmus in the Aeneid.
kurt a. raaflaub is professor of classics and history and David Herlihy University
Professor Emeritus at Brown University, where he was also director of the Program
in Ancient Studies (2000–2009) and Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence
(2005–8). Recent publications include The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece
(2004, winner of the American Historical Association’s James Henry Breasted
Prize); Social Struggles in Archaic Rome (editor, new expanded and updated ed.
2005); War and Peace in the Ancient World (editor, 2007); Origins of Democracy in
Ancient Greece (coauthor, 2007); and A Companion to Archaic Greece (coeditor,
2009). Together with Cynthia Damon and Gregory Bucher, he is working on a new
edition and historical-philological commentary on Caesar’s Bellum civile.
andreola rossi is the author of Contexts of War: Manipulation of Genre in Virgilian

Battle Narrative (2004), and with Brian Breed she has previously edited Ennius and
the Invention of Roman Epic (Arethusa 39.3: 2006).
richard thomas is professor of Greek and Latin and Harvard College Professor at
Harvard University. His teaching and research interests are generally focused on
Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature, intertextuality, translation and translation
xiv contributors
theory, the reception of classical literature in all periods, and the works of Bob
Dylan. Recent books include Reading Virgil and His Texts: Studies in Intertextuality
(1999) and Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001) as well as two coedited vol-
umes, Classics and the Uses of Reception (2006) and Bob Dylan’s Performance Artistry
(Oral Tradition 22.1: 2007).
t. p. wiseman is emeritus professor of classics at the University of Exeter and a

Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent books are The Myths of Rome (2004),
which won the American Philological Association’s Goodwin Award of Merit,
Unwritten Rome (2008), and Remembering the Roman People (2009).
Citizens of Discord
Introduction
Brian W. Breed
Cynthia Damon
Andreola Rossi
1. A Temple of Discord
As part of his long diatribe on civil war in the City of God, Augustine
mocks the Romans for erecting a Temple of Concord in the aftermath of
the murder of Gaius Gracchus.1 He asks (C.D. 3.25), “If they wanted to
reflect truly what had happened, why didn’t they build a Temple of
Discord instead?” (cur enim, si rebus gestis congruere voluerunt, non ibi
potius aedem Discordiae fabricarunt?). Plutarch provides evidence that
equally cynical reactions to the gesture were expressed at the time
(CG 17.6):
However, what distressed the people . . . was the building of a

Temple of Concord by Opimius; for it seemed that he was
exalting himself and taking pride and in a manner celebrating a
triumph on account of so many deaths of citizens. Therefore at
night, underneath the inscription on the temple, some people
added this verse: “A work of discord produces a Temple of
Concord.”
Why not a Temple of Discord? Augustine wonders (C.D. 3.25) “whether

there is any reason why Concord is considered a goddess, but Discord is
not” (an ulla ratio redditur, cur Concordia dea sit, et Discordia dea non sit?).
He even outrageously suggests that the Romans would have been better
off worshipping Discord. She might have been appeased and stopped
harassing them. Honoring Concord obviously did not help.
4 citizens of discord
The conflict between the Gracchi and the senate was, at least as it came to seem
to Romans of the generation of Cicero and Varro, the moment when Rome opened
the Gates of (Civil) War.2 Even as the Romans of the following decades and beyond
experienced repeated eruptions of civil war, the powerful symbolism of the Temple
of Concord remained, promising that the suppression of internal dissent could
secure a return to the way things had been and later, under the Empire, that the
emperor guaranteed the state’s freedom from a return to civil strife. As perversely
appropriate as a Temple of Discord would have been, the Romans did not need one
to remind them of the persistence of civil war in their society. Repeatedly convulsed
by civil war, they came to perceive that civil conflict, indeed fraternal conflict, was
enshrined in their very foundation myth.
The burden of civil war on Roman minds would be hard to overestimate. Civil
wars, more than other wars, sear themselves into the memory of societies that suffer
them. Enemies look and speak like oneself. Battlefields may be close to home.
As Lucan (1.32) describes it, “deep lie the wounds inflicted by the hand of a fellow-
citizen” (alta sedent civilis vulnera dextrae).3 Where civil strife establishes itself as a
pattern, each earlier conflict is present in some fashion in a society’s experience of
successive conflicts. This is particularly true at Rome, where in a period of 150 years
the Romans fought four epochal wars against themselves: under the rivals Marius
and Sulla (80s bc), Caesar and Pompey (early 40s bc), Octavian and Antony (spo-
radically between Caesar’s assassination in 44 bc and the battle of Actium in 31 bc),
and Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian (ad 69). These conflicts color the percep-
tion of Rome’s past back to the foundation, and echoes and imitations of them are
to be found during the Empire and in late antiquity. The patterns and cycles of
Roman civil war remain effective “intertexts” far into their future via translations
and appropriations, which would suggest that their relevance may remain vital for
some time to come.
2. Discordia
One of the generation of Romans who witnessed both the consequences of civil war
and the Augustan regime’s claim to have put an end to civil war, the poet Propertius
described the 40s and 30s bc in Italy as “the grim era, when Roman Discord harassed
her citizens” (1.22.4–5: duris . . . temporibus, cum Romana egit suos Discordia civis).
The conjunction of those two words, Discordia civis, “Discord / citizens,” effectively
captures two oppositions at the heart of Roman civil strife. Not only is discord,
discordia, the right term for the conflict of citizen against citizen,4 but the struggle
is also one of the Roman citizenry against discord itself and of discord repeatedly
assailing the citizens. The dispossessed Meliboeus of Virgil’s first Eclogue (Ecl. 1.71)
introduction 5
bewails the social disruptions wrought by civil war with the words “See to what end
discord has brought wretched citizens” (en quo miseros produxit discordia civis). In
the hands of the Dirae poet, this becomes a curse against “you, Discord, always hos-
tile to your citizen” (83: tuque inimica tui semper Discordia civis).5 In the Aeneid
(12.583), when the quasi-civil war between Trojans and Latins spills into the city of
Latinus and confusion reigns within the walls as the people are divided on whether
to open their gates to the Trojans or take up arms to repel them, “discord arises
among the wavering citizens” (exoritur trepidos inter discordia civis). If it is concord
that ties citizens together in a community, discord threatens to deny citizens their
identity as such, attacking them and the idea of community itself. And yet to cast
Discord as the citizens’ enemy and the source of civil violence is in the end no
explanation but, rather, a strategy of evasion. It masks the irrefutable fact of civil
war: that the citizen’s enemy is also a citizen; that they are at war with themselves.
Discordia has a history in Latin literature going back to Ennius’ Annales and his
much-referenced lines “after foul Discord shattered the ironclad posts and gates of
War” (Ann. 225–26 [Skutsch 1985] = Hor. S. 1.4.60–61: postquam Discordia taetra /
Belli ferratos postes portasque refregit). Virgil’s Allecto, who stirs up the war among
Trojans and Latins in Aeneid 7, is the best known descendent of Ennian Discord, her
lineage directly referenced in the words she speaks to her patron Juno: “Look, the
discord you wanted is complete through grim war; now tell them to join in an alli-
ance and establish their treaties” (A. 7.545–46: en, perfecta tibi bello discordia tristi; /
dic in amicitiam coeant et foedera iungant).6 The context of Discord’s appearance in
Ennius had been the opening of the shrine of Janus Geminus to signal the eruption
of new hostilities after the conclusion of the First Punic War.7 Virgil’s Juno herself
performs the task that Discord performs in Ennius (A. 7.620–22), but Allecto’s
achievement is the full realization in the world of her Ennian origin. The discord
she crafts, however, carries associations specifically with civil war that are not pre-
sent in Ennius, as the war between Trojans and Latins violates the ties of shared
ancestry and family due to the nearly consummated joining of Latinus and Aeneas
as father-in-law and son-in-law.8 When the goddess Discord herself appears in
Vulcan’s depiction of the battle of Actium on the shield of Aeneas, her torn cloak
represents the violent division of what should be unified: “and Discord wades forth
joyfully in her torn cloak” (A. 8.702: et scissa gaudens vadit Discordia palla).9 Civil
war rips things; it creates divisions. It is also a doubler; a unity is divided in two, but
a sameness remains on the opposing sides. Romulus and Remus; warring fathers-
in-law and sons-in-law; the historical intertextuality of conflicts that geminate and
mirror each other: dualisms and contradictions come almost too easily to the sur-
face when looking at Roman civil war.10
Ennian Discord was the personification and embodiment of Empedoclean
dqi| or meπjo|, the animating “strife” of the universe, and the cosmic element of her
character is not forgotten over the course of her literary career.11 The Dirae poet, for
instance, makes the link between the political phenomenon of discord and disrup-
tions in the normal operation of the world (4–7):12
ante lupos rapient haedi, vituli ante leones,

delphini fugient pisces, aquilae ante columbas
et conversa retro rerum discordia gliscet—
multa prius fient quam non mea libera avena.
Kids will take wolves, calves will take lions, dolphins will flee from fish,
eagles will flee doves, and discord among the elements will come back
and grow strong again—these many things will happen before my pipe
will lose its freedom.
This war among the elements is a prominent part of the reflection of civil war, espe-
cially in the Roman epic tradition. The cosmic tendencies of Augustan and post-
Augustan poetry secure the full coincidence of discord as “at once the emblem of
historical discord and of disharmony in the natural world.”13
Just as Discord displays the tendency to expand and to work externally, so she
also turns toward interior states. Rage and madness (furor, rabies) become perhaps
the most prominent of the metaphors that take hold of Roman conceptions of civil
war.14 The psychological working method of Virgil’s Allecto is a departure from her
Ennian heritage (Feeney 1991: 164). By invading and influencing human minds
Allecto plays the role of a tragic Madness, Lyssa, and a Fury.15 In Turnus she inspires
the “madness of war” (A. 7.461: insania belli).16 But, as Denis Feeney (1991: 163) has
pointed out, in contrast to the Greek Erinyes who punish crimes within families,
“Allecto disrupts an almost consummated order and ‘punishes’ those who have
committed no crime.”
As the Aeneid plots the story of Roman expansion from humble beginnings to
cosmic fulfillment, achieving oneness of urbs “city” and orbis “world,” unrestrained
negative forces like Allecto give glimpses of an alternative plot in which everything
might have gone horribly wrong (Hardie 1986: 253). Roman civil wars call forth
expressions of surprise and bafflement; it is not supposed to be this way. Civil war
is a sin, a crime, a curse, a punishment. And yet there may be alternate ways of con-
ceiving Discord’s role in the plot of Roman history. We might conceive, with
Petronius’ civil war poet Eumolpus for instance, a story of cosmic expansion into
division and disruption in which discord becomes a feature not of interference, but
of continuity in Roman history. At times it might seem that the true fulfillment of
Roman destiny comes not, as an Augustus might like to present it, with the closing
of the gates of war, but when “on earth whatever Discord commanded was
accomplished” (Petr. 124.295: factum est in terris quidquid Discordia iussit).
introduction 7
Propertius makes the bold transference that casts the Romans as Discord’s
citizens and gives our volume its title. The personification of civil strife becomes
both their patron goddess and their tormentor.17 In Petronius’ Civil war, when
Discord mocks Pompey for his inability to protect Rome—“Magnus, do you not
know how to guard the citadels of Rome?” (Sat. 124.292–93: nescis tu, Magne, tueri /
Romanas arces?)—is it because Rome is properly her city?
Rome may belong to Discord, but her ill effects are not contained within
Rome’s walls. They spill out into Italy in the same poem of Propertius (Italiae
funera, “the deaths of Italy”), and in other instances Rome’s civil wars encompass
ever-expanding geographical space to involve even the cosmos itself. Lucan is of
course the poet of the expansiveness of discord, and the doublings and reversals in
the name of Discord that are given free reign in Lucan’s poem come to a point of
singularity when Caesar’s troops thwart his progress by mutinying. Only discord
can stop civil war (5.297–99):
sic eat, o superi: quando pietasque fidesque

destituunt moresque malos sperare relictum est,
finem civili faciat discordia bello.
So be it, o gods above: since piety and trust are gone and all that remains
to expect is wickedness, let discord bring an end to civil war.
This is not only a paradoxical reversal; it is also a reopening of the question of how
discord and concord relate to one another, an issue that seemingly was settled in
Virgil, with discord presented as the disruptive force that opposes and prevents
concord. For Lucan’s Concord, too, is problematic. In the fraternization scene
before Ilerda, for example, “things have reached such a pitch of perversity that
conflict is replacing concord as the true binding force, and that disruption caused
by love may be as much a disaster, a nefas, as disruption caused by enmity. . . . Civil
war is not the dissolution of a system; it is the exchange of one system for another”
(Masters 1992: 72).
For certain Roman observers at least Discord is the embodiment of systemic
collapse and so the enemy of the citizens, threatening to take away their identity
as such. And yet Roman reality might also be described in the terms Jamie
Masters’s Lucan explores, with concord and discord conceived of not as a system
and the consequence of the breakdown of that system, but as alternative systems.
Arnaldo Momigliano (1942) has described how Concord arrived in republican
Rome as a calque on the Greek Homonoia, a civic deity who idealized and pre-
sided over the maintenance of agreement and harmony. Roman Concord from
the beginning departed from her Greek roots by taking on the function of
presiding over attempts to (re)create agreement after eruptions of dispute and
violence. Concord, in other words, tends to follow and replace discord, presuming
Discord’s work.18 In this sequence, which then is the system and which is the
breakdown? And yet the Romans themselves, as Momigliano showed, conceived
of their Concord more on the Greek model as the stable force that maintained
the proper order of their society, governed by its mixed power-sharing
constitution. This view, having no role for a force that undoes and that can, in
turn, be undone by concord, leaves discord out of the equation, even as, by
implication, a citizenry governed by Discord must exist as the alternative to one
governed by Concord.
The Romans would again and again have occasion to ponder the relationship
between Discord and Concord in their society and whether their status as citizens
was properly presided over by the one or the other. The historical realities to which
these personifications refer ensure that even with no temple in her name, and in
contrast to the “real” goddess Concord, Discord is not merely a phenomenon of
language. Perhaps even more than Concord, who superintends a state of suspended
tensions, Discord names forces at work in the world that have measurable results,
in particular the deaths of citizens. With that in mind, as we turn to consider the
temporal scope of civil war in Rome, it might be necessary to return to the
completely logical question of Augustine: is there any reason “why Concord is
considered a goddess but Discord is not?”
3. Rome’s Civil Wars
In the 60s bc, civil war, remarkably, seemed something that belonged safely to
Rome’s past.19 The picture was soon to change quite dramatically, however. Over
the course of the following two decades, as the city of Rome seemed to be on the
verge of imploding in an endless cycle of civil wars, bellum civile gained a most omi-
nous connotation. Civil wars began to be seen as a form of madness, a furor, blind-
ing Roman citizens and threatening to annihilate the republic.20 In this political
chaos, it is perhaps not surprising that Romans began to search for answers to a
number of pressing questions (with which we continue to grapple today), trying to
understand also the nature of civil war. When and why did the republic, a political
system whose “most basic mission” was “to mediate strife between its members and
to establish rules for the political game,” begin to fail?21 Was Rome—a military
society, a city-state expanding into a territorial empire through conquest of fellow
Italians, a political culture built on binaries (two consuls, plebeians and patricians,
knights and senate)—doomed from the start to a history of civil wars? Or were civil
wars triggered by specific events?
introduction 9
Answers to these questions differed.22 Varro traced the origin of the conflict to
the period of the Gracchi and more precisely to the judiciary law passed in Gaius
Gracchus’ second tribunate in 122 bc when, by taking away the jury-courts from the
senate and handing them over to the equestrian order, Gaius made the previously
unified citizen body two-headed.23 Cicero identified the beginning with the policy
of Tiberius Gracchus and his agrarian reforms, others with his murder in 133 bc,
which marked the beginning of civil bloodshed. Pollio chose to begin his histories
in the year 60 bc, therefore viewing the date of the first triumvirate as a major
turning point in Roman history. Sallust placed the beginning of Roman decline in
146 bc, the date of the destruction of Carthage, after which Rome became sole
mistress of the world; for him lack of metus hostilis, “fear of an enemy,” is the reason
for the beginning of the moral decadence that eventually brought about Rome’s
civil unrest (Hist. 1.12; cf. Cat. 10, Hist. 1.11). But the start of the civil wars could be
retrojected further back in time.
In Epode 7 (19–20), Horace suggests that the present civil wars are the expiation
of an ancestral crime, “when the blood of innocent Remus trickled into the earth, a
curse to his descendants” (ut immerentis fluxit in terram Remi / sacer nepotibus
cruor).24 A little later in Livy’s Ab urbe condita important foundation myths of the
city, namely, Romulus’ foundation of the city and his killing of his brother Remus,
the rape of the Sabines, and Rome’s war with Alba (a “war that resembled a civil war
between parents and children”; 1.23.1: bellum . . . civili simillimum bello, prope inter
parentes natosque), acquire civil war overtones hard to miss.25 In the Aeneid, the
starting point is put even further back, to the war between Trojans and Latins (often
depicted as a war between kin, for Trojans and the Latins are kindred gentes even
before being united—originally they stem from the same land, Ausonia, and the
Trojan journey is ever presented as a “return” to their original motherland).26
Finally, revisiting again the notion that the present civil wars are the result of an
inherited sin or guilt going back to the very beginning of its history, Virgil’s Georgics
(2.501–2) place the original sin with Trojan Laomedon’s periuria, his cheating Apollo
and Poseidon of their due payment after the gods helped build the walls of Troy. In
these authors, civil wars are not simply a bug in the system, something that “went
wrong” along the way in Roman history and that can be either fixed or expelled;
civil wars are either the price of an original sin or, even more ominously, a congen-
ital defect of Rome, a city born from an act of civil war.
For the Romans the beginnings and causes of the civil wars that afflicted the
Roman republic in the last century bc were difficult to trace and blurred in a distant
past. Their end, however, was tidily and neatly formalized and controlled by the
man who emerged as their victor and who not only saved the city and restored
the republic but also founded Rome anew.27 Wisely, Octavian avoided taking up the
name Romulus—the name was stained with fraternal bloodshed—and opted for
the more dignified and safer title of Augustus (Suet. Aug. 7). Yet not even he could
escape the fact that his Rome had been founded once again by an act of civil war;
the story of Rome’s foundation had repeated itself. But what Augustus could do, he
did. He attempted to rewrite the story of his own civil war, casting Antony to the
side and introducing Cleopatra at the center of his narrative, and he emphasized
Rome’s bright new future.28
In the year 29 bc, after his victory over (Antony and) Cleopatra, Octavian, soon
to be Augustus, celebrated a triple triumph in commemoration of his victories in
Illyricum, at Actium, and in Egypt. In an act full of symbolic meaning, he closed the
Gates of War.29 The age of Discord was formally supplanted by a new era in which
Rome could go back to her traditional role of eliminating external threats while
enjoying internal peace. Augustus had brought Concord back to Rome, an achieve-
ment thoroughly celebrated in coins and buildings of the period, most notably in a
rebuilt aedes Concordiae.30
The Temple of Concord, located on the slopes of the Capitoline, had a long
history.31 First vowed, although perhaps never built, by Camillus in 367 bc during
the Conflict of the Orders, a temple was certainly erected in 121 bc by Lucius
Opimius at the request of the senate following the death of Gaius Gracchus. During
the Republic this temple was the symbol of the concordia ordinum, and the senate
used it for meetings “especially when there was a question of civic discord or distur-
bance to be discussed” (Richardson 1992: 99). It was there, in December of 63 bc, for
example, that Cicero asked the Roman people to keep in mind the state’s history of
civil conflict when deciding how to interpret the Catilinarian conspiracy and where,
two days later, Roman senators voted to kill their fellow citizens in the name of
restoring concord. In 7 bc, while Augustus was still on the throne, Tiberius under-
took its complete restoration, and the new temple was dedicated on 16 January,
ad 10, in his own name and in that of his dead brother, Drusus. The choice of
restoring the Temple of Concord speaks to continuity with past traditions, yet
Tiberius did not simply restore a building associated with the concordia ordinum of
the republican past. The temple was also given a new name,32 dedicated as a Temple
of Augustan Concord, aedes Concordiae Augustae, where Concord is “both the deity
and the peace-bringing ruler’s achievement” (Ov. Fast. 6.92: placidi numen opusque
ducis), and commemorating the new Augustan world order in which, tellingly, “the
concord of the state and the concord of the imperial family seem to have become
one and the same.”33
The radical change in the Roman political system that took place under
Augustus has direct and important bearing on our present topic.34 The fact that
now urbs and orbis have become one and the same with the One, the princeps, opens
up new important questions for our understanding of the nature of the civil wars
introduction 11
that took place in Rome in the principate. We may legitimately ask, for example,
whether a state that identifies more and more with its ruling family and in which
the Romans become disenfranchised from their role as cives allows for the possibility
of civil wars or whether the very nature of the new political system occludes such a
possibility. After all, civil wars supposedly require either the active involvement of
the citizen body or an attempt to change the form of government in ways that will
affect citizens. Do the dynastic struggles for succession during the first century ad,
when one man (often belonging to the same family) or one family attempted or
allegedly attempted to supplant another by eliminating the weaker or more unlucky
rival (e.g., Britannicus), or even the bloody wars of 69 that witnessed the succession
of four emperors in one year, legitimately amount to civil wars? These struggles did
not raise questions about the nature and the viability of the existing monarchical
constitution. Even when Vespasian emerged as the victor of the civil strife of ad 69,
he did not present himself as one who had come to challenge the nature of the
Roman imperial system, but simply as a new and more worthy successor to
Augustus. Yet, what seems clear to us now, from the perspective of reading and
interpreting events at a time in the future when the history of Rome has reached its
conclusion, seems not to have appeared in this light to contemporary Romans who
were living in the unfolding of their own history.
In Tacitus’ Histories, both the historian and his characters hold up the civil
wars of the republican past as a key historical subtext, a key point of reference for
understanding the more recent imperial civil wars of ad 69. They see continuity,
not rupture, between the old republican civil wars and the present ones and thus
implicitly view the dynastic struggles of 69 as proper civil wars.35 In the same period,
Statius writes the Thebaid, an epic that engages with the decline of a ruling family
into fanatical despotism and a civil war between two brothers, seen as a conflict
between equals who are mirror images of one another, all set in a hallucinatory
scene of ancestral mythology. And Lucan retells the horrors of the war between
Pompey and Caesar, a war “more than civil” (i.e., between kin), and places the dis-
integration of Rome within a frame of cosmic dissolution in which all rules of
nature, society, and language are subverted. All three authors write about the past
as relevant to the present. In his proem (1.33–38), Lucan even presents the long
legacy of civil war as a necessary evil that has brought about the rule of Nero. These
works seem to bespeak a contemporary obsession with civil wars and despotism
and with a chaotic world in which things have gone terribly wrong.
By the third century, however, as the fragmentation and disunity of the empire
increases, and when the city of Rome is no longer the centripetal force of the empire
and the boundary between Roman elements and non-Roman elements in the army
and within the wider empire becomes blurred at best, by necessity the notion of
civil wars begins to be further removed from the equation of the many power
struggles that vexed the period. Indeed, Rome was barely recognizable as Rome
when a putative contemporary looking at a series of short-lived emperors and the
violent struggles of their supporters could ask, with Cam Grey, “Civil war? What
civil war?” In a sort of grim paradox, and almost fulfilling the curse that accom-
panies its foundational fratricide, Rome, at least in the mind of its citizens, is free of
civil wars when it is about to be no more. And yet Rome’s connection with civil war
does not end with the collapse of the imperial system. In the hands of later observers,
especially those who experience or recount civil wars in their own societies, Rome’s
civil wars are a powerful tool for exploring continuities and ruptures between past
and present, the local and the universal.
4. Citizens of Discord
This volume’s essays, which were all originally presented at the conference “See
How I Rip Myself: Rome and Its Civil Wars” held in Amherst, Massachusetts, on
10–11 November 2007, are arranged in four parts and, where possible, in comple-
mentary or contrasting (dare we say discordant?) pairs.
Essays in the first part, “Beginnings, Endings,” ask when civil war began at
Rome or when it ended. They are interested not in dates, however, but in the
condition of the res publica (“commonwealth” or “state”; literally, “the public
thing”) in which civil war could (or could not) arise and could (or could not) con-
clude. The essays all pay heed to the consequences, political and more broadly com-
munal, of the potential for civil war. The first pair (Wiseman, Batstone) seek
testimony from witnesses contemporary with the civil wars of the Late Republic,
primarily Varro, Cicero, and Sallust; one asks what they see looking back, the other
asks also about the future. The following pair (Flower, Grey) focus on the nexus
between political community and civil war: What does civil war do to a republic?
And what is Rome like when it no longer experiences civil war?
The contributions to the second part, “Cycles,” are concerned with civil war as
a recurrent phenomenon; more starkly, as a phenomenon without end. If the dis-
cord of the second century bc looked like a political problem, by the Augustan
period it felt like an ancestral curse. Certainly the issue of closure was broached in
the first group of essays—searching for an end point can prove fruitless—but in
this part it becomes thematic. The first two essays (Pelling, Ash) examine the impli-
cations for and the historiography of the recurrence of civil wars at Rome. The
second pair (Quint, Rossi) illuminate different aspects of “the Aeneid as a poem of
civil wars” (Rossi, this volume, p. 147).
In the third part, “Aftermath,” the essays focus on attempts to put civil war in
the past or, conversely, to claim, for better or worse, the legacy of past civil wars. The
introduction 13
first two contributions in this section (Raaflaub, Lowrie) look at the immediate
aftermath of civil war, at early attempts to restore the res publica, to re-create
community, one essay focusing on Caesar’s failure, the other on Augustus’ success.
The next pair (Kellum, Fantham) look at the civil wars of the Late Republic from a
time decades into the imperial period. Both focus on Neronian monuments—one
painted, one literary. But the common date yields no common outlook.
The perspective from which the essays in the final part, “Afterlife,” view Rome’s
civil wars is even more distant, in content if not always in time. The first two essays
(Feldherr, Breed) look at the productive engagement between innovative poetic
genres in the early Augustan period and the recent Roman experience of civil war,
finding in both lyric and elegy an appropriation of civil war attributes for generic
definition and viewing the civil war context as an opportunity for poetry to shape
society. The next pair (Gowing, Damon) discuss civil war attributes appropriated
for ethical definition: for the Tiberian-era authors who figure in one essay, civil war
cannot be allowed to exist as a contemporary possibility, whereas in the Tacitean
analysis presented in the other, the threat of civil war is continually kept alive by the
emperor and his inner circle; where Valerius Maximus and Velleius Paterculus see
virtue, Tacitus sees vice. The last two essays (Feeney, Thomas) gesture toward a
much larger field of opportunity—Rome’s civil wars as seen post-Rome—while
also being neatly circumscribed in both subject and point. Both contributions show
that the Roman experience of civil war speaks to and through works that are not
written in Greek or Latin or, indeed, in antiquity at all. Their evocations of the role
of translation from the Greek and Latin sources suggest that in the future transla-
tions will keep fruitful the political concepts, the historical analyses, and the literary
and artistic responses to civil war that the essays in the volume examine.
A Temple of Discord? To Machiavelli, at least, having the advantage of Augustine in

both distance and detachment, it would have made sense. Thus Momigliano, in a
discussion of the difference between Greek homonoia, which “tends to conserve a
pre-existing equilibrium,” and Roman concordia, which celebrates the overcoming
of discord arising from “the extension of privileges from one class to another,” sum-
marized Machiavelli’s assessment of Rome’s uniquely expansive citizenship policy:
“not concord, but discord, helped Rome.”36 That is, the clash of class on class and
people on people, all of them ending up cives, yielded stability, yielded empire.
Machiavelli, of course, was looking at Livy’s first decade, at the foundational period
of the Early Republic. But the essays in this volume suggest that in later periods, too,
civil war redefined the world in lasting ways.
When we put together the conference on Rome’s civil wars we hoped that new
insights would emerge from a consideration of the various ways in which those
wars were perceived, experienced, and represented by Romans and others across a
variety of media and historical periods. Why did the Romans repeatedly subject
themselves to civil conflict over the long course of their history? Is there something
distinctive about the nature and quality of a Roman civil war? How does civil war
insinuate itself into the Roman worldview? And how does civil war alter what it
means to be a Roman? What influence does the Roman propensity for civil war
have over how other cultures define Rome? These are some of the questions that
Citizens of Discord addresses.
Our volume’s title captures something fundamental to these essays, namely,
the link between discordia and Rome. Propertius and other poets of the period flag
this with the recurrent hexameter line-ending discordia civis discussed earlier; the
essays here make the same point on a broader canvas and with more diverse media.
As will be shown, the defining role of, or, to take the longer view, the creative
impetus given by civil war’s conflict and destruction manifested itself in a variety of
areas: politics, ethics, society, literature, to name a few of those examined here.
The political, naturally, dominates, Rome being a culture where for the elite
male the political life with its military interludes directed aspiration and achieve-
ment to the almost total exclusion of other pursuits. The economic or religious
motivations that provoke civil strife in modern societies did not do so at Rome, at
least not as the Romans saw it: it was, rather, politics. And the politics that mat-
tered was internal, not international. Pelling (in this volume, p. 109) asks a telling
question in his study of Greek analyses of Roman civil wars through a Thucydidean
lens, where the words fit but the situations do not: “Is this just the ‘Thucydidean
patina’? Or do we reflect that the forces at play in Thucydides were whole nations,
but now are individuals, and that this tells a tale about Rome?” Sallust would say
yes, sadly, according to Batstone (in this volume, p. 66): “ ‘Among us the first dis-
putes arose from a vice of human nature that, restless and indomitable, is always
engaging in contests over liberty or glory or domination’ (Hist. 1.7). What is the
end to vice that indomitably seeks contests for domination? In world history that
rises from lubido dominandi (Cat. 2.2)?” The persistence of civil war at Rome seems
to represent both an endless cycle of conflict within an ostensibly unified society
and the continuing possibility of creating unity for a divided populace out of
conflict, and at every stage from the Gracchi to Theodosius I the connection bet-
ween the political sphere and civil war prompts comment from contemporaries
and historians alike.
In a republic, for example, as Harriet Flower argues in “Rome’s First Civil War
and the Fragility of Republican Political Culture,” civil war destroys not only people
and property but also the social contract that gives a republic coherence. She iden-
tifies the first real civil war at Rome as that of Sulla and maintains that it destroyed
the Republic as traditionally defined. The various constitutions that replaced one
another with ever greater frequency between Sulla and Augustus were different
introduction 15
republics, destroyed by their own civil wars, until the “restored republic” of Augustus
was created from the ruins.
But before Augustus there was Caesar, with his civil war guilt and his commu-
nity-building politics, the subject of Kurt Raaflaub’s essay, “Creating a Grand
Coalition of True Roman Citizens: On Caesar’s Political Strategy in the Civil War.”
Raaflaub connects Caesar’s apologia for civil war—his aims were beneficial to all,
his intention to offer the “grand coalition of good citizens and true Romans” a
recourse against the selfish inaction of the faction that opposed him and blocked
changes to the status quo—with his earlier attempts at coalition-building. Caesar’s
enlightened policy, however, failed to win adherents, so even he despaired of it.
Thereupon the civil wars continued until Augustus “seduced everyone with the
delights of peace,” as Tacitus put it, cynically (Ann. 1.2.1: cunctos dulcedine otii
pellexit).
The ever shorter “lifespans” of the republics established after Sulla’s attack on
Rome—Cicero’s concordia, for example, was unraveling before he left office, and
Caesar’s friend Matius was surely not alone in asking, “if Caesar, with all his genius,
never found a way out, who will now find one?” (quoted at Cic. Att. 14.1.1)—brought
more urgency to questions about beginnings, questions that if answered correctly
might offer hope of finding an ending. T. P. Wiseman, in “The Two-Headed State:
How Romans Explained Civil War,” takes Varro, along with the more familiar Cicero
and Sallust, as his principal informants and shows that these authors, themselves
scarred by one or more civil wars in the first century bc, placed the starting point in
the second century bc, with the Gracchi; no Romulus, no Remus, no ancestral curse.
The underlying cause unearthed here is political: popularis legislation or its mur-
derous suppression, depending on the explainer’s political orientation. And these
discrepant explanations, as Wiseman observes, “not only invoke the two-headed
state but also exemplify it” (p. 41). Ending civil war seems a distant prospect.
For Livy, in fact, the question about beginnings offers no hope of end: civil war
is in many ways the foundation myth of the principate, a paradox examined by
Michèle Lowrie in “Spurius Maelius: Dictatorship and the Homo Sacer,” showing
that the principate regularizes the “state of exception” in which the laws are
suspended in order to preserve the state and that this state of exception comes into
being as a result of civil conflict, a challenge raised by one part of the community
against the ruling structure. In the Maelius exemplum discussed by Lowrie, the
conflict does not degenerate into civil war—Maelius is eliminated by murder before
that can happen—but when Livy purveys the story under Augustus, civil conflict
had just been experienced on a global scale.
According to Rhiannon Ash, in “Tarda Moles Civilis Belli: The Weight of the
Past in Tacitus’ Histories,” the republican civil wars are the lens through which
Tacitus invites his readers to respond to the wars of ad 69. Ash looks at three
“conspicuously reflective moment(s)” concerned with this historical legacy and its
capacity to either paralyze or provoke, both within the text and, by extension, in the
early second-century world of his first readers, arguing that Tacitus’ narrative of 69
“collapse(s) the chronological distance between past and present to engage in a
moralizing and cumulative three-way synkrisis” (p. 120). From this perspective, the
repeated experience of civil wars, combined with the “near-miss” in the transition
from Nerva to Trajan, were constitutive for Trajanic Rome.
When Tacitus wrote the analysis of Nero’s principate studied by Cynthia
Damon and discussed in “Intestinum Scelus : Preemptive Execution in Tacitus’
Annals,” however, the legacy of civil war seemed more uniformly grim, a kind of
banalization of state violence against citizens, a political system that consumes its
own. Damon addresses Tacitus’ multi-episode account of Nero’s paranoid, possibly
cynical, and ultimately self-defeating appropriation of civil war exempla to moti-
vate the suppression of potential dissent. “The paranoid reaction, when it sounded
the ‘civil war alarm,’ risked rousing real civil war and thereby perpetuating Rome’s
cycle of self-inflicted suffering” (p. 262).
By the Late Empire, the picture had shifted again: the memory of civil war
remained, but the absence of a coherent community meant that intra-empire
conflicts with their contests over legitimacy and authority fractured along dif-
ferent lines. In “Civil War? What Civil War? Usurpers in the Historia Augusta,”
Cam Grey shows that in the historical consciousness of the Late Empire, civil
war survives but yields empty tropes: you cannot have a civil war if you have,
instead of Varro’s “two-headed monster,” a “multiheaded monster” (p. 98).
Reducing the heads to two so as to establish collegial rule was in fact the aim: “To
characterize this period as one of civil war . . . would be to miss the subtle,
nuanced interplay of claim and counterclaim and the fundamental importance
of mutual recognition as a strategy for two claimants to the imperium to bolster
each other’s legitimacy” (p. 98).
Denis Feeney’s contribution, “Doing the Numbers: The Roman Mathematics
of Civil War in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,” serves as a post-Roman
counterpoint to the political trajectory traced so far. As with Machiavelli, distance
changed the view. Shakespeare’s perspective on Roman history was not hampered
by the Romans’ own (Augustan and later) teleology; the triumviral period with its
multiplex civil conflict is not the seedbed of principate (or tyranny) but, rather, “an
atmosphere of disordered contingency” (p. 287). Unlike the ancient authors dis-
cussed here, with their interest in beginnings and (elusive) endings, their need to
blame and excuse, their sense of powerlessness before the unbreakable cycle, the
inherited curse, the incurable contagion of civil war, Shakespeare presents the
history of the last republic (in Flower’s terms) as highly contingent; there is
no doom.
introduction 17
When we turn to the effects of civil war on Roman society more broadly
construed, the contemporary picture as presented in this volume is less detailed
but also more positive. As Barbara Kellum shows in “Representations and
Re-presentations of the Battle of Actium,” Octavian’s victory at Actium and the
final demise of the senatorial republic created a new world of opportunities for the
municipal elite of Italy and for freedmen, which both groups acknowledged, even
decades after Augustus’ death, by incorporating allusions to Actium—the founding
moment—into the pictorial programs of houses, monuments, and civic buildings.
Kellum takes as her central concern the painted representations of the battle of
Actium on the fourth-style wall in a Pompeian dining room, asking what this
century-old event might have meant for the freedmen homeowners, the Vettii. The
aftermath story from this perspective sees the victory at Actium as a victory for
segments of Roman society—both freedmen and municipal Italians—not well-
served by senatorial rule. It was not just exhaustion that made Augustus’ “restored
republic” acceptable at Rome.
The perspective of groups newly “enfranchised” (to use the term loosely) by
Augustus also emerges in Chris Pelling’s essay on works by Greek authors at Rome:
“ ‘Learning from that violent schoolmaster’: Thucydidean Intertextuality and Some
Greek Views of Roman Civil War.” Particularly interesting is the view he ascribes
(albeit tentatively) to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who reached Rome shortly after
Actium, and who, like the other Greek historians studied here, tried to communi-
cate Roman experience through a Thucydidean frame of reference. For Dionysius
writing of Aeneas and the pre-foundation stories, “Rome, right from the beginning,
adds something of its own to the mix, and . . . it is this mix of divinely approved
moral worthiness and the mailed glove in the background that makes men like
Latinus realize that this is something special, special enough to mean that the
Thucydidean match-force-with-force mindset does not work—is indeed outdated
in this world even though it is actually eight hundred years earlier than the
Thucydidean model it is evoking. For Rome, morality works; and here it works in
avoiding the civil war that otherwise threatens, even if—an addition that an
Augustan audience would find all too easy to make—it had not gone on working
well enough to avoid the civil wars of more recent times” (p. 115). For Dionysius, as
for Plutarch and Appian, Pelling shows that the Thucydidean template works only
indifferently in characterizing Roman civil wars, perhaps best serving the Greek
authors who were trying to explain the Roman experience in showing them (and
us) the differences between the Roman Republic and the Greek city-states: “the
intertext . . . points not or not only to recurrence, but to singularity” (p. 112).
The point that Pelling sees implicit in Dionysius’ present-inflected account of
the past is explicit (a generation earlier) in Sallust, according to Will Batstone in
“Word at War: The Prequel.” But where for Dionysius what made (early) Rome
special was her ability to avoid conflict by using logos, for Sallust Romans fought
with words as well as weapons, with no end in sight. The experience of civil war is
equally defining, and the definition is equally inclusive of moral and social as well
as political characteristics, but the two Romes are utterly different. No rose-colored
glasses for Sallust, not even temporarily: “he was taking important steps toward
seeing that Roman virtus was itself both a cause of civil war and what was displayed
and destroyed by civil war” (p. 66).
The ethical component of Romanness highlighted (among others) by Pelling
and Batstone is at the forefront of Alain Gowing’s “ ‘Caesar grabs my pen’: Writing
Civil War under Tiberius.” As Gowing shows, Velleius Paterculus, the source of his
titular quotation, and his contemporary Valerius Maximus, reluctant though they
were to write about civil war, nevertheless used its legacy to define their emperor’s
imperial virtue. Augustus had buried civil wars, true (his Res Gestae say so), but the
ghost was unquiet; Tiberius is virtuous for keeping civil war at bay. Both authors
complement Tiberius’ own investment in Concord, which was both symbolic, in
his rededication of her temple (discussed earlier), and practical, in his repression of
the still-present seeds of civil war (discussed by Gowing). “Velleius constructs a his-
tory in which the civil wars of the Late Republic lead not to the promise of further
war, but to a savior in the form of the new emperor, Valerius a world of Roman
exempla that offer models for behavior in a society in need of heroes rather than
villains, of men who could quell conflict, not start it. For neither the historian nor
the moralist is civil war the focus of attention; rather, the wars serve merely to
throw into relief an emperor who saved Romans from themselves” (p. 257). Very
different from the traditional, Thucydidean, assessment of civil war’s ethical mes-
sage, neatly summarized by Pelling: “stasis, civil conflict, provide[s] the prism
through which the most brutal and unsettling aspects of warfare bec[o]me partic-
ularly visible and stark” (p. 107). But powerful testimony as to what they were after:
“In writing of the Roman civil wars of the past, Velleius and Valerius in effect write
them out of the present” (p. 257).
After the political, social, and ethical spheres discussed above, it remains to
consider the literary and intellectual, where we find not that civil war per se defined
Roman enterprise in these areas but that it yielded opportunities used by writers to
define their genres and, more broadly, the role of their writing at Rome; in the
essays introduced below the emphasis is more on the creative impetus given by civil
war. However, the question of what is Roman comes through all the same in the
poets who urge Rome to shed her militaristic/political focus and refound community
along new lines.
Some innovative literary responses to civil war have already been mentioned,
of course: in the historians, in particular, the essays here show that the quest for
understanding often elicits stylistic artistry as well as analytical insight. Shakespeare,
introduction 19
too, combines a novel perspective on what was at stake in Rome just after Caesar’s
assassination with an ability to shape civil war into the austerely satisfying trope of
number play. But as Feeney shows, his transformation of Rome’s civil war story is
not without emotional power: the countdown heads inexorably to “naught.” But it
is arguably the Roman poets of the centuries of civil war who engaged most
memorably and fruitfully with the civil war theme. That topic is larger than any one
volume can address—indeed many fine books and articles on the subject are listed
in our bibliography—but the papers here show that new perspectives emerge from
the interplay of genres with one another and with other types of texts and
contexts.
For example, Virgil’s sense that for Rome foreign conquest and civil war are
intertwined and indeed interdependent, discussed by David Quint in “Aeacidae
Pyrrhi: Patterns of Myth and History in Aeneid 1–6,” would have made sense to
Sallust, one feels. Quint shows how the contrast suggested by the Aeneid’s
architecture—Books 1–4 on wars that look foreign, balanced by Books 9–12 on wars
that look civil—proves impossible to sustain. The two enemies are inextricable in
the more complicated perspective articulated in Book 6, which “repeats the cou-
pling of vanquished Carthaginian and Greek enemies, even as it confesses to
enemies within and a reality of civil war” (p. 133). The Pyrrhus of the title is simul-
taneously the mythical son of Achilles and the historical king of Epirus as well as an
avatar of Cleopatra; and that is only the simplest of the overlays discussed here.
Andreola Rossi, too, in “Ab Urbe Condita: Roman History on the Shield of
Aeneas,” argues that civil war is disturbingly present in what is announced as a his-
tory of Rome’s triumphs; civil war fights for space with the more uplifting narra-
tives with which it is juxtaposed on the shield. “In a dramatic historical paradox,
Rome’s potential for expansion stems from, and is inextricably connected with,
internecine conflict, its fighting its double” (p. 149). An important contribution in
both of these papers is showing how the poet communicates both his sense of
Rome’s history of civil war and the impossibility of telling that history outright: you
can only suggest, sketch, allude, align. Here was a challenge indeed.
A challenge perhaps even harder to meet in lyric poetry than in epic. Andrew
Feldherr, in “ ‘Dionysiac Poetics’ and the Memory of Civil War in Horace’s Cleopatra
Ode,” shows what can be done with civil war’s painful and divisive legacy in a lyric
poem. In brief, lyric holds out the promise of remediation, and the poem, particu-
larly in its exploitation of Dionysiac elements, offers a glimpse of community
restored. Feldherr suggests that Horace, by melding Antony’s Dionysiac qualities
with Octavian’s triumph, offers a solution: “perhaps . . . working through the recog-
nition rather than the erasure of the self within the other becomes the force that
truly promises to end Rome’s civil war” (p. 231). An early glimpse of the insight that
would reach political life only late in the empire’s history with its appreciation of
collegial rule? In any case, a forceful assertion of what poetry has to offer to a society
whose history can be read as lubido dominandi over and over again.
The challenge of writing civil war into elegy is double, as is shown by Brian
Breed in “Propertius on Not Writing about Civil Wars.” In addition to the historical
problem exposed by Virgil (among others) that civil war is a dangerous topic in a
world spawned by civil war, there is also the generic problem that martial matters
belong to epic. As Breed shows, however, elegy needs civil war: “elegy cannot persist
without conflict and rivalry” (p. 243), and civil war, as the Romans knew to their
cost, was the exemplum for perpetual strife. And here, too, the literary point is
enhanced by engagement with the war-torn world: “the elegiac life looks capable of
being both the remedy that could rid Rome of civil conflict and a parallel venue
where the same scenarios of rivalry, victory, and defeat get perpetuated, with no
end in sight” (p. 244).
This perpetual conflict becomes a kind of elemental force in Lucan’s poem,
according to Elaine Fantham’s “Discordia Fratrum: Aspects of Lucan’s Conception
of Civil War.” The appropriate image is not a repeating series but rather a contagious
disease: discordia spreads to infect everything from the soldiers on the field of battle
to the soil of Thessaly to the weather and the cosmos itself. “Ultimately civil war
goes beyond individual impiety to create a ruined oikoumene and an empire
enslaved” (p. 219). To add this dimension to the narrative Lucan blended the
Lucretian inheritance of scientific poetry and his own training in Stoic philosophy
into the traditional substrate of historical narrative and epic style. Political
explanations can seem petty by comparison.
Universalizing moves are also at issue in the works studied by Richard Thomas
in “ ‘My brother got killed in the war’: Internecine Intertextuality,” a disparate group
of songs and poems that share an important strategy for representing contempo-
rary civil wars: “the recognition of other instances of civil conflict, across centuries
or millennia, works against the merely local or straightforwardly historical and
lends meanings that are universal in time and space” (p. 293). As Thomas shows
here, this strategy is particularly salutary given the need for a literary response to
reach readers on (or sympathetic to) both sides; otherwise it risks being propa-
ganda, and indeed propagating conflict. Once again we see the poetry of civil war
fighting (with its own weapons) against Discord herself.
What price change? Most Romans of the civil war centuries would probably feel that
Machiavelli, who urged ignoring their cries of pain, was wrong, and that Dante got
it just about right in consigning schismatics and sowers of discord to appalling
suffering in the eighth circle of Hell (Inferno 28). Their bodies are rent, their wounds
continually renewed; their heads, limbs, tongues, and guts are the sites for punish-
ments due for the violent divisions they created in life. The visceral image of self-
introduction 21
destruction and dissection of bodies that should be whole is first and most vividly
realized in the figure of Mohammed, conceptualized as the originator of great schism
within the Christian church. He stands split open from chin to rectum, his guts on
display, and crying out “See how I rip myself !” (30 Or vedi com’ io mi dilacco!).
notes
1. On the temple, see section 3 of this chapter.
2. See Wiseman in this volume.
3. Cf. Faust 2008 on the new experiences of death and suffering assimilated with
difficulty by Americans, north and south, during and after the Civil War.
4. E.g., Cic. Phil. 7.25: omnia . . . plena odiorum, plena discordiarum, ex quibus oriuntur
bella civilia; “everything full of hatred, full of discord, from which arise civil wars”;
cf. Hellegouarc’h 1963: 131–34.
5. Cf. Fraenkel 1966 ad loc.; the emendation pii . . . civis (“Discord always hostile to the
pious citizen”) is unnecessary.
6. See the classic discussion in Norden 1915: 10–33.
7. Cf. Skutsch 1985: 393–94.
8. Cf. esp. A. 7.335–40.
9. Noted in Grilli 1985.
10. See Hardie 1993a and 1993b, esp. 3–11 and 19–26, for the application of the
anthropological models of Girard 1977 to Roman literary representations of civil-war-like
violence.
11. See Skutsch 1985: 394–95 and ad Ann. 225; cf. Lucr. 5.436–42, 5.366, 6.1048 (at 5.1305
discordia is war), Ov. Met. 1.9, Man. 1.142.
12. A connection already implicitly present in the Eclogues, where the effects of
Discord on Meliboeus’ world are reflected in sublimated form in Tityrus’ expansive
adynata, the rhetorical “impossibilities” of a topsy-turvy world (Ecl. 1.59–63).
13. Feeney 1991: 164; Fantham in the present volume addresses this theme in Lucan.
14. Passages collected by Jal 1963: 421–22.
15. With Allecto/Discord, compare Tisiphone (Allecto’s sister) stirring up trouble in
Thebes in Ov. Met. 3; Hardie 1990: 233.
16. For civil war associations, cf. Horsfall 2000 ad loc.
17. It is possible that Propertius is the imitator of the Dirae poet; cf. Fraenkel 1966:
150n30.
18. For concord as the absence or the conclusion of discord, see Hellegouarc’h 1963:
127.
19. See Batstone in this volume, p. 53–54.
20. Cf., e.g., Hor. Epod. 7.13: furor . . . caecus, Carm. 4.15.17–18: furor civilis; also Virg.
A. 1.294: furor impius. The term is later picked up by Lucan 1.8: quis furor, o cives, quae tanta
licentia ferri.
21. Quotation from Flower, this volume, p. 175.
22. For an overview of modern theories about the start of Roman civil wars, see
Flower in this volume.
23. For detailed discussion of this and the following dates, see Wiseman in this
volume.
24. For the killing of Remus and the association of the myth with civil wars, see
Wiseman 1995: 141–50. For the sin going back to the murder of Rhea Silvia, or Ilia, mother
of Romulus and Remus, see Hor. Carm. 1.2.13–20.
25. For detailed discussion, see Rossi in this volume.
26. For Trojans and Latins as kindred nations, see A. 3.167–68 (prophecy of the
Penates) with Cova 1994. Cf. also A. 7.195–211 (speech of Latinus) and 7.240–42 (speech of
Ilioneus). On the passages in Aeneid 7, see Horsfall 2000.
27. For the notion that Augustus founded a new Rome, see Suet. Aug. 7, Man.
4.773–77.
28. Notably, Augustus declared war against Cleopatra (Dio 50.4.4., Plu. Ant. 60.1);
see Pelling in this volume, p. 108.
29. Cf., for example, the famous prophecy of Jupiter in Aeneid 1 (294–96): “grim with
iron frames, the Gates of War will be shut and inside unholy Furor, squatting on bloody
weapons, with its hands enchained behind its back by a hundred links of bronze, will grind
its teeth and howl with bloodied mouth” (dirae ferro et compagibus artis / claudentur Belli
portae; Furor impius intus / saeva sedens super arma et centum vinctus aenis / post tergum
nodis fremet horridus ore cruento).
30. For the representation of Concord in Augustan coins, see Sutherland 1984:
Augustus no. 423, no. 476.
31. For the temple, see Kellum 1990: 276–307, Richardson 1992 s.v., LTUR s.v.; also,
Flower (p. 77) and Gowing (p. 260n23) in this volume.
32. For the dedication of the temple, see Ov. Fast. 1.641–50.
33. Kellum 1990: 278. Kellum points out that the harmony of the imperial family is not
only reflected in the programs of objects on display but also implied in the vowing and
dedication of the temple.
34. For Augustus’ power being based on a new form of permanent state of exception
that circumvented the republican weaknesses while co-opting its protections, see Lowrie in
this volume.
35. See Ash in this volume for a fuller discussion.
36. Momigliano 1942: 120. Machiavelli’s own words are worth quoting (1.4.1): “Io dico
che coloro che dannono i tumulti intra i nobili e la plebe, mi pare che biasimino quelle cose che
furono prima causa del tenere libera Roma; e che considerino piú a’ romori ed alle grida che di
tali tumulti nascevano, che a’ buoni effetti che quelli partorivano.”
part i
Beginnings, Endings
1
The Two-Headed State:
How Romans Explained
Civil War
T. P. Wiseman
Quo, quo scelesti ruitis? In Horace’s haunting poem (Epode 7), the speaker
challenges the Roman people to explain why yet again—for the seventh
time in twenty years—they are preparing to kill each other in a civil war.
Pallid and numb, they do not reply, but the poet thinks he knows the
answer. Sic est, “that’s what it is”: the expiation of an ancestral crime,
“when the blosod of innocent Remus trickled into the earth, a curse to his
descendants.”1
But in that case, why was the crime so long unpunished? For the
Romans, civil war was a recent and anomalous phenomenon, not
something they had had to live with since the foundation. Other more
down-to-earth explanations had already been offered, by Romans who
were perhaps better placed than the freedman’s son from Venusia to
make a judgment, and the purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to
them and try to see what they imply. I deliberately concentrate on con-
temporary sources, numbering the quoted texts for convenience of
cross-reference.
My title is taken from the most systematically misunderstood author in

the whole of Latin literature—the soldier and senator, poet and satirist,
philosopher and historian Marcus Varro. It was probably about twelve
years before Horace’s poem, in the anxious and dangerous months after
26 beginnings, endings
the murder of Caesar, that Varro wrote his four-volume “biography of the Roman
people” (De vita populi Romani); its companion piece, the four-volume “genealogy
of the Roman people” (De gente populi Romani), is securely dated to 43 bc.2 The
first book of De vita evidently dealt with the Rome of the kings, the second with the
Early Republic, the third with the period of the Punic Wars, the fourth with the
disasters of Varro’s own time.
A fragment from Book 4 of De vita is our first witness.
1. Varro De vita populi Romani fr. 114 Riposati = Nonius 728 Lindsay
in spem adducebat non plus soluturos quam vellent; iniquus equestri
ordini iudicia tradidit ac bicipitem civitatem fecit, discordiarum civilium
fontem.
He encouraged them to hope that they would pay no more than they
wanted; he unfairly handed the jury-courts over to the equestrian order
and made the citizen body two-headed—the origin of the civil
discords.
The first sentence must refer to Gaius Gracchus’ lex frumentaria; so according to
Varro, the origin of the conflicts of the Late Republic was the law passed in Gracchus’
second tribunate, in 122 bc, transferring responsibility for the quaestio repetun-
darum from the senators to the equites (App. BC 1.22.91–2). That is confirmed by
Florus’ use of the key phrase in his narrative of Livius Drusus.
2. Florus 3.17.3 (2.5)

iudiciaria lege Gracchi diviserant populum Romanum et bicipitem ex
una fecerant civitatem. equites Romani tanta potestate subnixi, ut qui
fata fortunasque principum haberent in manu, interceptis vectigalibus
peculabantur suo iure rem publicam.
The Gracchi had divided the Roman people by the judiciary law and
made the previously unified citizen body two-headed. Buoyed up by such
great power, since they had the fate and fortunes of the leading citizens
in their hands, the Roman knights were defrauding the republic on their
own account by intercepting its revenues.
Note the evasive use of the plural name; Florus’ own view was that the crisis began
with Tiberius Gracchus in 133 bc, and so a little fudging was necessary for him to be
able to use Varro’s opinion at this point.3
Only one other author attributes the beginning of the crisis to the younger
Gracchus. In his long digression on the “constitution of Romulus” (2.7–29),
Dionysius makes this comment:
the two-headed state: how romans explained civil war 27
3. Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae 2.11.2–3

So strong was the harmony between the Romans that originated from
the customs set up by Romulus that they never went so far as bloodshed
and mutual killing for 630 years, even though many great disputes about
public policy arose between the people and those in office, as is liable to
happen in cities, large and small alike. By mutual persuasion and
instruction, by conceding some things and gaining others from those
who conceded, they achieved political solutions to their complaints. But
from the time that Gaius Gracchus, in the exercise of his tribunician
power, destroyed the harmony of the constitution, they have never yet
ceased from killing each other and driving each other out of the city, not
refraining from any irreparable act in the pursuit of victory.
Dionysius’ entire account of the Romulean constitution is inserted into the narra-
tive from an evidently nonnarrative source; since he cites Varro’s Antiquities at one
point, and uses clearly Varronian ideas at several others,4 I think we may safely
attribute to Varro Dionysius’ reflections on the loss of Roman harmony.
What he says is very reminiscent of the introduction to Appian’s Civil Wars,
though Appian puts the crucial date eleven years earlier.
4. Appian Civil Wars 1.1.1, 1.2.4–5

At Rome, the people and the senate were often in conflict with each
other, both about legislation and about debt-cancellation, land
distribution, or elections. But there was no civil violence, only lawful
differences and arguments, and even those they settled honorably by
making mutual concessions. . . . No sword was ever brought into the
assembly, and no civil bloodshed ever took place, until Tiberius
Gracchus, a tribune of the plebs and engaged in legislation, was the first
to be killed in political strife; and many others with him, crowded
together on the Capitol, were killed around the temple. And the strife did
not end with this abomination.
In this scenario, what causes the discord is not what the tribune did, but what was
done to him; not the political act, but the act of murder. The same view appears also
in Velleius.
5. Velleius Paterculus 2.3.2–3

Then the “best citizens”—the greater and better part of the senate and
equestrian order, and the plebeians who were immune to pernicious
policies—rushed on Gracchus as he stood with his crowds in the piazza
stirring up a throng from practically the whole of Italy. He fled, running
down the Clivus Capitolinus, and struck by a broken-off piece of bench
he ended in untimely death a life that he could have lived most

gloriously. This was the beginning of civil bloodshed and the impunity
of the sword in the city of Rome. From this time on, right was crushed by
violence; the most powerful demeanor was the one that took precedence;
disputes among citizens that had previously been solved by negotiation
were settled by armed force, and wars were begun not for good cause but
according to the profit they brought.
The diagnosis here is all the more significant because Velleius had already signaled
serious disapproval of Tiberius Gracchus’ proposals.5 That was the optimate view
as expressed by Cicero, who regarded Tiberius as “justly killed” and Scipio Nasica as
~
a national hero.6 Velleius’ insistence that, nevertheless, the qvñ jajx m was the
manner of Tiberius’ death and not the nature of his policies must imply that there
was an influential non-Ciceronian source of which he also had to take account. The
most likely candidate is Pollio, who we know was unimpressed by Cicero.7
Cicero himself puts a carefully neutral assessment of the crisis into the mouth
of Laelius in the preliminary conversation of De republica.
6. Cicero De republica 1.31

quid enim mihi L. Paulli nepos, hoc avunculo, nobilissima in familia
atque in hac tam clara re publica natus, quaerit quo modo duo soles visi
sint, non quaerit cur in una re publica duo senatus et duo paene iam
populi sint? nam ut videtis mors Tiberii Gracchi et iam ante tota illius
ratio tribunatus divisit populum unum in duas partes.
Why, I ask you, does the grandson of Lucius Paullus, the nephew of
[Scipio] here, born in a most noble family and in this famous republic,
ask how two suns have appeared, and doesn’t ask why in a single republic
there are now two senates and practically two peoples? For, as you see,
the death of Tiberius Gracchus, and even before that the whole policy of
his tribunate, has divided one people into two parties.
In one sense, Cicero is being properly objective here: whether we think it was the
policy or the death that did it depends on which of the two parties we favor. But
I think his phraseology suggests a tacit admission that the death version was the one
normally accepted, with Laelius (and of course Cicero himself) wanting to place
responsibility on the victim by blaming his policies.
If so, then we have three clearly distinguishable reasons why a previously
integrated citizen body, capable of resolving political differences by negotiation and
compromise, was split into two, resulting in discord, political violence, and ulti-
mately civil war. To put the reasons in chronological order of attestation, they are:
(a) the murder of Tiberius Gracchus; this was the view implied (but not
endorsed) by Cicero’s Laelius in 51 bc and stated explicitly by Velleius and
Appian, possibly via Pollio;
(b) the “whole policy” of Tiberius Gracchus’ tribunate, presumably meaning
the agrarian law; this was the view preferred by Cicero’s Laelius in 51 bc;
(c) the judiciary law of Gaius Gracchus; this was Varro’s view, as expressed
probably in 44 bc.
What the second and third reasons have in common is the assumption that the ulti-
mate cause was a political measure rather than the unprecedented use of violence.
To that extent they may be described as “optimate” explanations, diverting respon-
sibility away from the men who did the killing, and it would be easy to suppose that
Cicero and Varro were of one mind, differing only on the minor point of which
particular Gracchan measure was the catalyst. But that won’t do.
In the first place, Varro’s explanation is different in kind from Cicero’s. He does
not suggest that Gaius Gracchus’ judiciary law was so intolerable that murder was
justified, which is clearly what Cicero implies about Tiberius’ policy.8 His point
seems to be that once the equites were given political power, there were two rival
interest groups within the citizen body that inevitably came into conflict; Gracchus’
fault was in creating the conditions for discord, not starting it himself.
Secondly, Varro’s political outlook was not the same as Cicero’s. It is not enough
just to describe him, as in the Cambridge Ancient History, as “an older contempo-
rary of Cicero, whom he resembled in social background and political sympathies”
(Griffin 1994: 701). We know that Cicero found him difficult,9 and in 59 bc, when
Cicero was fulminating about the “tyranny” of Caesar and Pompey, Varro was serv-
ing on the commission administering Caesar’s agrarian law.10 The difference bet-
ween the two men may best be seen if we consider Cicero’s top-down view of
republican politics.
II
There is a very revealing passage in the first book of De oratore, written in 55 bc.
Antonius is disputing Crassus’ argument that the orator should also be a philoso-
pher, and he cites Crassus’ own speech to the people in 106 bc, urging the return of
the jury-courts from the equites to the senate.
7. Cicero De oratore 1.225–26 = Lucius Crassus Suasio legis Serviliae fr. 24

Malcovati
But Crassus, if those [philosophical ideas] were valid among peoples and
citizen bodies, who would have allowed you, for all your fame and
distinction as a leading politician, to say what you did in a crowded

meeting of your fellow-citizens? “Rescue us from our misery, rescue us
from the jaws of those whose cruelty cannot be satisfied except with our
blood! Do not allow us to be the slaves of anyone, except you as a body,
whose servants we can and ought to be.” . . . As for your final comment
that the senate not only can but ought to serve the people, what
philosopher could be so weak, so soft, so feeble, so committed to the
standard of physical pleasure and pain, as to assert that the senate serves
the people, when the people itself has handed over to the senate the
power of controlling and guiding it, like reins?
Crassus had taken it for granted in his speech that the senate was the servant of the
people. Cicero makes Antonius admire Crassus’ eloquence but reject his view of
the constitution, assuming instead not only that the senate guides and controls
the people as a rider guides and controls his horse but also that its authority to do
so was formally conferred by the people itself.
Four years later, in De republica, the reins are in the hands of a single wise
statesman, the optimus civis who was the main subject of the dialogue.11 In that
work, however, Cicero prefers a different metaphor, that of the gubernator, the
helmsman of the republic.12 And he is not just a philosophical construct but an
urgent necessity in practical politics. That comes out most clearly in a letter to
Atticus written at a time of acute political tension, in February 49 bc.
8. Cicero Ad Atticum 8.11.1–2 = De republica 5.8 (trans. D. R. Shackleton

Bailey)
I therefore spend all my time reflecting on the essential greatness of the
figure I have portrayed conscientiously enough, in your opinion at least,
in my volumes. Do you remember the standard which I want my ideal
statesman to apply to all his actions? This is what Scipio says in Book V,
I think:
Just as a fair voyage is the object of the helmsman, health of the
physician, victory of the general, so our statesman’s object is the
happiness of his countrymen—to promote power for their security,
wealth for their abundance, fame for their dignity, virtue for their
good name. This is the work I would have him accomplish, the
greatest and noblest in human society.
To this our Gnaeus [Pompey] has never given a thought, least of all in
the present context.
What Varro thought about that may perhaps be inferred from his own rather
pointed use of the gubernator metaphor in De lingua Latina. It comes at the point
where Varro is arguing that only the people can be the arbiter of correct usage of its
own language.
9. Varro De lingua Latina 9.6

populus enim in sua potestate, singuli in illius; itaque ut suam quisque
consuetudinem, si mala est, corrigere debet, sic populus suam. ego
populi consuetudinis non sum ut dominus, at ille meae est. ut rationi
optemperare debet gubernator, gubernatori unus quisque in navi, sic
populus rationi, nos singuli populo.
The people has power over itself, individuals are in the power of the
people. So just as each person should correct his own usage if it is bad,
so the people should correct its own. I am not in the position of a
master of the people’s usage, but it is of mine. As the helmsman ought
to obey reason, and each member of the crew ought to obey the
helmsman, so the people ought to obey reason, and we ought to obey
the people.
In a work written just a few years after De republica, and dedicated to Cicero himself,
that choice of the helmsman metaphor can hardly be fortuitous.
Was Varro implying that “we ought to obey the people” also in matters of
politics? Since his own political works are lost, there can be no certain answer, but
even from the surviving fragments a consistent viewpoint can be reconstructed.
Consider for instance a phrase used by Aulus Gellius, in a passage for which Varro
was certainly one of his authorities.
10. Varro(?) fr. 58 Funaioli = Gellius 17.21.48

isdemque temporibus Diogenes Stoicus et Carneades Academicus et
Critolaus Peripateticus ab Atheniensibus ad senatum populi Romani
negotii publici gratia legati sunt.
And in that same period Diogenes the Stoic, Carneades the

Academic, and Critolaus the Peripatetic were sent by the Athenians
as ambassadors on public business to the senate of the Roman
people.
“The senate of the Roman people” was not a phrase that rose easily to Cicero’s
lips,13 but it is quite consistent with the attitude of Lucius Crassus in the speech
cited for criticism in De oratore. If it was indeed Varro’s phrase, it fits well with
Varro’s view about the proper limits of the authority of the people’s elected
magistrates.
11. Varro Antiquitates humanae fr. 21.3 Mirsch = Gellius 13.13.4

qui potestatem neque vocationis populi viritim habent neque prensionis,
eos magistratus a privato in ius vocari est potestas. M. Laevinus aedilis
curulis a privato in praetorem in ius est eductus; nunc stipati servis
publicis non modo prendi non possunt sed etiam ultro submovent
populum.
It is legally possible for a private citizen even to summon to law those

magistrates who do not have the power of summoning the people as
individuals or of arrest. Marcus Laevinus, a curule aedile, was brought to
law before the praetor by a private citizen. Nowadays they are escorted by
public servants; not only can they not be arrested, but they even go so far
as to move the people away.
What is revealing about that passage is Varro’s sense of a change in behavior; today’s
aediles are arrogant and full of their own importance. Born in 116 bc (Marius must
have been consul when he received the toga virilis), Varro was a witness of Roman
politics over a very long period, and his evidence for changing standards should be
taken seriously.
His sense of the corruption of the traditional republican ethos was no doubt
what motivated his Menippean Satires, written in the seventies and sixties bc; even
in the brief fragments that survive it is a constantly recurring theme. For instance,
what looks like the comment of a cynical politician:
12. Varro Menippean Satires fr. 512 Astbury = Nonius 310L

hodie, si possumus quod debemus populo in foro medio luci claro
decoquere,
“If today, in the middle of the Forum in broad daylight, we can melt
away what we owe to the people, . . .”
Or the satirist’s observation of the decadence of modern equites:
13. Varro Menippean Satires frr. 479–80 Astbury = Nonius 64L, 69L
itaque tum ecum mordacem calcitronem horridum miles acer non
vitabat . . . nunc emunt trossuli nardo nitidi vulgo Attico talento ecum.
So in those days a keen soldier didn’t avoid a bad-tempered horse that

would bite and kick. . . .
Nowadays the cavaliers gleam with cosmetics, and normally buy their
horse for an Attic talent.
One recurring character in Varro’s Satires is Manius, a man with a historic

praenomen. Manius Curius was one of the great Roman commanders of the third
century bc, famous for the frugality of his personal life.14 It was he who conquered
the Sabines and divided their land into equal seven-iugera plots for the Roman
people, declaring it the sign of a bad citizen to want more land than he can cultivate
himself and of a bad commander to demand more than his soldiers get.15 Two frag-
ments from one of the satires that featured his modern namesake give an idea of
how Varro saw the modern world.
14. Varro Menippean Satires frr. 63, 66 Astbury = Nonius 296L, 131L, 289L
avi et atavi nostri, cum alium et cepe eorum verba olerent, tamen
optume animati erant.
Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had an excellent attitude, even

though their words did smell of garlic and onion.
non te pudet, Mani, cum domi tuae vides conmilitonum tuorum

cohortis servis tuis ministrare caementa?
Aren’t you ashamed, Manius, when at your house you see cohorts of your
fellow-soldiers supplying your slaves with rubble for concrete?
Varro himself grew up in the Sabine territory, in the Quirina tribe among those
seven-iugera farms allotted by Manius Curius.16 How could that egalitarian ethos
have failed to influence his own understanding of the republic?
Certainly he disapproved of the lavish villas created by the leading optimates of
his own time. Here at least we have the secure evidence of an extant text.
15. Varro Res rusticae 1.13.6–7

item cetera ut essent in villa huiusce modi quae cultura quaereret providebant.
nunc contra villam urbanam quam maximam ac politissimam habeant dant
operam ac cum Metelli ac Luculli villis pessimo publico aedificatis certant.
Similarly [the men of old] took care that a villa of this sort should
contain everything else required for cultivation. Nowadays, however,
people strive to have as large and elaborate an “urban” villa as possible,
and they compete with the villas of Metellus and Lucullus that were built
to great public detriment.
Cicero too deplored the luxury of Lucullus’ villa17 but was never so explicit in his
criticism. A later passage in the same work suggests that Varro took essentially the
same view as Tiberius Gracchus about the rich landowners of the Late Republic.
16. Varro Res rusticae 2.pref.4

itaque in qua terra culturam agri docuerunt pastores progeniem suam
qui condiderunt urbem, ibi contra progenies eorum propter avaritiam
contra leges ex segetibus fecit prata.
And so, in the land where the shepherds who founded the city taught
their descendants agriculture, their descendants have made pasture out
of cornfields, from avarice and in defiance of the laws.
So when Varro wrote his “biography of the Roman people,” in a time of murderous
political conflict, it is reasonable to suppose that he did not take a simple optimate
line. Indeed, one of the surviving fragments suggests that he blamed the optimates
for the political crisis.
17. Varro De vita populi Romani fr. 121 Riposati = Nonius 802L
tanta porro invasit cupiditas honorum plerisque ut vel caelum ruere,
dummodo magistratum adipiscantur, exoptent.
Besides, most of them have been infected by so great a lust for honors
that they’d even long for the sky to fall, provided they get their
magistracy.
In 44 bc, with the young Caesar coming to claim his inheritance,18 it must have
seemed that the sky had indeed fallen on the politics of the Roman republic.
III
If our inference about Varro’s political outlook is anything like the reality, it is not
difficult to see why he disapproved of the Gracchan jury-courts. The iudices of the
previous quaestio repetundarum, set up in 149 bc, were members of the “senate of
the Roman people” (item 10 above)—that is, men who had previously offered
themselves for election by the citizen body and been entrusted with the responsi-
bility of office. For the new juries, however, as we know from the surviving lex
repetundarum, the qualification was defined as never having been elected to office.19
As P. A. Brunt (1988: 202) sums it up,
All present and former members of the senate, together with holders of
offices which gave a claim to future membership of the senate, and the
fathers, brothers, and sons of such persons, are ineligible; the positive
qualification is lost in lacunae of the text, but there is no doubt that it
was in some sense equestrian, whether the iudices were to be past or

present holders of the public horse, or to be merely of free birth and
equestrian census. They also had to be resident in Rome; so they were
not likely to be mere country gentlemen, but the richest members of the
order, notably publicans who needed a Roman domicile for their
business.
The criterion was no longer election by the Roman people but merely wealth.
We have already seen what Varro thought of the wealthy equites of his own
day (item 13 above). He knew at first hand the fierce conflict of interests between
private profit and public responsibility that resulted from the Gracchan judi-
ciary law: no doubt he was too young to have heard Lucius Crassus’ speech in 106
(item 7 above), but the scandalous condemnation of Rutilius Rufus, which took
place when he was a young man,20 may well have had a formative effect on his
thinking. That was evidently what he meant by making the citizen-body
two-headed; but how does it fit with his equally forthright condemnation of
ambition for office?
Here we may turn to another contemporary witness, Titus Lucretius. True, he
was not a senator, but the philosophical mentor of Gaius Memmius was well placed
to know how senators operated. His view of the political life is summed up in a
famous passage.
18. Lucretius 2.7–13

sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae,
certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.
But nothing is sweeter than to dwell in the serene temples on high,

fortified by the teaching of the wise, from which you can look down on
others and see them wandering this way and that, going astray as they
seek the way of life, striving in talent, competing in nobility, struggling
night and day with extreme effort to emerge on to the heights of wealth
and to wield power.
Here is the same pathological pursuit of office that Varro described but with an
extra nuance: the nobiles are competing for wealth as well as power. What drives
them is avarice.
19. Lucretius 3.59–64

denique avarities et honorum caeca cupido
quae miseros homines cogunt transcendere finis
iuris et interdum socios scelerum atque ministros
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes, haec vulnera vitae
non minimam partem mortis formidine aluntur.
Besides, avarice and the blind lust for office, which compel wretched men
to go beyond the limits of right, and sometimes as accomplices and
ministers of crime to struggle night and day with extreme effort to
emerge on to the heights of wealth, these wounds of life are fed to no
small extent by the fear of death.
Varro too had noted avaritia as the motive for the illegal behavior of the great
landowners (item 16 above), the abuse Tiberius Gracchus had tried in vain to
check. The pursuit of office was also the pursuit of wealth, frequently by the abuse
of power in the provinces. That is something we are very familiar with from the
Verrines—but we must remember that the Cicero of the Verrines is not the Cicero
of De oratore and De republica, even less the Cicero of De officiis, and it is the
later, determinedly optimate Cicero that we know so thoroughly from his
correspondence. If we think we understand Roman politics from the inside, it
may be that we only understand one part of it. Cicero had so thoroughly internal-
ized his political assumptions that we may be tempted to think that was all there
ever was.
Between them, Lucretius and Varro offer a valuable corrective. Here is the poet,
in sociological vein:
20. Lucretius 5.1120–26

at claros homines voluerunt se atque potentis,
ut fundamento stabili fortuna maneret
et placidam possent opulenti degere vitam,
nequiquam, quoniam ad summum succedere honorem
certantes iter infestum fecere viai,
et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ipsos
invidia interdum contemptim in Tartara taetra.
Men have wished to be famous and powerful, so that their fortune might
rest on a firm foundation and themselves live a peaceful life in enjoyment
of riches—but in vain. For in striving to reach the summit of honor they
have made their own way dangerous, and even from the top, like
lightning, envy often casts them down in contempt to the foul abyss.
And here is the senator as satirist, attacking funeral speeches:
21. Varro Menippean Satires fr. 376 Astbury = Nonius 504–5L

qui potest laus videri vera, cum mortuus saepe furacissimus ac
nequissimus civis iuxta ac Publius Africanus. . .
How can a eulogy seem true, when often the dead man [is praised] like
Publius Africanus when he was the biggest thief and villain in Rome?
There is no reason to suppose that Roman citizens as a body accepted the self-
evaluation of the aristocracy, and of men like Cicero, who shared most of the aris-
tocracy’s values.
When Clodius was killed in 52 bc, the Roman people burned down Sulla’s
senate-house and had to be held back by armed guards when Cicero defended the
murderer.21 For Cicero, and for Brutus and Cato too, it was self-evident that the
death of Clodius was of benefit to the republic.22 As with Tiberius Gracchus, they
simply took it for granted that some political initiatives were so unacceptable that
nonlegal violence was justified to prevent them from happening. Varro evidently
regarded that attitude as symptomatic of the irrevocable discord that divided the
citizen body (item 3 above).
It was probably soon after the burning of the senate-house that Cicero wrote
De legibus, in which he gave his brother Quintus a lengthy diatribe on the seditious
nature of the tribunate; Sulla, said Quintus, had the right idea about tribunes.23
One of the tribunes who had been most vocal on behalf of the people in 52 bc was
expelled from the senate two years later by an optimate censor.24 That was Sallust,
and when after a checkered career under Caesar he retired from politics to write
history, he too had a very clear case to make about what had gone wrong with the
republic.
IV
He began with a monograph on a minor civil war, the Bellum Catilinae. In order to
account for the vices of his protagonist, Sallust inserted a lengthy digression on the
corruption of public morals after the destruction of Carthage in 146 bc. He identi-
fied the same vices as Varro and Lucretius (items 16, 17, and 19 above)—avarice and
lust for office.
22. Sallust Catiline 10.3–6

And so there grew the lust first for money and then for power; those were
the building materials, so to speak, of every kind of evil. For avarice
destroyed honesty, integrity, and all the other virtues; instead of them, it
taught arrogance, cruelty, neglect of the gods, the belief that everything
can be bought. Ambition compelled many men to be liars, to have one
thing ready on the tongue and something else hidden in the heart, to
judge friendship and enmity by advantage rather than fact, to look good
rather than to be good. At first these vices grew slowly, and were
occasionally punished; later, when the contagion spread like a plague, the
citizen body changed its nature, and power that had once been just and
upright became cruel and intolerable.
Sallust’s two monographs were written probably in the late 40s, two or three years
after the appearance of Varro’s “biography of the Roman people” (and the proscrip-
tion of its author). His main work, the Histories, carried the same message for
readers in the 30s.
23. Sallust Histories 1.11 Maurenbrecher = Augustine Civitas Dei 2.18

optumis autem moribus et maxuma concordia egit inter secundum
atque postremum bellum Carthaginiense . . . at discordia et avaritia atque
ambitio et cetera secundis rebus oriri sueta mala post Carthaginis
excidium maxume aucta sunt.
[Rome] acted by the highest moral standards and with the utmost
harmony between the Second Punic War and the final one. . . . But
discord, avarice, ambition, and the other vices that usually emerge in
prosperous times, increased enormously after the destruction of
Carthage.
24. Sallust Histories 1.12M = Gellius 9.12.15, Augustine Civitas Dei 3.17
Once fear of Carthage had been removed, there was space for the waging
of political feuds. Frequent riots, seditions, and finally civil wars broke
out. A few powerful men, to whose influence the majority had acceded,
were aiming at domination under the honorable name of the senate or
the plebs. Citizens were not called good or bad according to their services
to the republic, since all were equally corrupt; but anyone of outstanding
wealth who was powerful in wrongdoing was regarded as a “good citizen”
because he defended the status quo.
Here at last we have an explicit link between the moral corruption of avarice and
ambition and the political corruption of violence and civil war. As a historian,
Sallust was very careful to present himself as above partisan politics,25 and in this
passage the powerful few who aimed at domination included some who claimed to
speak for the plebs.26 But the following sentence revealed his main target, the rich
who did not want their privileges disturbed.
In his second monograph he had made the point more clearly. Having stated
firmly that the Gracchi “defended the people’s liberty and exposed the crimes of the
few,”27 he then went on to make only a slight reservation.
25. Sallust Jugurthine War 42.2–4

It is true that in their eagerness for victory the attitude of the Gracchi
was too unrestrained, but it is more proper for a good man to accept
defeat than to use evil means to overcome a wrong. The aristocracy used
its victory just as it chose, getting rid of many people by killing or
banishing them; it thus added more to its future fear than its future
power. This has been the usual cause of the ruin of great states, when
each side wants to defeat the other by any means at all, and take too
ruthless a vengeance when it has done so.
The guilty few were now identified as the aristocracy (nobilitas), acting in its own
interests without restraint. To avarice and lust for office Sallust had added a third
defining characteristic, arrogance.
26. Sallust Jugurthine War 5.1–2

bellum scripturus sum quod populus Romanus cum Iugurtha rege
Numidarum gessit, . . . quia tunc primum superbiae nobilitatis obviam
itum est; quae contentio divina et humana cuncta permiscuit eoque
vecordiae processit ut studiis civilibus bellum atque vastitas Italiae finem
faceret.
I propose to write the history of the war the Roman people waged with
Jugurtha, king of the Numidians . . . because that was the first time a
challenge was offered to the arrogance of the aristocracy. The conflict
threw everything human and divine into confusion, and reached such a
level of madness that the hostility between citizens ended in war and the
devastation of Italy.
Sallust agreed with Varro (item 3 above), and with the source of Velleius and Appian
(items 4–5 above), that when the republic was in a healthy condition the senate and
people settled their differences peacefully.28 He also agreed with Varro (items 1–2
above) that the Gracchi were not wholly blameless in exacerbating the crisis.
However, there can be no doubt about where he placed the primary responsibility—
on the aristocracy, and its arrogant pursuit of wealth and power.29 It is quite pos-
sible, so far as we can guess from the fragments (item 17 above), that that too was
Varro’s position.
It is all a far cry from Cicero’s confident statement in 56 bc that the Roman
citizen body had always been two-headed:
27. Cicero Pro Sestio 96 (trans. R. Gardner, slightly amended)

duo genera semper in hac civitate fuerunt eorum qui versari in re publica
atque in ea se excellentius studuerunt, quibus ex generibus alteri se
populares, alteri optimates et haberi et esse voluerunt. qui ea quae
faciebant quaeque dicebant multitudini iucunda volebant esse,
populares, qui autem ita se gerebant ut sua consilia optimo cuique
probarent, optimates habebantur.
There have always been two classes of men in this state who have sought
to engage in public affairs and to distinguish themselves in them. Of
these two classes one aimed at being, by repute and in reality, populares,
the other optimates. Those who wished everything they did and said to
be agreeable to the masses were reckoned as populares, but those who
acted so as to win by their policy the approval of all the best citizens were
reckoned as optimates.
He went on to define the optimates as all citizens who were not criminal, insane, or
in financial trouble (Sest. 97, 99). That last criterion does at least confirm what
Cicero was honest enough to admit in his private correspondence (though not of
course in public), that he was the spokesman of the rich.30 In the speech for Sestius,
he simply took their partisan viewpoint and presented it as if it were a historical
datum, in order to instruct the youth of Rome.31
Cicero was a humane and civilized man, and not an aristocrat. Nevertheless,
his political attitude, with its unquestioning assumption that the interests of the
few were identical with those of the res publica as a whole, was surely what Sallust
meant by superbia nobilitatis. It was what drove Nasica and the senators to club
Tiberius Gracchus to death in the public assembly, and Brutus and Cassius and
their allies to butcher Caesar in the senate itself. The interests of the Roman people
were not to be considered. Even when Cicero was championing the republic in
December 44, his carelessness of constitutional propriety is revealed in a comment
to one of Caesar’s assassins.
28. Cicero Ad familiares 11.7.2, to Decimus Brutus

nullo enim publico consilio rem publicam liberavisti, quo etiam est res
illa maior et clarior.
For you liberated the republic with no public authority, which makes
your deed even greater and more splendid.
I come back yet again to Marcus Varro. He took constitutional propriety very
seriously, and for all the effort Cicero put into presenting the two of them as
brothers in arms, the letters to Atticus betray the fault lines in the relationship.
29. Cicero Ad Atticum 13.25.3, quoting Homer Iliad 11.654 (Patroclus to

Nestor)
sed est, ut scis, deimø| mñq sva jem ja≠ ma¨siom aÆsiæ{so.
But he’s a strange character, as you know—“Even the blameless he’d be

quick to blame.”
We don’t know what Varro was blaming Cicero for at that particular moment in the
summer of 45 bc,32 but another fragment of his lost “biography of the Roman peo-
ple” gives a clear enough indication of his point of view a year or so later.
30. Varro De vita populi Romani fr. 124 Riposati = Nonius 438L
si modo civili concordia exsequi rationem parent, rumores famam
differant licebit nosque carpant.
Let them spread rumors and criticize me, provided their own policies
aim at civil concord.
The arrogance of the optimates in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination is well

attested,33 and it looks as if Book 4 of De vita populi Romani included an attempt to
counter it on behalf of the Roman citizen body as a whole.
What I hope this interrogation of the sources has shown is that the Romans’
own explanations of civil war not only invoke the two-headed state but also
exemplify it.
On the one hand, we can detect a point of view broadly shared—whatever
their individual emphases—by Varro, Lucretius, and Sallust: that in the second
century bc, motivated first by avarice, then by ambition for the magistracies that
enabled a man to enrich himself, and finally by the arrogance that equated the good
of the state with the interests of the rich, the Roman aristocracy destroyed the
traditional ethos of the republic.
On the other hand, we have Cicero’s view: the republic was always in the control
of the “best people,” who acted as a moral example to the citizen body;34 the mis-
deeds of individuals could be controlled by self-regulation,35 and any political
attempt to challenge this aristocracy (to use the word in its literal sense) was
necessarily the work of madmen and criminals. On this view, the killings of Tiberius
Gracchus, Publius Clodius, and Gaius Caesar were self-evidently justified.36
It is important to understand that once Cicero had won his consulship, and no
longer had to gain support by backing popularis causes,37 his political stance was
not significantly different from the one Varro and Sallust saw as responsible for the
corruption of the republic. Of course he was less ruthless than the hard-line opti-
mates, believing as he did that civil war was the worst of evils;38 but he shared the
mindset that had led to civil war in the first place. As a senior senator who believed,
and asserted in public, that political assassination was sometimes necessary, he
himself was part of the problem.
So too was Brutus, who fought at Philippi for what he saw as Roman liberty.
One of his officers was the young Horace, who made sure that his readers were
aware of the fact.39 I think it is not surprising that when Horace looked for an expla-
nation of civil war he sought it in the primeval past. He was right that it all began
with a murder; but the blood that flowed with such deadly results had been shed
only a hundred years before.
notes
1. Hor. Epod. 7.19–20: ut immerentis fluxit in terram Remi / sacer nepotibus cruor.
2. Arnobius Adversus nationes 5.8 = Varro De gente populi Romani fr. 20 Fraccaro.
3. So too Plin. Nat. 33.34: iudicum autem appellatione separare eum ordinem primi
omnium instituere Gracchi discordi popularitate in contumeliam senatus.
4. D.H. 2.21.2 (kåcx dç Seqåmsio| OÃqqxm ém qvaiokocäi| cåcqafiem, móq
sx̃m jas sóm aÃsóm ôkijäm jlarmsxm poktpeiqæsaso|); 2.7.2–4 on tripartite
division of people and land (cf. Varro Antiquitates humanae fr. 4.6 Mirsch, L. 5.55, 5.81, 5.89);
2.18.3 on myths unworthy of the gods (cf. Varro Antiquitates divinae fr. 7 Cardauns); 2.28.3
on market days (cf. Varro R. 2.pref.1). For the full argument see Wiseman 2009: 81–98.
5. Vell. 2.2.3: summa imis miscuit et in praeruptum atque anceps periculum adduxit
rem publicam; cf. 2.6.1: qui Ti. Gracchum idem Gaium fratrem eius occupavit furor.
6. E.g., Cic. Catil. 1.3, Planc. 88, Tusc. 4.51, Brut. 103, 212, Off. 1.109, Phil. 8.13.
7. Sen. Suas. 6.14: infestissimus famae Ciceronis; cf. 6.24 for his malignitas.
8. Cic. Brut. 103: propter turbulentissimum tribunatum . . . ab ipsa re publica est
interfectus; spelled out more crudely by V. Max. 7.2.6b: senatus . . . Ti. Gracchum tribunum
plebis agrariam legem promulgare ausum morte multavit.
9. Cic. Att. 2.25.1, summer 59 bc, quoting Euripides Andromache 448: mirabiliter enim
moratus est, sicut nosti; èkijs ja≠ oÃdåm; Att. 13.25.3, summer 45 bc (item 29). See further
Wiseman 2009: 109–12.
10. Var. R 1.2.10; Plin. Nat. 7.176. Cf. Cic. Att. 2.8.1 (reges), 9.1 (his dynastis), 12.1
(regnum), 13.2 (regnum), 14.1 (émstqammeπrhai), 17.1 (stqamm¨da), 21.1 (dominatio), 24.3
(Ahala or Brutus needed); Qfr. 1.2.16 (reges).
11. Cic. Rep. 1.9: sapientis esse accipere habenas; Qfr. 3.5.1: de optimo statu civitatis et de
optimo cive.
12. Cic. Rep. 2.51: rector et gubernator rei publicae, 5.5–6: rector. Gubernare rem
publicam (or civitatem): 1.45, 52; 2.15, 47; cf. Leg. 3.28. Regere rem publicam (or civitatem):
1.11, 42, 47, 53; 2.15, 23; cf. Leg. 3.14.
13. In fact, he uses it once (Pis. 18) out of about fifteen hundred occurrences of the
word senatus in his extant works.
14. Cic. Rep. 3.40, Leg. 2.3, Sen. 55–56; Plu. Cat. Ma. 2.1–2, etc. For Varro’s admiration
of him, see Menippean Satires fr. 195 Astbury = Nonius 28L.
15. V. Max. 4.3.5b, Col. 1.pref.14, 1.3.10; Plin. Nat. 18.18, Fron. Str. 4.3.12, De viris
illustribus 33.5–6. See further Wiseman 2009: 42–44.
16. Var. R. 3.2.1 (Q. Axius a tribulis of the author), Inscriptiones Graecae 7.413.12:
Jæimso| nio| Laqjot tØø| Jtq¨my; Symmachus Letters 1.2 (Varro as Reatinus); cf.
Var. R. 2.pref.6 and 2.8.3 on Varro’s horses and asses in Reatino, 3.2.3, 5, 9, and 12 on villae
Reatinae. See Varro Logistorici fr. 25 Chappuis (Nonius 155L) on his own upbringing in the
country: mihi puero modica una fuit tunica et toga, sine fasceis calciamenta, ecus sine
ephippio, balneum non cotidianum, alveus rarus.
17. Cic. Leg. 3.30, Off. 1.140; he is more indulgent at Fin. 2.107.
18. For Varro’s disapproval, see Cic. Att. 16.9 (November 44).
19. Lex repetundarum lines 12–13, 16 = Crawford 1996: 66–67.
20. Cf. Cic. Brut. 115: quo iudicio convulsam penitus scimus esse rem publicam. Varro
was twenty-four in 92 bc.
21. D.C. 40.49.2–3; Asc. 33C, 40–42C. For Sulla’s name on the senate-house, see D.C.
40.50.2–3, 44.5.2.
22. Cic. Mil. 72–91; Asc. 41C, Quint. 3.6.93, 10.1.23 (Brutus); Asc. 53–44C (Cato).
23. Cic. Leg. 3.19–26, esp. 22: in ista quidem re vehementer Sullam probo.
24. D.C. 50.63.3–4; cf. Asc. 37C, 49–50C, 51C.
25. Sal. Cat. 4.2: mihi a spe metu partibus rei publicae animus liber erat, Hist. 1.6M:
neque me divorsa pars in civilibus armis movit a vero.
26. So too Sal. Cat. 38.3: quicumque rem publicam agitavere honestis nominibus, alii
sicuti populi iura defenderent, pars quo senatus auctoritas maxuma foret, bonum publicum
simulantes pro sua quisque potentia certabant.
27. Sal. Jug. 42.1: vindicare plebem in libertatem et paucorum scelera patefacere coepere.
28. Sal. Jug. 41.2: ante Carthaginem deletam populus et senatus Romanus placide
modesteque inter se rem publicam tractabant, neque gloriae neque dominationis certamen
inter civis erat.
29. The locus classicus is Sal. Jug. 41.6–10.
30. Cic. Att. 1.19.4 (60 bc): is enim est noster exercitus, hominum, ut tute scis,
locupletium.
31. Cic. Sest. 96: rem . . . praeclaram iuventuti ad discendum nec mihi difficilem ad
perdocendum.
32. See Wiseman 2009: 107–29 for Cicero’s relations with Varro.
33. Matius in Cic. Fam. 11.28.3 (October 44 bc): ‘plecteris ergo’ inquiunt, ‘quoniam
factum nostrum improbare audes.’ o superbiam inauditam!
34. Cic. Leg. 3.10, on the senatorial order: is ordo vitio vacato, ceteris specimen esto.
35. Cic. Leg. 3.7, on the censors: probrum in senatu ne relinquonto . . . eaque potestas
semper esto.
36. Iure caesus: Cic. de Orat. 2.106, Planc. 88, Off. 2.43 (Gracchus); ap. Quint. 3.6.93
(Clodius); Att. 15.3.2 (Caesar). See further Wiseman 2009: 177–210.
37. Q. Cicero Comm. pet. 5 and 53: persuadendumque est iis nos semper cum optimati-
bus de re publica sensisse, minime popularis fuisse; si quid locuti populariter videamur, id nos
eo consilio fecisse ut nobis Cn. Pompeium adiungeremus . . . multitudo [sc. existimet] ex eo
quod dumtaxat oratione in contionibus ac iudicio popularis fuisti te a suis commodis non
alienum futurum.
38. See, for instance, Cic. Att. 7.6.2 (December 50), 7.14.3 (January 49), 9.6.7
(March 49).
39. Hor. S. 1.6.48, 1.7.18–35, Carm. 2.7.9–12, Ep. 2.2.46–51.
2
Word at War: The Prequel
William W. Batstone
Twenty years ago John Henderson added his voice to the revival in Lucan
studies with a cranky, provocative, and sometimes brilliant article, “Lucan /
The Word at War” (1987). There, relying in large part upon modern authors
for perspective and theory, he represented Lucan’s brilliance in deploying
the word “which bears a sword” (Emily Dickinson), in writing the poem
that “breaks rules, inflicts pain and suffering” (123), in forging an anti-
poetic rhetoric of hyperbole (123, 135), and in carrying on a struggle that
Louis Althusser (1971: 24) said “may be summed up in the struggle for one
word against another word.” Althusser goes on to elaborate that “certain
words struggle against themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of
an ambiguity, the stake in a decisive but undecided battle.” An important
element of the rhetorical metaformations, metaplasms, paragrams, and
deconstructions that Henderson (1987: 152, 124) saw Lucan deploying,
indulging, and captured by is the fact that in these verbal struggles where
“the grounding differences of Roman thinking turn turtle,” where “the
besieger and the besieged [are] both caught in a cooperative duet,” the
reader too is caught up in the deconstructions of civil war, “the centripetal
vortex of ‘One World’ politics . . . the cult of aggression and Oneness
leading to a logical end in suicidal implosion.”
Here I discuss three aspects of the dynamic Henderson has explored.
First, there is the contest that takes place in and with words, a contest for
hegemony, for victory, for unity, a contest that requires the silencing and /
or mutilation of the other. This struggle depends upon the deconstruc-
tablity of the word, its varied and various appearances, appropriations,
and mutations; the way compassion can become a vice and parricide a virtue.
Second, there is the way that this linguistic warfare can “disorient the reader civis,”
the citizen reader, and out of her own desire for stability, for control, or even for
Oneness, she can find herself taking sides, becoming Caesar, forced by the rhetoric
of civil war to mutilate Otherness and in the process mutilating herself.1 Finally,
there is the claim that this struggle with/in the word is endemic to war and to civil
war.2
In what follows I offer an interpretation of Sallust that finds a war with/in his
words, not quite the paragrammatic deconstructions of form that Henderson
explores, an inheritance from Ahl 1976, but deconstructions of logic and rhetoric.
I will be claiming that in Sallust, too, the reader is drawn to taking sides, but in
choosing ingens virtus, “extraordinary manly virtue,” chooses discord, in choosing
patria, “fatherland,” chooses the death of ingenui cives, “native born citizens.”3
Before looking at Sallust’s text, however, it will be useful to offer briefly some
consideration of both the theoretical background to the “Word at war” and the his-
torical context in which Sallust (Cat. 4.4) wrote of “an action especially memorable
for the unprecedented nature of the crime and the danger,” his bellum civile.4
1. Argument Is War5
“Moreover, it will be a commonplace for the defense

. . . not only to transform the facts
but to change even the words.”
—Cic. Inv. 2.56
the civil war of language with itself . . .

to speak is to fight
—Lyotard 1988: 204, 1984: 10
Discussions of civil war often make the claim that civil war disrupts the stability of
meaning in a stable society.6 Appeal is made to normalcy, to institutions, and to “judg-
ing communities,” all of which are disrupted by civil war. Thucydides is cited: writing
of stasis-torn Corcyra he reports that “the customary evaluation of words in relation
to action was changed for (self-)justification” (3.83.4).7 This misuse of language is
sometimes taken as a special case, a feature of stasis. But the word is always at war, and
contesting the content and limits of ethical terms is not a feature of stasis but a feature
of culture, politics, argument, of psychology and the intertextuality of life.8
The word as a site for civil war specifically is an analytic and heuristic meta-
phor in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, who argues that every word, every
word at war: the prequel 47
phrase, requires a supplement, what he calls the differend, and that this differend
marks every phrase as a site for civil war.9 He speaks of tribunals and what can and
cannot be said within the protocols of different discourses, since every idiom
imposes its own regulations and entailments. And so the difference between lan-
guage as usual and language during stasis is not a difference that happens in or to
language; it is a difference in what happens to men, their relationship to power and
money and how language is deployed.
Such a view returns us to Thucydides’ observation about language and stasis.
He does not say that words change their meaning, but that “the customary evalua-
tion of terms in relation to actions” changes. In Lyotard’s terms this means that the
larger discourse in which terms are implicated (customary evaluation) is changed
and that this happens for the purpose of (self-)justification. Words are never
self-sufficient; we need the differend to understand why one man (Th. 3.82.4) speaks
of “reckless daring” and another of “loyal courage” and why each usage or phrase
represents a temporary victory over other judgments or tribunals.
Stasis does not cause linguistic instability, nor does verbal chaos or disagree-
ment about moral discourse cause stasis. The fact is that the customary evaluation
of words in relation to action is always slipping, is always contested. It is when this
slippage is used for self-justification and with murderous intent that we have a spe-
cial characteristic of stasis. “Cautious plotting [became] a justifiable means of
self-defense” (Th. 3.82.4). “The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising
from greed and ambition” (3.82.8). “They provoked the state with honorable slo-
gans . . . pretending the common good each struggled for his own power” (Sal. Cat.
38.3). Duplicity and verbal warfare are not, however, the special linguistic features
of stasis; the desire to dominate language is just another symptom of the desire to
dominate others, to turn another’s virtues into vices and vice versa, to silence
another’s argument. What marks stasis is the use of the inherent instability of lan-
guage to sequester power and money, the use of this instability to destroy fellow
citizens and to justify those actions.
This shifts our attention from the fact of verbal warfare to the way in which the
verbal warfare reveals or hides the terms of an ideological contest and justifies the
outcome of that contest. It is not (only) a matter of degree (there is more verbal war
in Lucan than in Sallust), but a matter of kind and content: in Sallust the logic of
history (closure, gloria, sense itself) fails and the verbal warfare of enemies is no
more destructive of community than the verbal warfare of citizens is.
Critics who assume that civil war creates linguistic chaos are repeating the mis-
interpretation of the younger Cato who in Sallust seems to reference Thucydides:10
“for a long time now we have lost the true names for things” (Cat. 52.11: iam pridem
equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus). Thucydides says nothing about “true
names,” only about “the customary evaluation of names in relation to actions,”
which is essentially an agreement by a community to accept or debate the moral

value and common understanding of what “courage” or superbia, “arrogance,” in
action is, and not to make disagreement about these evaluations a cover for mur-
derous intent. Thucydides is not concerned with some essentialized truth, as if
virtus, “manly excellence, virtue,” or a virtue such as courage could be captured,
analyzed, and placed in a taxonomy, but rather with the differend that stasis seems
to privilege: “(self-)justification,” the tribunals of power, greed, and ambition.
It is at least ironic that Cato’s citation is itself an example of war with words.
Who is the custodian of vera vocabula if not Cato? The younger Cato’s use (in
Sallust’s text) of the Thucydidean topos, then, is not the citation of authority or a
political analysis; it is Cato’s effort to use the Thucydidean topos for his own pur-
poses: he is calling the senate’s disagreement about policy “the failure to use the
right words.” In other words, Cato shows that even the Thucydidean analysis of the
abuse of language can be used for ulterior purposes. As we shall see, when Cato later
attacks misericordia, “compassion,” the difference is not that society is divided about
the meaning of misericordia; the difference is the life and death of citizens and the
way in which turning compassion into a moral flaw and political danger can justify
murder(ous self-interest).
But warfare is not only destructive: it founds the community it defends. We can
take as an example the elder Cato’s speech on behalf of the Rhodians. He does not
speak during a time of cultural revolution or stasis, and the case does not involve
the life and death of citizens. Nevertheless, Gellius, who reports the speech, says that
the other senators were “hostile and intent on plundering and possessing the
Rhodians’ wealth” (Gel. 6.3.7). Cato is said to respond with every “weapon” and
“auxiliary force” of rhetorical art. The word is at war. But listen to Cato’s arma and
subsidia: “They say that the Rhodians are arrogant, citing as an objection something
I would not at all want said about me or my children. Alright, let them be arrogant.
What difference does it make to us? Are we angry if someone is more arrogant than
we are?” (fr. 169 = Gel. 6.3.50). It is precisely “the customary evaluation of word and
action” that Cato contests and whose internal contradictions he deploys against
others. Superbia is a bad thing—I teach my children not to be superbi. Superbia is a
small thing—so what if the Rhodians are arrogant? Superbia is a good thing—it
defines our own Romanness. And so the superbia used by others as a justification
for killing Rhodians is defanged, made less deadly.
Cato’s purpose is not to justify the pursuit of wealth, nor to seek the alienation
and destruction of others. Consequently, he does not use superbia as a term of
difference, but as a term of Romanness. He does not take the word away from his
opponents; instead, he neutralizes its power to accuse. He argues that the senate
should not use one meaning or evaluation of superbia as a cover and justification
for murdering the Rhodians. He regroups his own community around other
meanings of superbia: we as Romans can agree that it is a moral flaw; we can agree
that it is not the most important moral flaw; we can agree that it defines us. Cato’s
argument depends upon the fact that these contradictions hold together the
community of Romans just as Romans hold together these contradictions.
Similar tactics are used by Cicero in the Fourth Catilinarian. Again, a war of
words is under way, and again, the founding of community, here explicitly called
consensus, “common understanding,” and concordia, “harmony.” Cicero attempts to
take a side without taking a side; he is the consul ready to do what the senate advises;
he will do everything, suffer anything, all for the sake of all (some form of omnes is
repeated forty-five times); he only wants the senate to know that he is not hesitant
to act. So far, Cicero says, the senatorial debate has advised leniency (Cicero’s ver-
sion is similar to Cato’s version of Caesar’s proposal) and deadly severity. And even
in defining the two proposals, Cicero is joining them: one entails death, the other
removes death but embraces “all the harsh consequences of the other punishments”;
both are commensurate with dignitas, “a man’s sense of what he has earned and
deserved from others,” and rerum magnitudo, “the magnitude of events”; both
involve summa severitas, “the greatest severity” (Catil. 4.7).
When he deals directly with Caesar’s proposal he distinguishes the lenience of
demagogues from that of someone who truly represents the interests of the people,
the vere popularis (4.9). The appeal to “true names” finds a place for Caesarian
politics.
If Caesar’s proposal is lenient, suggests Cicero, Silanus’ proposal is cruel. But
Cicero refutes the distinction. What can be cruel, he asks, in punishing such men?
(If we accept Sallust’s version as reflecting Caesar’s actual speech, Cicero is here
using Caesar’s argument against him.) Then he raises the stakes: vehemence is not
cruel, but an act of compassion and humanity. Caesar may be “a most lenient and
amiable man” (4.10), but who is mitior, “more amiable,” than the consul? “I . . . am
not moved by any ferocity of spirit—who is more amiable than me?—but by a
certain singular humanity and compassion” (4.11). Compassion moves Cicero to be
vehement, and he is vehemently severe: “because these things seem to me vehe-
mently wretched and pitiable, for that reason I present myself in opposition to
those who have perpetrated them as one who is severe and vehement” (4.12). The
customary evaluation of terms in relation to action is here contested, but part of the
purpose is to preserve the coherence of a community that values lenience and com-
passion as well as moral severity.
The consensus that Cicero imagined he had forged was not one that joined just
the orders of Roman society. Cicero thought he had also joined the hearts and
minds of all (true) Romans in a community of zeal and virtue: “What a crown,
what zeal, what manly excellence they bring to our common safety and honor!”
(4.15). Of course, such unanimity depends upon exclusion, even upon a common
enemy: res publica, “the republic, the state,” was secured by metus hostilis, “fear of
the enemy.” Furthermore, Cicero’s argument that the conspirators were not cives,
“citizens,” but hostes, “hostile enemies,” can be seen not just as a legal exculpation,
but also as a necessary entailment of community and concordia: either the
community is at war with itself (and not a community) or the enemy is not part of
the community. The community is what refuses to be at war with itself: “And if this
unity, confirmed in my consulship, can be maintained in the republic forever,
I maintain that in the future no civil or domestic trouble will come to any part of
the state” (4.15). In hindsight, it was, of course, naive of Cicero to believe that there
was consensus, and Sallust will make this clear, in part by exposing a different rhet-
oric and a more deadly war with words.
But the word is always at war. This means that to characterize civil war as a
time of verbal chaos is a misrepresentation of how we use words in more stable
societies and under less murderous conditions. As such, it marks discourse during
civil war as a deviant form of discourse, as if this deviance caused or was caused by
civil war.11 By segregating the verbal warfare that surrounds and supports the
murder of citizens from the verbal warfare that is part of life in the forum one
obscures the connection between the two, and so one creates an artificial boundary,
like the Rubicon, between civil war and the ideological struggles of political life.
This may satisfy our need for beginnings,12 for definitions, and especially for
boundaries between war and argument (a need that is itself an appeal to the god of
boundaries, Mars), but it will not help us to understand the chaotic flow of events
or the complex forces at work in the Late Republic.13
And then there is the matter of that chaotic flow of events. Sallust, writing the
Bellum Catilinae sometime between Philippi (42 bc) and the Treaty of Brundisium
(40 bc) (Syme 1964: 127–29), provides us not only with a record of what happened
in 63 bc but also with a perspective on what civil war looked like, at least to Sallust,
in the late 40s, in those years when Rome “gradually changed from being the most
lovely and best and became the worst and most criminal” (Sal. Cat. 5.9). There are
two preliminary points to make. First, for Sallust it was not war that destroyed the
republic, and it was not the abuse of words. Lucan represents this war of signs by
rewriting the letters of Caesar in caedes and Scaeva; such paragrammatic play is
absent in Sallust.14 It was “the character of the state . . . how the ancestors adminis-
tered the republic” (5.9) that changed.15 That this change of character would be
reflected in verbal warfare and even cultivated by verbal warfare should go without
saying. And the details of that warfare will help us see how Sallust accomplished his
extraordinary task of equating (murderous) actions to/with (murderous) words.16
But the second point to keep in mind is that the events of 63, which Sallust charac-
terized as a civil war, and even civil war itself, may not have looked the same in the
60s as it did in the 40s. Just as Sallust’s view of the event was not Cicero’s view, so
his view of the word war is not Cicero’s. It is hard to know how much the differences
characterize the men and how much the times, but it is to those differences that we
now turn.
2. Some Background
Most discussion of Roman civil war depends heavily on a single version of civil war,
one that defines civil war as inherently Roman, an ancestral curse that requires
bloodletting: Horace’s “bitter fate . . . and the crime of a brother’s murder (Epod.
7.17–18); Virgil’s “impious soldier” (Ecl. 1.70) and “nor did the gods deem it unworthy
that twice we fertilize Emathia with our blood” (G. 1.491): for the Romans a self-
defining event, the inheritance of a fratricide that gave Rome her name.
But was civil war a single reality, an identifiable thing, a Roman attribute, fully
developed in all its horror by Lucan but a reality for all who lived through and after
the last hundred years of the Republic? Was it a defining element of Roman iden-
tity? This is roughly the approach that Paul Jal (1963) took in discussing the contro-
versy about whether the Social War should be considered a civil war (7–9) and in
justifying the scope of his study in terms of the origins of civil discord in Rome
(9–15) and in analyzing the unity of his subject (43–69).17 But civil war in Jal’s sense
or Lucan’s sense is not the civil war we find when we look at the earliest expressions
of concern over civil discord, or the first mention of bellum civile. This, of course,
raises an important question. When did civil war become civil war?
This is not the place to attempt a review of all the issues, moral and psychological
as well as historical and political, raised by the changing history of civil war in the
first century. But some context seems appropriate, if only to keep in mind that “civil
war” was itself a moving target during Sallust’s lifetime. Sallust’s text precedes
Horace’s epodes by about ten years. Although the war with Catiline was for Sallust
clearly a civil war, it is not so clear how it relates to Sulla’s civil war or to other dis-
turbances of the Late Republic. It may help to look at how the rhetoric of civil war
before Sallust and even before Catiline was itself caught up in the drift and cross-
currents of history.
When we do, we find two surprising references. The first explicit mention of
civil war18 comes in Cicero’s speech on Pompey’s command, 66 bc. Listing Pompey’s
credentials, Cicero cites his experience with various and diverse types of wars and
enemies (Man. 28):
Civil war, African war, a war across the Alps, a war in Spain that mingled
citizens and the most warlike nations, a slave war, a naval war, all the
varied and diverse types of wars and enemies, this man alone has not
only fought them but brought them to an end, and they declare that
there is no aspect of military experience that escapes the understanding
of this man.
In the context of later versions of civil war, this is unexpected. Civile bellum takes
first position because the list is chronological, but it has none of the connotations
we associate with bella . . . plus quam civilia or acerba fata. In fact, since the other
wars are all identified by place, and the first three (and a half) could all be consid-
ered civil wars,19 civile can be read as a kind of geographical marker. And that is an
important point. For Lucan, the words civile bellum cannot name the horror. But,
apparently, there was a time in the rhetoric of the republic when bellum civile was
just an item on Pompey’s resume, a place where he fought and won.
Another reference to the period of Sulla and Cinna strikes roughly the same
note. In the pro Fonteio of 69 bc, Cicero argues that Fonteius should not be handed
over to the Gauls, that Rome does not have many men of praetorian rank who are
his equal (Font. 43):
Recollect what lieutenants Lucius Julius, and Publius Rutilius, and Lucius
Cato, and Gnaeus Pompeius have lately had in the Italian war. You will
see that at that time there existed also Marcus Cornutus, Lucius Cinna,
and Lucius Sulla, men of praetorian rank, and of the greatest skill in war;
and, besides them Gaius Marius, Publius Didius, Quintus Catulus, and
Publius Crassus, men who did not learn the science of war from books
but from their achievements and their victories. Come now, cast your
eyes over the senate-house, look thoroughly into every part of the
republic; do you see no possible event in which you may require men like
those? Or, if any such event should arise, do you think that the Roman
people is at this moment rich in such men?
Cicero is concerned with military prowess (Font. 42), and he wants Fonteius acquitted
in part because contemporary youths do not study war, partly because the most
brave men and the greatest leaders have passed away, destroyed some by age, some
by civil discord and the state’s catastrophe (42). And among those “most brave men”
and “greatest leaders” are names—Cinna, Sulla, Marius—that would later be
emblematic of the horror of civil war. Furthermore, when speaking of Sulla’s march
on Rome, Cicero describes it as a time “when . . . great armies quarreled about the
tribunals and the laws” (6). What would Lucan have done with this? Cicero does not
overlook the reality of Sulla’s civil war—it is just a different reality.
These passages support Erich Gruen’s view that Sulla’s war in particular was “a
struggle over legitimacy, not for a new order.”20 In taking this position, Gruen
adopts the view of Cicero (Catil. 3.24–25; see below), whose self-aggrandizing
rhetoric both exploits the potential to present Sulla as a solidifying conservative

and encourages skepticism (it was in Cicero’s self-interest to present Catiline’s
conspiracy as unique). In any event, throughout the 60s, Sulla’s civil war was not yet
what it would become. Even in Cicero’s Catilinarian orations, civil war needs to be
puffed up: Catiline’s conspiracy is a war (over thirty times). It is “nefarious,”
“unholy,” “horrible”; “a path of crime and war,” “internal and domestic war, the
greatest and most cruel in human memory.” But Cicero is careful to segregate
Catiline from Sulla: the Sullan veterans who joined Catiline were not typical of the
colonies Sulla established, “which I understand were universally inhabited by the
best and bravest men” (2.20).
By 50 bc things were different. People thought that Pompey might be a Sulla
(Att. 9.10.221) or that Caesar might be a Sulla (Att. 7.7.7); both wanted to be auto-
crats, to rule (Att. 8.11.2). Sulla was everywhere the terrifying exemplum (Att. 10.7.1):
“It is a struggle for autocracy in which the more moderate and ethical and moral
autocrat has been defeated, and if he does not conquer, the name of the Roman
people must be destroyed, but if he does conquer, he will conquer in the manner
and according to the example of Sulla.”
The sense that the Roman people were living out a self-defining ancestral curse
does not appear until Horace (Epod. 7.17–20). But Horace’s view depends in part on
an important conceptual element: lack of closure or, more precisely, the loss of clo-
sure. Parumne? he asks: “Is it still too little?” Looking back at Cicero’s speech on
Pompey’s command or on Fonteius’ praetorian virtues, Sulla and Cinna and Marius
seem safely in the past. Sulla is, of course, not yet Caesar avant la lettre.
The same perspective dominates Cicero’s well-known letter to Lucceius. In that
letter, written in 56 bc, Cicero asks Lucceius to compose a monograph that covered
the period from the beginning of the conspiracy to his own return from exile: “on
a single theme and a single persona” (Fam. 5.12.2). He notes that “the risky and
varied circumstances of real men, often superior men, contain wonder, suspense,
joy, trouble, hope, fear; but if they arrive at a noteworthy end, the reader’s soul is
filled with a most delightful pleasure” (Fam. 5.12.5). He refers to the present secu-
rity22 and the closure that makes the monograph he has in mind possible.23
Several things are remarkable about this letter, especially in contrast to the
monograph that Sallust wrote on the same event. The singleness of theme and
person envisaged by Cicero is abandoned by Sallust. His Bellum Catilinae is clearly
not about Cicero, but is it about a war, or history and its rewards, or about virtue,
Catiline, res publica, community? The confidence that Cicero feels in “real men,
often superior men” is in marked contrast to Sallust’s view that the republic had not
produced any men of real virtue for some time. Cicero’s sense that the events should
issue in the reward of history, gloria (Fam. 5.12.1, 9), agrees in principle with Sallust’s
view of history (Cat. 1.3, 3.2, passim; see Earl 1961) but not with the actual narrative
of the conspiracy. But especially, as we will see, Cicero’s belief in 56 bc that the
course of events had arrived at “a noteworthy end,” one that offered “a most
delightful pleasure,” is contradicted by Sallust’s story and its elusive closure.
So this is an important difference: what seemed over to Cicero in 66 (Sulla’s
civil war) and what seemed over to Cicero in 56 (the Catilinarian conspiracy) have
become in the late 40s a continuing problem, one that reaches back to Sulla in Asia
and the destruction of Carthage, a problem with continuing and unresolved moral
and political dimensions. This discord is explored and revealed in the linguistic
instability of Sallust’s text. To some extent, Sallust is rebutting Cicero’s concordia
and teasing out the underlying disagreements that stand in the way of any mean-
ingful resolution. But, he writes between civil war conceived as a military theater, a
line on Pompey’s résumé, and civil war as an ancestral curse, between civil dissen-
sions that are safely in the past24 and the same cruel tyranny that will be the model
for the future tyranny, between Cicero’s great man view of history and the events
that followed Caesar’s assassination. In this context, Sallust’s sense that the under-
lying fabric of community, that the concordia that had made Rome great (and that
Cicero thought he had reenergized) and that allows one citizen to listen to another,
to pursue self-interest and even partisan interest without becoming murderous,
Sallust’s sense that all this was torn and broken and could not be put back together
is both similar to Lucan and vastly different.
In what follows I will be looking at how words rip and tear, how the logic and
rhetoric of words captures and defeats both the speaker and the listener, how
Sallust offers his readers no place to stand. If this sounds similar to what Lucan
does, it is important to remember as well how utterly different it was and is. Sallust,
in my opinion, was both too soon in the course of events and too personally
involved in the past to be able to curse the horror and give up on understanding.
Our failure to find knowledge in Sallust is the failure of a desire and need that
Sallust’s text also fosters. Another way of putting this is to say that if Lucan turns
virtus to crimen (Henderson 1987: 139), Sallust turns virtus into bellum, its appro-
priate sphere, one might say, but that is the problem: in bellum civile, virtus is
killing Romans.
3. Word at War: Sallust
“And it is not proper to call those

battles just, they are the wrath of a vengeful fatherland;
And this war is no more a war than when Catiline readied
torches to set fire to our roofs.”
—Luc. 2.539–42 (Pompey speaking)
It is easy to find in Catiline’s Conspiracy the expected and predictable war of words.
Catiline appeals to fundamental Roman values and ideological touchstones: liberty,
wealth, propriety, glory (Cat. 20.14); “you carry the fatherland in your right hands”
(58.8); “wealth, propriety, glory, and beyond these liberty” (58.9), fatherland, liberty,
life (58.11); and so does Cato: fatherland, parents, altars, and hearths (52.3); homes
and houses (52.5); liberty and our life (52.6). Catiline also addresses his men in
terms of their virtus and fides. If one is to claim legitimacy in Rome—and even
criminals claim legitimacy—one does so in these terms.
More striking is the way in which these appeals are made to recall and divide
the moral language of the author himself. Robert Sklenář (1998: 206) has noted that
Sallust forces “his normative language into a logomachy with itself.” Sklenář explores
the ways Caesar and Cato use that normative language to their own ends: Caesar
warns against actions that like Sulla’s “proceeded from good beginnings to bad
precedents” (51.27: mala exempla ex rebus bonis orta sunt) and in doing so echoes
Sallust’s own assessment: “when the republic was taken over by arms and from
good beginnings Sulla got bad outcomes” (11.4: armis recepta re publica bonis initiis
malos eventus habuit); then, Cato, recalling the same passage, urges the senators to
“take over the republic . . . our life and liberty are at stake” (52.5–6: capessite rem
publicam . . . libertas et anima nostra in dubio est). Similarly, Caesar appeals to
leniency in the name of ingenium “intelligence” and dispassionate reason, while
Cato appeals to severity in the name of his audience’s greed and luxury.
Sklenář’s conclusion, following J. D. Minyard and others, is that the language of
virtue is broken. Cato articulates “the crisis of the age. Words are floating free,
divorced from the values and institutions to which they were attached. . . . The utility
of language for conveying ideas and truth, the very possibility of having tests of
truth amid such confusion of idea, was called into question” (Minyard 1985: 21–22).
Now, in the post-deconstructive age, we all know that words are always already
broken. The difference is not in their stability, but in the cost of their instability and
in how that instability is being used. In what follows I will be less interested in some
lost coherence or some broken judging community, some mos maiorum uncon-
structed for present purposes—things I do not believe ever existed—than in the
way Sallust represents words being used to promote violence and factionalism, to
hide ulterior motives, and to divide society against itself. But beyond the way others
use words is the way Sallust’s own text uses words. Here he represents discourse
trying to make an account, trying to use ingenium and ratio animi, “mental
reasoning,” to frame a moral stance that is both true and useful.
It has often been observed that Sallust’s style puts him at odds with Cicero; his
style refutes Cicero’s balance and confidence. It is true that Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae
is set against Cicero’s sonorous aestheticization of word, phrase, and period, against
his view of politics and history. But it is easy to forget that Sallust’s style is equally
opposed to the bare magisterial clarity of Caesar. Sallust did not write like Caesar.
In Sallust we find this sentence: “So great was the violence of disease, and, corrup-
tion-like, it had invaded most of the souls of the citizens” (Cat. 36.5: tanta vis morbi
atque uti tabes plerosque civium animos invaserat). In Caesar, no vis morbi (and
morbus does not serve as a metaphor), no tabes. And is Sallust referring only to the
conspirators among the citizens when he says plerosque civium animos? Or does it
mean that “most souls of the citizens” were infected? Or does he imply that many
outside the conspiracy could have provided information about the conspiracy but
were also infected? The importance of a sentence like Sallust’s is that it challenges
our security, and it does so, in part, on the very point that continually worried
Cicero: who all were involved? This uncertainty is mirrored in hypallage: “such vio-
lence of disease.” Does Sallust put it this way because it was violence that entered
their souls? Or because there is no genitive for vis and he could not say “a disease of
such violence”? And is it violence that was like a disease (vis uti tabes) or sickness
that was like a disease? Or did Sallust write tabes because there was no genitive of
tabes?25 And what kind of invasion is an invasion from within?
Stylistically, Sallust resists both clarity and beauty. And yet this broken and
deceptive narrative style also stands in contrast to the totalizing certainty of Sallust’s
own opening words: “All men, who are eager to excel the other animals, with the
utmost effort ought to struggle. . . . All our power is situated in mind and body”
(Cat. 1.1: omnes homines, qui sese student praestare ceteris animalibus, . . . summa ope
niti decet. . . . Nostra omnis vis in animo et corpore sita est). Is it churlish to ask where
in history any sentence beginning omnes homines could be true? Have historians
become philosphers?26 And Sallust imitates the language and concerns of the rhe-
torical schools.27 His text is playing an uneasy game with pedagogical clarity and
balance: it promises the world, a world of understanding, universality, propriety; it
offers eternity—“to make the memory of us as long as possible . . . virtue is held
bright and eternal” (Cat. 1.3–4: memoriam nostri quam maxime longam effi-
cere . . . virtus clara aeternaque habetur). And then it offers Catiline.
In Sallust, rhetoric and history are both broken. But not into the textual para-
grams of Lucan. Instead we find failed propositions (failed ratio); the truth
expressed in lies and lies wrapped in truth; moral viciousness rewarded and virtue
at war with itself. In this work of history that praises the use of ingenium, the
debate between Caesar and Cato is exemplary of verbal warfare at the rhetorical
level. Both speakers justify their position in terms of history, and so the mono-
graph offers two views of how we use the past, of what the past is: does it clarify
the flux and uncertainty of our actions and in doing so clarify our responsibility to
the future, or does it justify the severe certainty of our moral positions? There is no
clear answer, and so, as a debate about policy, it challenges the putative effective-
ness of ingenium. And as users of history ourselves, when we look back on the
death of the Catilinarians, Cicero’s exile, and the bitter struggle between Cato and
Caesar that followed, should we side with Caesar or Cato? Argument here is both
war and the seeds of war.
As part of this debate Sallust thematizes the word war: he has Cato complain
that Romans have perverted the true names for things (52.11). In a deliberative
speech before the senate this criticism harbors, of course, Cato’s presumption that
he is himself the arbiter of “true names,” and that is, as we shall see, an irony. For
our purposes right now, however, we will look at how this critique agrees and dis-
agrees with Sallust’s own diagnosis.
Sallust said, “After wealth began to mean honor, and glory, military com-
mands, and political power followed it, manly virtue began to lose its cutting edge,
poverty (paupertas) was held (haberi) to be a moral flaw, and blameless action
(innocentia) was construed as a sign28 (duci) of ulterior motives (malevolentia)”
(12.1). What Sallust describes here is the first order of verbal violence: the wounded
word. Innocentia now is taken as malevolentia; paupertas is listed below the rubric
“vices.” This verbal violence reflects the subservience of gloria, imperium, and
potentia to wealth: sequebatur, Sallust says. In fact, the passage is constructed from
military language: in the following (sequebatur), the holding (haberi), and the
leading (duci) that permeates the process of verbal violence. And these military
metaphors recall the process of civil degeneration that Sallust frequently returns
to: lust and arrogance invade (2.5); duplicity invades (10.5–6); “and so the result of
wealth: luxury and greed and arrogance invaded the youth” (12.2: igitur ex divitiis
iuventutem luxuria atque avaritia cum superbia invasere). We are well on our way
to the diseased violence that, like a tabes, invades (36.5). Words lose their true
meaning—first, in the rhetoric of self-interest; then, in a world of actions that can
be referenced only in language that spins off into the hypallage and violent meta-
phors we discussed above.
But there is another level of verbal violence. At 38.3, Sallust turns to the period
after the first consulship of Crassus and Pompey. On the one side, young men agi-
tated the plebs against the senate; on the other, the nobles struggled against the plebs
with all their resources for what looked like the senate’s glory but was really their
own glorification (38.3):
For, to set forth the truth briefly, after that time all political agitators used
honorable terms, some just like (sicuti) those who would be defending
the rights of the people, others to make senatorial power strongest, each
was pretending to work for the public good (bonum publicum) while
struggling for his own political power.
Once again, Sallust recounts a scene of verbal violence, both violence to words,
whose meanings deceive and whose ability to speak truth is damaged, and violence
with words, since language covers malevolent and violent intent. But the (ab)use
of language is complex: they were using honorable names, pretending to the
public good. But what did they really do? They agitated, on both sides. The young
men acted in the same way as those who would defend the rights of the people:
sicuti, he said, not quasi. Can you act like defenders of the people and not defend
them? In fact, tribunician power was restored, senatorial power resisted. Exactly
what the defenders of the plebs would do. They said that they were “defending the
rights of the people”—this was an honorable claim, and they did what defenders
do, but they were pretending to serve the bonum publicum, and they were really
struggling for their own political power. Here, moral and political language is
losing its power to signify the moral and political content of action. The problem
lies neither in what they did (defending the plebs) nor in what they said; the
problem of meaning lies in their intention, the differend. It was their actions,
taken as signs and related in signs, that were false. Similarly, Sallust says the nobles
acted in order to make senatorial power strongest. This is not a pretense or
comparison; it is not preceded by sicuti. If you thought the difference between
virtuous action and hypocritical action on the part of the adulescentes was a
matter of intention, that recourse has now been withdrawn: the nobles acted in
such a way that they intended to make senatorial power the strongest. This was
the use and the abuse of honesta nomina: it was a pretense of the public good. The
words are honorable, the words are true, they are a pretense. Pretending the public
good, they are destroying res publica. The problem here goes beyond the use of
political slogans.
It is well known that Sallust’s topos here is indebted to Thucydides’ description
of how moral terms were distorted during the revolution on Corcyra in 427, dis-
cussed above. “The customary evaluation of words in relation to actions was
changed” (3.82.4), and “caring for the common good in word, they made it their
prize” (3.82.8).29 But the very thing that secures the meaning or the ordinary evalu-
ation of a word in Thucydides, its relationship to action, is exactly what Sallust has
in our passage problematized. In Thucydides, men become hypocrites (3.82.4–8):
they do not want to hear that they are reckless, so they justify their actions by calling
them courageous; they do not want to hear about prudence, so they reject it and
justify this as the rejection of cowardice. They care for the public realm in word
only (s lçm joim kæc{ heqape omse|), using fair sounding phrases (les
¿mælaso| èjseqoi eÃpqepo‹|). And these language games support the powerful;
the moderate citizens perish. Furthermore, Thucydides lets you know just where
the pretense is: “striving in every way to get the better of each other they dared the
most awful deeds”: violation of prescribed and established laws, unjust sentences,
acts of public violence, refusal to find common cause. It is the relationship of fair
sounding slogans to vicious action that reveals the hypocrisy. In Sallust, on the
other hand, they did what they said and said what they did—“honorable words”
but still a pretense.
Thucydides is a precedent for the Sallustian analysis that civil discord and vio-
lence are supported and attended by abuses and misuses of language; but Sallust
knows that words also wound when slogans like “defending the people’s rights” and
“senatorial power” are honorable and true but, at the same time, sources of vio-
lence. In fact, even the victory of one side over the other does not, in Sallust, bring
the violence or the struggle to an end: there was no modus contentionis, no “end of
the struggle,” and “both sides made victory a practice of cruelty” (38.4: utrique vic-
toriam crudeliter exercebant). Victoriam crudeliter exercebant: they kept victory agi-
tated and in motion cruelly; they trained victory in cruelty; victory was a cruel
exercise—but an exercise for what? And what kind of victory is it that both sides
exercise? A civil victory and a civil defeat? utrique “on both sides” trips up the victo-
ria of any one side before we get there; victory, the end of war, is already wounded
and waiting to be conquered.
Comparing Cato’s Thucydidean complaint that the Romans have perverted
the true names for things (52.11) with Sallust, we have found that for Sallust the
problem of language in the political context of Rome is not just a matter of refer-
ence; it is complicated by the intersection of reference, intention, and context.
Language is always already wounded, already at war. And for Sallust the situation is
even more extreme than for Thucydides. In Thucydides, physical disease creates a
moral crisis that overvalues wealth and pleasure while misnaming them as “lovely
and useful things.” Pessimistic perhaps, but bring on the doctors, cure the disease,
put things in order! In Sallust, wealth and pleasure—the products of military and
imperial success—create a moral crisis that invades like a contagious physical dis-
ease (35.6). What is the cure for this? Military and imperial failure? metus hostilis?
This impasse, the impasse of finding that the truth lies or does not help, that
glory and military success underwrite failure, is particularly important in a work
that gets its moral bearings in high-minded assurances about ingenium (talent,
intellect), animus (soul, mind, spirit), virtus (virtue, manliness): “it appears more
upright to seek glory with the resources of intellect than of physical strength” (1.3:
rectius videtur ingeni quam virium opibus gloriam quaerere); “virtue is held brilliant
and eternal” (1.4: virtus clara aeternaque habetur); “that in war intellect had the
most power” (2.2: in bello plurumum ingenium posse); “if the mental excellence of
kings and commanders were as valued/valid in peace as in war, human affairs would
be in a more equitable and stable condition” (2.3: si regum atque imperatorum animi
virtus in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabliius atque constantius sese res humanae
haberent). But even in the preface these words do not disaggregate the components
of a moral discourse. Rather, the moral discourse spirals through synonyms and
periphrases that cannot quite name or stabilize the forces at work and so cannot
quite control them:30 “body and soul” (in animo et corpore) becomes “the resources
of intellect and strength” (ingeni quam virium opibus) becomes “strength of body
and virtue of mind” (vine corporis an virtute animi) becomes “intellect . . . body . . . ”
(ingenium, . . . corpus) becomes “virtue” (virtuti). The war here is within the word.
Before it serves Cato’s purpose to attack the mores of Caesar’s ingens virtus, already
ingenium, animus, and virtus are in an uneasy relationship with each other. No sur-
prise, then, that Caesar’s reference to the need for dispassionate reason, “where you
focus the intellect, it prevails” (51.3: ubi intenderis ingenium, valet), is an example of
Sallustian ingenium and animi virtus (“in war intellect has the most power,” “if the
mental excellence of kings and commanders were as valued/valid in peace as in
war”) at the same time that it is an example of the failure of ingenium and virtus:
both in that Caesar fails to persuade and in that the eventual solution does not solve
the underlying conflicts.
Now, Cato believes in calling a spade a spade, but his complaint is problematic:
he does not seem to understand that calling things by their true names is itself a
double problem. First, everything can be redescribed, and calling things by their
“real name” is not a solution, but merely another weapon in the war. Second, he
seems not to understand that he is illustrative of the abuses he chastises, and yet he
deploys cynicism, name calling, and reinterpretation as well as any general deploys
his signa. “Our libertas and our life is at stake” (52.6), he says, and then he asks, “will
we keep possession of what is ours or will the enemy gain control of all our posses-
sions and ourselves as well?” (52.10). They attack the fatherland (52.3); they prepare
cruel consequences for the citizens and the state (52.36). For the aristocracy that
survived Sulla and Cinna, this is clearly a political exaggeration—there are ways to
survive: recall Cicero praising Pompey. But, more importantly, it recalls Catiline’s
own fears. “Remember what you carry in your right hands: wealth, honor, glory,
and more: libertas and your fatherland” (58.8). “We are fighting for the fatherland,
for libertas, for life” (58.11). “That libertas that you have often longed for, and more:
wealth, honor, glory is set before your eyes; Fortuna has made all of these things the
reward for the victors” (20.14). Both Cato and Catiline are fighting for libertas and
over the word libertas. In the one instance, it means the freedom of the senate to act
with authority and resolution, especially as it means killing the conspirators; in the
other, it means the freedom of the poor and the wretched from the praetor’s cruelty,
the burden of debt, and the freedom of an aristocrat like Catiline to pursue his
dignitas, even if it means the killing of senators.31
But Cato is more aggressive. He pretends to interrupt his own argument: “Here
someone mentions “gentleness” and “compassion” to me” (52.11: quisquam mansue-
tudinem et misericordiam nominat). Odd, because no one has. In a few paragraphs,
Sallust himself will say that these qualities made Caesar famous. In the text, then,
they are clearly a reference to Caesar, but they do not appear in Caesar’s speech. In
fact, Sallust’s Caesar places misericordia under the “passions” and warns that it is a
poor advisor: “For all men (omnis homines), Conscript Fathers, who consult about
uncertain things, it is proper that they be free from hatred, friendship, wrath, and
pity” (51.2), he begins, echoing Sallust as well as the elder Cato. And he continues to
note that there are many “poor counsels taken by kings and peoples under the com-
pulsion of wrath or pity” (51.4). So who does mention them? Furthermore, it is odd
that Cato says quisquam, the pronoun associated with negatives and implied nega-
tives. What, then, is Cato saying? “Here surely no one will mention to me ‘gentle-
ness’ and ‘compassion’—but let’s argue with him anyway.”32 Is quisquam the true
pronoun? Not only have we lost the true nouns but the true pronouns as well; and
we are putting words in . . . what? Someone’s mouth? Or no one’s mouth? But even
this does not exhaust the verbal skirmish.
Earlier, the Catilinarian Gaius Manlius tried to justify to Quintus Marcius his
actions: “we don’t want power or wealth,” he had said, “we are fighting for libertas”
(33.4). Marcius attempted to dissuade Manlius from his violent course by reference
to the mansuetudo and misericordia of the senate: “The senate’s gentleness and
compassion has always been such that no one has ever sought their help in vain”
(34.1). Of course, Sallust will go on to write the Bellum Jugurthinum, which gives the
lie to Marcius’ words, but it is important for us that Cato’s mansuetudo and miseri-
cordia, those “dirty words,” turn out to be references not just to Caesar, but also to
the banner of senatorial equity. The man who claims that we have lost the true
name for things is himself busy emptying the false or hypocritical names of
senatorial power of their true references. And Cato goes on to say that “being gen-
erous with other people’s property is called liberality” (52.11: aliena bona largiri lib-
eralitas . . . vocatur). But, one may ask, where is that the case? If this, too, is a reference
to Caesar, we should compare Sallust’s description of Caesar (54.4): “to neglect his
own interests while intent on the interests of his friends, to refuse nothing that was
worth giving as a gift.” There is no claim here that Caesar was busy giving away the
property of others. Perhaps this a reference to Caesar’s generosity with money bor-
rowed from Crassus? But, then, the true name is mutua, not aliena. Or is Cato refer-
ring to the source of Crassus’ wealth, perhaps in the Sullan proscriptions? One can
supplement Cato’s words in such a way that several meanings are possible, but that
is precisely the reason that this rhetoric is powerful. You don’t have to know exactly
what Cato means to feel outrage and high moral dudgeon. The war with words is
being carried on at the level of the supplement. Which means, for Cato, that
meaning doesn’t matter; rage does.
But it is the term for “being generous,” largiri, that really bothers Cato. As he
finishes his complaint about the abuse of language, he deploys largiri in a garish met-
aphor (52.12): “Let them be liberal. . . . Let them be compassionate. . . . Don’t let them be
generous with (ne . . . largiantur) our blood.” Elsewhere in Sallust, largiri means “to
bribe.” If that is the meaning here, it is a tortured katachresis: failure to kill the con-
spirators makes a bribe of senatorial blood; that is, sparing the conspirators could
mean the blood (i.e., death) of senators, which is imagined as something given to the
conspirators in an effort to prevent the conspirators from killing those who have
spared them. This is an extraordinary revision of Caesar’s argument and an extraor-
dinarily murderous interpretation of a policy disagreement. But so is the simpler
reading “Don’t let them be generous with our blood.” By this reading, generosity (the
less common meaning of largiri) is not generosity at all: it is another form of giving
away what most deeply belongs to another, blood.33 Long since we have lost the true
names for things. In Cato the word is at war and word is the weapon.
Cato’s violent rejection of Caesar’s position reappears at the level of generaliza-
tion in the synkrisis. There Sallust describes both men’s path to glory: “Caesar
attained glory by giving, aiding, pardoning; Cato by offering no bribes” (54.3: Caesar
dando sublevando ignoscundo, Cato nihil largiundo gloriam adeptus est). The lan-
guage here enacts the opposition of the men and can be read as focalized with
Caesar’s expansive and generous characteristics of action met by Cato’s negative,
singular morality.34 Read this way, it is as if Cato not only has his own moral code,35
but he turns that code into a refutation of Caesar. How, for instance, is nihil largi-
undo a path to glory? The phrase is usually glossed as “by offering no bribes”—
which is, of course, an irony since Cato was reputed to have used bribery
extensively . . . against Caesar, of course.36 But it is hard to see how the refusal to
bribe is a path to glory. But this is also the rhetoric of confrontation and evasion.
Nihil largiundo not only rejects Caesarian generous characteristics, it also charac-
terizes them as immoral, the kind of thing that Cato does not do. Without such an
implicit accusation about another’s intention, largiri refers to lavish generosity. In
Cicero, it’s how the fields offer crops, and it marks the supreme civil benignitas,
“goodwill,” of Tarquinius.37 Cato’s response to Caesarian generosity, then, empties
the term largiri of positive and generous content and replaces generosity with
self-serving manipulation. This is, of course, a self-serving manipulation of lan-
guage, and not just in how it changes the “true meaning” of largiri, but also in how
it constructs a Catonian virtue: Cato may not bribe, but what he is really saying is
that he sees the underlying hypocrisy in the actions of others, and what they call
largiri (or dare or sublevare) is really self-serving and immoral. So, Caesar is “gen-
erous,” and Cato stigmatizes “generosity.”
If we accept Caesar’s characteristics as both positive mores and as characteristics
lacking in Cato, we can note how the Catonian path to glory is not just different from
Caesar’s, but a refutation and destruction of Caesar’s path. We should compare the
rhetoric of the elder Cato and of Cicero in the Fourth Catilinarian as discussed above.
There is no effort here to build community (to find a place within for the moral
dangers of superbia, as Cato does in the interests of societas; to allow humanitas et
misericordia to make their claims on the world of action, as Cicero does in the name
of consensus). Even at the level of reading, as one supplies context, intention, morality
and so on, if the reader voices largiundo with Cato (and Sallust elsewhere), Caesar is
under attack; if the reader voices dando, sublevando, ignoscendo with Caesar, Cato
stands outside community entirely. Here is Althusser again: “Certain words struggle
against themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity, the stake in
a decisive but undecided battle.” The word is at war.
This struggle takes place elsewhere in the synkrisis.38 Caesar is considered great
for his beneficia, “good-deeds, kindnesses,” and for munificentia, “munificence”;
Cato, for integritas vitae, “integrity of life.” Is integritas a virtue in itself or a denial
of Caesarian duplicity—expressed of course as a single state? But what is the nature
of the contrast? Can one have integritas without action, without beneficium? Or
does integritas “really” say that Caesar’s beneficia are duplicitous? It’s impossible to
tell. It requires a supplement, a differend. Then, Caesar is clarus for his mansuetudo
and misericordia—the very terms that Cato was afraid no one would mention; on
the other hand, Cato’s virtue is his severitas, “moral severity.” This pair of contrast-
ing virtues seem to be parallel and complementary; but then we hear that from his
severitas Cato earns dignitas, a pointed and hostile term to use after the events of
early 49 bc. Does Sallust let Cato get, by opposing Caesar, the very thing Caesar
wanted to defend? Are these guys fighting over who gets to say “dignitas”?39
The last short comparison of the synkrisis appears to be substantive but turns
out again to be the site of verbal warfare: “in one there was refuge for the wretched,
in the other destruction for the wicked” (54.3: in altero miseris perfugium erat, in
altero malis pernicies). It is true that perfugium and pernicies are alternative and
opposed civil postures, appropriate under different circumstances, but what makes
this comparison a war of words is the opposed pair upon which the alternatives of
“refuge” and “destruction” depend: miseris perfugium and malis pernicies. How does
one know whether Catiline, for instance, and his followers are miser (as they are at
20.9, 20.13, 33.1), and aiding the miseri (35.2), or mali (5.2, 16.3, 48.8)? While the
opposing postures are not mutually exclusive, the terms of their application set
them against each other in practice. The synkrisis does not end in praise for men
whose ingens virtus opposed the vicious tendencies of the time, but in praise for
men whose ingens virtus opposes each other’s, and for Cato, who at least strives for
a one-word morality, the word of domination.
Some time ago, Ronald Syme (1964: 120) proposed a synthetic reading of the
synkrisis: “Caesar and Cato were divergent in conduct, principles, and allegiance.
Their qualities could be regarded as complementary no less than antithetic. In alli-
ance the two had what was needed to save the Republic.” What he leaves out in this
assessment is that they also had what it took to destroy the Republic: a failure to
find common ground, to create that community of argument and action that
allowed difference to coalesce (see Sal. Cat. 6.2). And not just a failure, but a refusal.
One notes how Cato is characterized by negatives: nihil, pernicies, non modo . . . neque,
quo minus petebat. To side with Caesar is to bribe the conspirators with senatorial
blood, to be duplicitous, ambitious, facile; to side with Cato is to push severity and
integrity to the point where they justify the murderous actions of Torquatus,40 to
choose civil war and the death of citizens.
The contest going on in these verbal battles depends upon a fundamental, if
threatened, sense or hope that there is virtus and that we can or should know the
difference between the miseri and the mali. One might say that Sallust cultivates the
need for such moral and political clarity at the same time that he frustrates it. But
there is a larger problem at work in the Bellum Catilinae. Sallust proposes that the
goal of human life is to win gloria and fama, to be talked about, not to pass through
life silently like the beasts of the field (1.1). To do this through the exercise of inge-
nium is upright, rectius; it is what makes us superior to the prone beasts. One should
use vis animi, virtus animi, and ingenium to accomplish egregia facinora, “out-
standing deeds”41 (Jug. 2.2) that like the anima itself will be immortal. Furthermore,
it is the task of the historian to record these deeds in words that are equal to them,
and this task requires praeclara ingenia, “brilliant intellect” (8). Thus, the moral
fabric of history and the moral purpose of the historian are woven together.
Intellectual virtue, great deeds, great writing, immortal fame for both the author of
deeds and the author of words.
But the system does not work. In the first place, the very history of history
depends upon the war of words. For a long time, Sallust says, it was unclear whether
mental or physical strength was more effective. During that time, men were satisfied
with what they had. But then it was discovered that “intellect was most powerful” by
Cyrus and by the Athenians and Spartans, which is to say, in the histories of Herodotus
and Thucydides. Thus we have the victory of ingenium, the appearance of kings and
cities with names that we know, gloria, fama, and the work of the historian, but these
coincide with two other claims: lubido dominandi was held to be a causa belli, and
maxima gloria meant maximum imperium. Words are the site of contests, and the
fundamental contest is a drive for domination and hegemony.42
And Sallust’s moral system fails in another way. His own words, the product
of his praeclarum ingenium, bestow on Catiline the fama that his war efforts seek
(Cat. 33.1). The purpose of life is to win fame by the exercise of ingenium; to be men,
not beasts. Catiline’s war efforts depend upon his exercise of corporis et animi vis
and the subservience of his body to his mind: “His body endured hunger, cold,
sleeplessness, more than anyone would believe” (5.3). Catiline enacts Sallustian vir-
tues. And Sallust’s words also record in Catilinarian speeches the Sallustian con-
demnation of oligarchic abuses in Rome (33, 58.12): to agree with Sallust then is to
agree to some extent with Catiline. And the words of the moral historian grant to
this memorable criminal the gloria that he imagines as he speaks to his troops
before the final confrontation. Is the quest for gloria, for libertas, for dignitas a
Roman quest or one that sets Roman against Roman?
“Your animus, age and virtus encourage me. . . . Remember that you carry in
your right hand wealth, honor, glory, and beyond that your freedom and your father-
land. . . . But if Fortune is unkind to your virtus, do not lose your life without taking
vengeance, and do not be captured and slaughtered like the beasts of the field; fight
rather like real men” (58.18–21). These are the words that Catiline’s men take with
them into war, like Marius’ aquila (the standard that marks a Roman army on the
field, the particular standard that commemorates a notable Roman victory). Like
this standard, Catiline’s words divide Rome against itself; these are words of war and
words at war. And, of course, not only does Catiline sound like Sallust, and like an
exemplary Roman general,43 but he also fights and dies like one, mindful of his
family and his own pristine dignity (60.7). Roman words, Roman deeds, Roman
virtue, Roman dignity—all commemorated in Sallust’s words. You could have seen
how much animi vis there was in Catiline’s army. They all died, wounds in their
chest, falling where they fought; not a single ingenuus civis was captured (61.1–5).
The words by which Sallust tries to sort out the moral purpose of history fail on
the field of civil war: vis animi, veteris dignitas, virtus vostra, libertas. The signa sound,
the aquila moves forward, Romans die. But the problem does not end here, with the
defeat of Catiline. The victory for the army of the Roman people meant looting dead
Romans. As the language of external enemies, of hostes, turns to the language of
everyday politics, of amici and inimici, the Romans gaze on the dead with happiness,
sadness, grief, and joy. But these emotions do not compose a Roman community
reflecting upon the grievousness of civil war: sadness at the loss of Roman life, joy for
the victory of the Roman people. Instead, they continue the hostilities of war: the
Romans are sad when they see a dead amicus, glad when they see a dead inimicus. And
so the terms that should let difference play again in the day-to-day workings of the
Roman forum recycle the suicidal impulses of One-World politics. On both sides,
men exercise a cruel victory. This is not Lucan’s antipoetic rhetoric of hyperbole—but
it is more disturbing and more dangerous. The word you thought was not at war, the
war you thought was merely metaphorical, turns out to be deadly, and now even the
terms of forensic hostilities insure the continuation of words and men at war.
4. Coda: The Prequel
Before Lucan’s One Word War, before Virgil’s impius miles and Horace’s acerba fata
and fracta virtus, there was in Cicero’s rhetoric Pompey’s résumé and the need for
experienced generals. Between these incompatible views of civil war one finds
Sallust’s tortured semantics, failed ingenium, and faltering ratio, and that is what
this essay has tried to return to. It is an important step in the conceptualization of
civil war in the Late Republic. For Sallust adds at least three elements without which
we do not get to ancestral curses and cries of “The horror! The horror!” First among
those elements is Sallust’s sense of a lack of closure, his sense that the broken and
fractious elements of republican politics continue to play out their deadly violence
after the battle is over. And not only in his final scene, but especially in the senate
where he replaces Cicero’s assurances of concordia with the broken virtue and
deadly animus of Cato against Caesar. Second, there is Sallust’s sense that the rhet-
oric of both sides is deadly: that Cato’s moral severity is just as hypocritical and
self-destructive as Caesar’s largitio and that the rhetoric of accommodation is dan-
gerous, that on both sides (all three sides) libertas and patria mean the death of
ingenui cives. And finally there is Sallust’s sense of the depth of the problem: that it
goes back beyond Carthage to something in the nature of history and the nature of
Rome, something he would later refer to saying, “Among us the first disputes arose
from a vice of human nature that, restless and indomitable, is always engaging in
contests over liberty or glory or domination” (Hist. 1.7). What is the end to a vice
that indomitably seeks contests for domination? In a world history that rises from
lubido dominandi (Cat. 2.2)?
In the late 40s, as Sallust looked back on the events of 63, they no longer had
the coherence or the closure that Cicero still believed in when he wrote to Lucceius
in 56. In this regard, Sallust’s monograph is a dark refutation of Cicero’s hope that
Roman society had refound its coherence in opposition to Catiline, a rejection of
his assimilating and self-aggrandizing rhetoric of consensus and unanimity, of con-
cordia at the Temple of Concord, a hope that was itself already riven with moral
judgments44 but one that tried to preserve community around metus hostilis. Of
course, Cicero did not know in 63 or in 56 that the war between Cato and Caesar
was going to become deadly, that his concordia would fail, and that he would die
from its failure. But in the late 40s, Sallust did. Still, it would be unfair to turn this
fact against Cicero. Perhaps Cicero should have known better: before his term was
up the tribunes for the next year were already agitating. Nevertheless, it is Cicero’s
version and vision of concordia the Sallust represents as what is missing, what Rome
had lost: “and so because of harmony a diverse and vagabond multitude created in
a short time a state” (Cat. 6.2).
Sallust’s civil war is not yet the ancestral curse of Horace or Lucan. But in rec-
ognizing the lack of closure to the events of 63, in articulating a symbolic system
that no longer articulated either the virtues of society or their proper rewards, and
in representing this system as being deployed against community, he was taking
important steps toward seeing that Roman virtus was itself both a cause of civil war
and what was displayed and destroyed by civil war, which is to say toward the civil
war as we know it in later authors. In Catiline’s Conspiracy, Sallust explores and

exploits the language problem that was being explored and exploited by the con-
tests within Roman society. He sees them as both the weapons and the reflections
of a division that cannot be healed. Even the vote of the senate at the Temple of
Harmony/Concord did not return to Rome the concordia that would allow diverse
interests to coalesce.
According to Henderson (1987: 142–43), Lucan takes as his target not only civil
war but also Roman imperium, manliness, epic poetry. Sallust’s concerns are both
broader and more narrow: his exemplum is Catiline, a failed tyrant, a man who
both acted too soon and acted too slowly; but in taking on this unprecedented
danger to the republic Sallust also takes on history itself, fame as the reward for
action, and the conflicts within political virtue. Perhaps Sallust’s engagement is dif-
ferent because he lived in the midst of the event that Lucan will hypostatize as all
civil war, all war, cosmos. There is a luxury in everything being “after the fact.” And
part of that luxury lies in closure, distance, objectification. Civil war and “wars
more than civil” can become the image of an entire world gone wrong when they
can be isolated, seen as a cause or an origin, when the war itself has become an
event. But when it is a matter of fearing Octavian or avoiding proscription, of see-
ing no end to “the lust for domination” (2.3) and “things taken in one and another
direction and changed and everything confused” (2.3), it is harder to know who or
what to curse. It would be unfair to say that this history doesn’t wish to comprehend,
or that it disowns its patrimony of knowledge, or that it curses history.45 In fact,
caught in the midst of civil war, Sallust seems desperately, even cynically, to want to
understand the communal failure. Catiline’s Conspiracy is important not only for
what it says about history and power, and not only for where it is positioned in the
history of Romans reflecting on civil war, but also for how it wrestles with the cer-
tainties and uncertainties of its own knowledge.
notes
1. Henderson 1987: 155; see also 149.
2. Henderson here is following Conte 1968: 240 and Martindale 1981: 138–39. See also
152: “For the centre, the narrative focus, the scene in the epic of Bellum Civile, is always
already a political construct, the construction of a political contestation.” Henderson is
followed by Masters 1992: 90: “mimicry of civil war, of divided unity, concordia discors”; and
Roller 2001: 28–29: “Lucan makes civil war a context in which he can participate in the
ideological struggles of his own day.”
3. Translations are my own unless otherwise ascribed.
4. Although Sallust does not call the conspiracy a bellum civile, a “civil war,” his
soldiers desire civile bellum (16.4), his youthful followers prefer bellum (20.15), he urges his
men to consider belli spolia, “the spoils of war” (20.15), and when they ask about the
condicio belli, “terms of the war,” he speaks of “things that war and the victors’ lust can
bring” (21.1: quae bellum atque lubido victorum fert). He says that Manlius began a bellum
(24.2), that Catiline decided to make bellum (26.5), that the senate’s decree was to make
bellum (29.1). Lentulus says that this was the year for bellum civile (47.2), and Cato says
that this was Cethegus’ second bellum against the fatherland (52.33). The plebs were happy
to be saved from belli facinora, “war crimes” (32.2). This does not exhaust the references
but demonstrates that all thought the conflict with Catiline was appropriately called a
bellum.
5. Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3–6; cited and used by Roller 2001: 218. See also Rhet.
Her. 4.47: “the prosecutor’s duty is to attack with charges; the defense’s duty is to weaken
them and to beat them back”; and Cic. Inv. 1.1 (discussed below).
6. See esp. Roller 2001. For a more sophisticated view, see Kennedy 1992: 34–35:
“Stability of terms is in an important sense illusory, but in an equally important sense, it is
not. Different individuals or groups have a differential capacity to make a meaning
stick. . . . The right of any individual to use a particular expression with a particular meaning
in particular circumstances is both an index and issue of power. A corollary to this is that
stability of meaning, the feeling that words have a fixed and assured meaning, is a hidden
function of the stability of power: recall the complaint that is regularly voiced in the
conditions of a radical shift of power in society, the complaint of a Thucydides or a Sallust
that ‘words are not being used in their proper meanings.’ ”
7. As one expects with Thucydides, there is some dispute as to his precise meaning:
do words change meaning, or is it their customary evaluation that changes? The interpreta-
tion adopted here is that of Swain 1993: 36 (with bibliography): “words kept their accus-
tomed ‘evaluation’ (n¨xri|), their sense, but . . . the reference of words to acts was
consciously reevaluated in order to justify (sz̃ dijai›rei) the behavior of the speaker and
to suggest that it was something better than it actually was.” Sallust seems to cover several
possibilities: “recklessness in wicked deed is called bravery” (52.11: malarum rerum audacia
fortitudo vocatur); “poverty began to be taken for blame, innocence began to be construed
as malevolence” (12.1: paupertas probro haberi, innocentia pro malevolentia duci coepit, and
see Ramsey 2007 ad loc.); “with honorable slogans” (38.3: honestis nominibus).
8. For an introductory background to the dialogicity or intertextuality of life and
mind, see Kristeva 1986 and Bakhtin 1981.
9. Lyotard 1988: 138, No. 201; see also Nos. 188, 190, and 231 and Lyotard 1989: 357:
“A differend takes the form of a civil war, of what the Greeks called a stasis: the form of a
spasm. The authority of the idiom in which cases are established and regulated is contested.
A different idiom and a different tribunal are demanded, which the other party contests
and regrets. Language is at war with itself.”
10. Sallust uses this passage of Thucydides in propria persona elsewhere: Cat. 12.1, 38.3.
Thucydides, however, nowhere speaks of “true terms.”
11. The linguistic abuses and instabilities of the forum are the site of a continuous
ideological war, and civil war or stasis is distinct from this linguistic warfare only in that
while in civil war citizens die in the clash of great armies motivated in part by these
symbolic structures, in the forum-as-usual, citizens who are not involved in great armies
die or are exiled at the hand of state apparatuses, the existence of which is not dependent
upon the success of their violent actions.
12. See Foucault 1977.

13. Over the past forty years more emphasis has fallen on exactly this aspect of late
republican history. To single out a few of the most important contributions: Gruen 1974:
449–507 speaks of events getting out of control; Raaflaub 1974 explores the animosities that
created an unnecessary impasse; Meier 1980b explores the “crisis without alternative” as a
crisis without intentions.
14. The only plausible verbal play I have discerned is with -mor-, in mors, mortalis,
memor, mores, which can be seen to paragram Romulus (not mentioned by Sallust), Roma,
gloriam, etc.
15. See further Wiseman in this volume.
16. Cf. “first because the actions have to be equated with words” (Cat. 3.2: primum
quod facta dictis exaequanda sunt).
17. Jal 1963: 55: “La guerre civile est, aux yeux des Romains, le type même de l’ ‘avitum
malum,’ mal beaucoup plus cruel qu’à Athénes”; 57: “La notion de guerre civile apparaît
ainsi comme une véritable ‘catégorie de la pensée romaine’, faisant fréquemment, de la part
des écrivains, l’objet de jugements généraux qui révèlent à quel point un tel sujet consti-
tuait, de Sylla à Vespasien, une des préoccupations constantes des esprits.”
18. Based on a search of “all authors” in PHI Latin Texts.
19. Thanks to Cynthia Damon for suggesting this. For confirmation, see Orosius
5.22.16, cited by Gruen 1974: 412; also Cic. Catil. 3.24–25. On civile as a geographical marker,
cf. Cicero on leaving Italy to fight a civil war (Fam. 2.16.3, quoted below).
20. See also Gruen 1974: 8, 38, 383–84.
21. See also Att. 9.7.3.
22. Cf. “the secure recollection of passed grief has a pleasure” (Fam. 5.12.4).
23. “And so it would be all the more desirable for me if you were to hold this opinion,
so that from your ongoing writings, in which you have embraced an unbroken history of
events, you could separate this tale, so to speak, of our actions and events” (Fam. 5.12.6.)
24. On closure to Sulla’s civil war, cf. Gruen 1974: 413: “The government recalled exiles
and restored most of their civil and political rights. That move placed a conspicuous seal
on fratricidal strife: the era of civil war had ended; Rome was to be whole again. Such, at
least, was the intention.” The date is 70, and even this closure is illusory. On closure in
Sallust’s Jugurtha, see Levene 1992.
25. See Charisius p. 119 (Barwick2) = GLK I.93 = Cinna 8 (Hollis): Cinna autem in
Smyrna ‘huius tabis’ dixit nullo auctore.
26. For Derrida and Lyotard this confusion of the “we” of the norm with the “we” of
obligation is the founding political moment: it effaces difference in the name of identity.
See Benhabib 1994. This means that omnes homines . . . is its own civil war, its own one-word
world.
27. See the opening of Cicero’s De inventione. There, Cicero speaks of “mental
reasoning, strengths of the body, desire of the soul; intellect; and being superior to the
beasts” (ratio animi, vires corporis, cupiditas animi, 1.2; ingenium, 1.4; praestare bestiis, 1.6).
His introduction includes a history of human progress and mind, led forward (of course)
by eloquentia (1.2). Eloquentia itself is conceived as an art of war: “In fact, the man who so
arms himself with eloquence that he cannot fight against his country’s advantage but can
fight for that advantage, he I think will be both very useful for his own affairs and for
public affairs and will be a most patriotic citizen” (Inv. 1.2). That Sallust is engaged in a
“history of mind,” see Gunderson 2000.
28. Sallust’s “translation” here reflects the modern understanding of axiosis in
Thucydides 3.82.4. See above, esp. n. 7.
29. The relevant section, 3.83.4, begins as follows: “The cause of all these evils was the
lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the
violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with
the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on
the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests
which they pretended to cherish.” Translation from Dent 1910. I would translate more
literally: “both sides using fair-sounding words . . . caring for the common in word, they
created struggles.”
30. See further Batstone 1990: 192–94 and Sklenář 1998: 210–11.
31. For the different senses of libertas, see Raaflaub 2003: 51–53. It is one function of
Manlius’ letter, Cat. 33, to make clear both differences within Catiline’s camp and the
legitimate complaints that were addressed by the conspiracy.
32. See Ramsey 2007: 207: “the indefinite pronoun quisquam is employed because of
the implied negative contained in this sentence (‘surely no one’).”
33. Compare the cynicism of “for even at that time lavish generosity was unknown to
many; no one was thought to be generous with an ulterior purpose; all gifts were accepted
as signs of goodwill” (Jug. 103.6).
34. See Batstone 1988.
35. Sallust never uses virtus in the plural, although both Caesar and Cicero do. Here in
the synkrisis two men of ingens virtus are compared in terms of their mores or
“character(istics).” The relationship for Sallust between mores and virtus is not entirely
clear: on the one hand, the mores cannot be either vicious or a matter of indifference, since
they form the substance of a comparison that illustrates ingens virtus; on the other hand,
the mores cannot in themselves constitute virtus since this ingens virtus appears diversis
moribus “with diverse characteristics.” It seems clear from Cicero that mores can be virtutes:
Cicero enjoins Cato to temper his virtutes with a certain mediocritas, “moderation,” as his
grandfather did (Mur. 63). Sallust himself, describing early Rome, says that citizens
competed with citizens de virtute; then, he cites as an example: “in peace . . . when they
received an injury they preferred forgiveness over prosecution” (9.4). For a list of virtutes
and vitia that in Cicero’s eyes characterized the Catilinarian conflict, see Cic. Catil. 2.25.
Finally, when Sallust says that Cato competed “in virtue with those who worked hard and
actively” (54.6: cum strenuo virtute), Sallust seems himself to place the hard and active vigor
of the strenuus in the category of virtus (cf. 54.6: cum modesto pudore). But this only
complicates cognitive clarity because (1) surely Caesar has an obvious claim both to
strenuus and to virtus (see 54.4: his virtus is not questioned, it only needs an opportunity to
appear) and (2) Catiline dies performing the duties of “the vigorous soldier and the good
general” (60.4: strenui militis et boni imperatoris). Perhaps Sallust imagines that Cato
competes with men like Caesar (the strenui) but also with virtus (which would have the
effect of denying virtus to “hard work”—not very Roman).
36. See Suet. Jul. 19.1: “not even Cato prevented this bribery from coming about for
the sake of the republic.”
37. Here is Cicero on the virtue of Lucius Tarquinius: “Moreover, there was in that
man the height of charm, the greatest good will for every citizen in terms of resources, of
help, of defense, even of generosity” (Rep. 2.35: largiendi etiam benignitas). See also Cic.
Tusc. 1.69 where “crops are lavish with their harvest” (segetes largiri fruges).
38. See further Batstone 1988.
39. Cf. Cic. Att. 7.11.1: “And he says that he is doing all this for the sake of dignitas. But
where is dignitas except where there is honor?”
40. See Levene 2000 for a full discussion of the paradoxes of Sallust’s Catonian style
and the younger Cato’s murderous morality.
41. The phrase is impossible to translate: facinus may mean “deed” but often means
“crime, misdeed”; egregia rarely means “extraordinary” and typically means something
more like “egregious.”
42. Cf. Sal. Hist. 1.7, quoted below.
43. For a more complete discussion of Catiline’s speeches, see Batstone 2010.
44. See Raaflaub 2003: 56 and Mitchell 1979: 198–203.
45. This sentence is essentially a revision of Henderson 1987: 136, in which I have
substituted “history” for “poem” and “poetry.”
3
Rome’s First Civil War and the
Fragility of Republican Political
Culture
Harriet I. Flower
Civil war, tearing aside words, forms and institutions, gave rein to
individual passions and revealed the innermost workings of human
nature.
—Ronald Syme1
1. Introduction
The subjects of civil war and of the failure of a republican system of

government at Rome, so closely related in time and in effect, are complex,
while the scope of this essay is circumscribed. Each of these topics invites and
even requires detailed separate consideration as a phenomenon in its own
right, even as each is integral to our view of Roman history. Nevertheless, I
would like to take this opportunity to explore the specific interrelationship
between civil war and republican politics in Rome during the second and
first centuries bc. In other words, I am not going to address many details of
the military aspects of full-scale civil war but want rather to focus on the rela-
tionship of such armed conflict between citizens to Rome’s republican
political culture at the time of Rome’s first civil war.
It is notable that a republican form of government came to an end at
Rome without the direct intervention of a foreign enemy or even under
the influence of the more indirect ideological or financial support of out-
siders. The Roman experience contrasted with what had happened repeat-
edly in various Greek city-states, such as when Athens and Sparta gave
assistance to opposing factions on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian

War. Rather, an increasing lack of political agreement among Romans is evident
over several generations, but civil war itself seems to appear as an important marker
at times of momentous political change. While the general escalation of violence in
political life has often been a subject of discussion, actual episodes of civil war char-
acterize and articulate decisive moments of political transformation.2
My essay will begin by looking at the significance of civil war for a republican
city-state such as Rome’s and then at the question of when civil war first broke out
between Roman citizens. These considerations will lead to an examination of under
what circumstances republican government came to an end. That political end
point will then be related to the phenomenon of civil war, in a specifically Roman
context.
2. Civil War in a Republic
The starting point for this discussion, and for the significance of civil war in repub-
lican history as I am trying to reconstruct it, is the general hypothesis that civil war
could and often did have particular and much more serious structural implications
for a republic than for a different political system, such as a hereditary oligarchy or
a monarchy. In military terms the immediate effects of civil war may often have
been similarly brutal from one age to another, no matter the form of government,
but in political terms the picture looked rather different in the case of a republic.
Civil war called into question the very basis of republican political culture at Rome,
which had been built upon the settlement of disputes by legal means in a system of
jury courts, through mediation and political debate, and most especially with the
help of elaborate mechanisms and public rituals of voting. Orderly civic life was
characteristic of republican politics when it was dominated by the nobiles (Rome’s
elected political elite), who consistently represented themselves as coming to power
as a result of several generations of negotiation and compromise between patri-
cians and plebeians, a process of political evolution (and a historical time period)
commonly referred to as the “Conflict of the Orders.”3 By contrast, civil war in the
imperial period tended to replace one emperor (and his family) with another rather
than to raise any profound questions about the nature of politics and the viability
of the existing monarchical constitution.4 In this way, for example, Vespasian, the
eventual victor in the bitter civil strife of the year ad 69, presented himself as a new
and more worthy successor to Augustus rather than as a political revolutionary who
had come to challenge and to reform the nature of the Roman imperial system.5
The Romans had long taken pride in their republican type of government,
especially in comparison with the Hellenistic monarchies that they had defeated
rome’s first civil war 75
with relative ease during the second century bc. Republican Rome, with its senate,
assemblies of citizens, and law courts with juries, seemed a civil and a civilized
society, its political character helping to account for its military and imperial suc-
cesses, or so Polybius had argued in the second century bc.6 Its soldiers were also
landowners and voters, who were known for their loyalty to a traditional ideal of
politics as a shared enterprise. Indeed, the very term res publica denoted a form of
government defined by openness and common cause among citizens working
together as a political community rather than a regime characterized by the domi-
nation of a faction or by the autocracy of an individual ruling in his own, narrow
interest.7 Politics in Rome was, therefore, conceived of as a “public thing” for two
very practical reasons: first because political debate and voting took place in public
under the eyes of the citizens, and second because politics was concerned with
issues defined as being of common interest to the community. The Latin expression
res publica, therefore, implied a kind of social contract agreed upon and imple-
mented by a community of citizens with equal access to the law, citizens who both
inherited and shaped a recognizable set of shared values and aspirations.
Hence, any civil war between Roman citizens was bound to present a profound
crisis for a republic, which would seem to have failed in its most basic mission to
mediate strife between its members and to establish rules for the political game,
rules that in each previous generation had transcended both individual ambitions
and any single political issue of the day. In sum, civil war by its very nature demon-
strated that the republican system of government had ceased to function and that
the rules had been broken. At the same time, the reestablishment of law and order
through war or indeed by means of any kind of force between citizens was essen-
tially “unrepublican,” at least from the perspective of traditional Roman political
practices.
3. Rome’s First Civil War
With this theoretical background in mind, my essay will raise and discuss the fol-
lowing three interrelated questions. First, what was a civil war (in a Roman con-
text)? Second, what was the historical relationship of civil war to the final decay and
collapse of traditional republican politics in Rome? And third, in light of these
questions, how should we interpret civil war in republican Rome?
As every student of Roman history has been taught, there do not seem to have
been any civil wars in the so-called Middle Republic, the time when Rome con-
quered Italy and expanded her influence to become a Mediterranean power.
Meanwhile, “civil war” is not a term usually used by ancient sources or modern his-
torians to describe the various phases of the political struggles known as the
“Conflict of the Orders” in either the fifth or the fourth centuries bc.8 Even the
expulsion of the kingly family of the Tarquins, traditionally dated to the late sixth
century, is customarily depicted in terms of ridding Rome of a foreign tyrant. The
wars that followed, in which attempts were apparently made to restore the mon-
archy at Rome, are not usually called civil wars.9 It is significant, therefore, to note
that the Romans did not inherit a traditional set of narratives about civil war that
defined the history or identity of their republican system of government.
Consequently, civil war seems to emerge as a characteristic of a “late” phase of
the long and varied history of republicanism in Rome. But when did the Romans
first fight a civil war or at least admit to doing so? The answer to this question may
be difficult because it depends on a more or less formal definition of “civil war.” I
will now offer an interpretation based on a definition that requires full-scale battles
between rival Roman armies led by generals rather than more random political vio-
lence, such as political assassinations or the activities of informal armed (paramili-
tary) groups, whether we want to call these “gangs” or “militias” or by some other
name. Other schemes are certainly possible, especially if civil strife is defined more
broadly and all types of violence are considered a breach of civic life. In another
context, it would be worth engaging in a finer and more detailed analysis of the
corrosive political effects of any violence, particularly in an urban environment in
which weapons had traditionally been banned and a regular police force had appar-
ently not been required.10
Traditionally, the violent death of Tiberius Gracchus and of his followers in
133 bc has been described as a watershed, both by Romans such as Cicero and
in modern historical discussions.11 Yet Cicero himself also tells us that divisions in
Roman society existed before Tiberius’ death and that these differences between
citizens were essentially political rather than military (Rep. 1.31). Tiberius Gracchus
was killed without the use of weapons or troops on the authority of a private citizen,
albeit one who held the high religious office of pontifex maximus. In fact, the reli-
gious overtones of the episode set it apart from anything that came later. Jerzy
Linderski has put forward a persuasive argument that identifies the intervention of
the pontifex maximus as a form a consecratio, an archaic type of religious curse that
was designed to rid the community of a would-be tyrant.12 In other words, however
significant and divisive this violence was, it is neither accurate nor helpful to
describe it as a “civil war” in a formal sense.
By contrast, the events of 121 bc, when Tiberius’ brother Gaius Gracchus, his
ally Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, and their supporters were killed, look much more like
a real civil war, inasmuch as there was fighting in the streets and the deployment of
troops by the consul Lucius Opimius, who was acting as Rome’s elected com-
mander-in-chief.13 This is the first occasion on which Roman citizens were treated
as enemies by their own government, even if they were not openly called hostes.
Nevertheless, a price was put on their heads and was apparently paid after their
deaths. On the other hand, Opimius relied heavily on foreign troops from Crete
rather than on regular Roman soldiers, who normally were not allowed to enter the
city under arms (Plu. CG 16). It is also notable that his enemies were private citi-
zens, not fellow magistrates in office. His appeal at the end of the year to the goddess
Concord, for whom he built a large new temple near the senate house, suggests a
public acknowledgement of civil strife as well as the pious hope for a new start in
political life.14 Even so, we need not necessarily term this violent confrontation a
“civil war.”
Very similar arguments appear to apply to the third well-known outbreak
of violence in Rome at the end of the second century, which took place in the year
100 bc and ended with the deaths of Saturninus and his associates at the hands of a
lynch mob.15 Armed militias were now apparently pervasive in Rome, and political
assassination was used as just one tool to control the outcome of elections to high
office. Saturninus’ and Glaucia’s attempts to put a group of political associates in
office over several years and to force through a series of reforms suggest the delib-
erate undermining of the basic principles of republican government. Both cur-
rently enlisted soldiers and veterans who had served under Marius could certainly
be found taking some role in the political life of the city, even in trying to influence
the outcome of voting assemblies. Yet episodes of anarchy, informal violence, and
political disarray did not in themselves constitute an actual state of what we would
call “civil war.” As before, in 133 and again in 121, the events of 100 led to the discred-
iting of political leaders on both sides of the controversial issues that were under
debate and of the tactics that those same leaders had employed to try to effect
reform or to restore order. Moreover, the elimination from politics, whether sooner
or later, of those who had prevailed on each occasion, namely Scipio Nasica (133),
Opimius (121), and even the national hero Gaius Marius (100), showed that vio-
lence had definitely not become an accepted or effective means to achieve a political
settlement in Rome.
According to the interpretation that I am suggesting, therefore, the first real
civil war at Rome did not take place in the second century bc but happened later
and involved somewhat different issues in a changed political climate. It may be
natural to see the earlier events as precursors of the ultimate clash of Roman armies,
but a careful analysis inevitably also brings out the distinctions between these var-
ious moments of political crisis over more than a generation. Seen in this light, the
decisive military action that caused a civil war happened in 88 bc with Sulla’s first
march on Rome.16 Sulla the consul had already been assigned the command against
Mithridates VI of Pontus by the senate in the usual way when the tribune Publius
Sulpicius Rufus put forward a bill to distribute the new Italian citizens throughout
the thirty-five existing voting tribes. Sulpicius met fierce opposition and turned to
Marius for political help. In return Marius demanded to be given the command
against Mithridates. When Sulla was removed from his command by a vote of the
assembly, he convinced his soldiers to march on Rome rather than to let Marius
take over as commander in the eastern campaign.
This was the first time that Roman soldiers took up arms and followed a gen-
eral in an outright attack on other Roman magistrates in office and on their home
city, which they captured by force. Sulla then drew the logical conclusion from his
actions when he formally declared his principal political opponents to be hostes
(enemies of the state) who could be killed with impunity. In doing so he explicitly
equated himself with the state and his political opponents with foreign enemies. No
doubt Sulla would have argued (and perhaps did so at length in his extensive
Memoirs) that a republican government was not fully functional at the time of his
violent intervention and that he was a duly elected consul in office acting to save the
state. Sulla’s initiative appears as decisive as it was devastating, whatever opinion
one may have of the motives for or defensibility of his choice.
The events that followed in the 80s were all in some way caused by Sulla’s
decision to turn to extreme violence and open war, a strategy he was to pursue
consistently for the rest of his political career. Soon after Sulla had left for Greece
to fight Mithridates in 87 bc, his political opponent Cinna imitated him in per-
suading an army to march on Rome.17 The occupation of the city over several
years by his political rivals, and his own position as an outlaw, came to a logical
conclusion when Sulla invaded Italy in 83 bc and went on to take Rome by force
a second time. The bloody pitched battle produced loss of life so extreme that
both sides initially assumed they had been defeated. Both sides in the civil
conflict since 88 treated each other as enemies and openly called each other by
that name. Both sides made use of armies to fight full-scale battles and executed
their rivals without a trial. The full extent of this civil war was finally revealed in
Sulla’s proscriptions, which not only imposed death and loss of property on his
opponents but also barred their relatives or descendants from a future role in
Roman politics.18 This civil war, or series of civil wars, resulted in a clear victory
in the city for Sulla and his associates at the expense of their rivals. In this way
also, the decisive quality of a formal civil war can be recognized in the events of
the 80s bc.
If the years from 88 to 81 bc were overshadowed by civil war, then the
background to the conflict is provided by the Social War that immediately preceded
these events.19 Another way to look at these years is to say that the Social War was
itself a type of civil war that did not reach directly into internal politics at Rome
until Sulla’s march on the city in 88. The armed conflict between Rome and her
Italian allies brought into question the whole basis of Roman power outside the
city, inasmuch as the wider Mediterranean empire had been acquired and was
maintained through the use of Italian manpower. As a result, Italians overseas were
increasingly identified with and protected by the Roman state. It was precisely the
success of this longstanding collaboration between Romans and Italians, in military
and economic areas, that now provoked the Italians to demand more at home,
whether they couched their wishes in terms of demands for Roman citizenship or
for a new, unified Italy not dominated by Rome.
In this sense the whole decade from 91 (when the Social War broke out) to 81
can be portrayed as one of extraordinary civil war, a single devastating conflict
brought on by Rome’s inability to maintain her position as leader in Italy at the
same time as her influence throughout the Mediterranean world.20 It is essential to
note that during these years republican government was never fully functional in a
traditional sense.21 The rhetoric of politics as usual and the continued use of the
traditional names for the political offices hardly served to hide the lawlessness and
utter disregard for accepted political norms. Some have argued that Lucius Cornelius
Cinna was a true republican, but his continual holding of the consulship from his
violent coup of 87 to his death at the hands of his soldiers in 84 belies that label.22
His legacy is also reflected in the sole consulship and dictatorial methods of his
close ally Gnaeus Papirius Carbo after his death. It is suggestive that Cinna’s
son-in-law, the popularis politician Julius Caesar, did not choose to rehabilitate his
father-in-law’s memory in the 60s, when Caesar was recalling Marius and had
restored his trophies and statues in the city (Plu. Caes. 5–6).
Similarly, Sulla’s dictatorship, however much it made use of republican ideas,
was unprecedented and by its very existence asserted that a republican government
needed to be reestablished in Rome. Sulla’s official title seems to have been dictator
rei publicae constituendae, “dictator charged with the organizing of the republic.” In
other words, the 80s was a decade that saw an extreme military emergency in Italy
(caused by the revolt of so many Italians) and a hard-won series of battles lead to
the rapid collapse of republican government in the city and the establishment of a
series of factional oligarchies that ended in the military dictatorship of one man,
Lucius Cornelius Sulla. My argument is that we should take this violent break in
Roman political life much more seriously than most previous discussions have.23 It
is also significant to note the continued violent opposition to Sulla’s proposed
political solution, first in the revolt of the patrician consul Marcus Aemilius Lepidus
in 78 and then in the much longer resistance led by Quintus Sertorius in Spain for
almost a decade throughout the 70s.24 In other words, Sulla’s violent takeover of the
city of Rome and the execution of his enemies there did not lead to a political solu-
tion acceptable to all.
But if we recognize the decisive break created in Italy by the Social War and
at Rome by the immediate political consequences of that war in the year 88 bc,
what difference does that make for our understanding of Roman politics? Did
this first civil war matter? What effects did it have on the Romans as a political
community? I would now like to turn to some political implications of my reading
of the 80s bc.
4. The End of Republican Government
My main conclusion will be presented first and will then be supported with various
considerations and observations. The traditional republican government of the
nobiles, whose political culture had taken its decisive shape in the late fourth century
bc, and which had been increasingly challenged since the violent events of 133, came
to a decisive and bloody end in the early 80s, specifically with the marches on Rome
by Sulla and then by Cinna. My interpretation of the 80s as a political watershed is
based on two fundamental observations. First, that the rupture caused by civil war
in the city’s political life and social fabric was stark. Second, that the republic set up
by Sulla through his legislation of 81 was significantly different in many fundamental
ways from what had come before in Roman history.
In other words, taking the phenomenon of civil war seriously involves a
recasting of our picture of how republican politics developed and how we should
divide it into historical periods. Periodization is always a product of hindsight.
Contemporaries cannot judge how later historians will divide eras and periods. Yet
it is hard to study the past, and even harder to teach about it, without a clear frame-
work of historical periods to refer to. The end of the Republic has been placed at
various moments but not usually much earlier than the year 60 bc, when Asinius
Pollio chose to start his historical narrative.25 Many historians have favored Caesar’s
crossing of the Rubicon in 49, which is obviously another big civil war moment.
Similarly, the emergence of the triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus in 43
was marked by bloody civil war as well as by renewed proscriptions. Those who still
want a Republic lasting until the battle of Actium in 31 are also choosing a civil war
and its conclusion as the end of an era. Josiah Osgood (2006) has recently made a
detailed and persuasive argument for the “triumviral period” as a separate histor-
ical era in its own right; his reading makes a great deal of sense and also has inter-
esting implications for the periodization of other times in Roman history. Is it,
therefore, simply a question of picking one’s favorite civil war to mark the end of
republican politics?
Despite the fact that we have much richer sources for the 40s and that many
contemporary Romans, such as Sallust, Cicero, and even Caesar himself, spoke of
that time as being the end of an era, we should not allow a fascination with the 40s
to distract us from the crucial events of the 80s, events that shaped the youthful
experiences of Pompey and Caesar. The loss of most contemporary writings,
including such influential works as the Memoirs of Sulla or the contemporary his-
tory of Sisenna, has been matched by the reticence of our surviving sources, notably
Cicero, to discuss in any real detail events that they themselves witnessed or were
even a part of. However, enough information does survive to establish certain basic
facts about the 80s. A brutal and unprecedented civil war destroyed the last vestiges
of the existing republican system of government and deprived Rome of many of
her most experienced leaders. After a hiatus in which politics operated in a nar-
rowly oligarchical way under Cinna, Sulla set up a military dictatorship apparently
for the specific and stated purpose of writing and implementing a new
constitution.
The new set of political rules, which Sulla imposed by force and without debate,
looked different in many fundamental ways from what had come before.26 This
essay is not the appropriate venue for a discussion of the full details of Sulla’s legis-
lation, but the main outlines are in any case clear and well known. Sulla’s senate was
far larger; he gave magistrates different functions; and above all he created a system
of law courts to police Roman society in a new and much more organized way. The
rule of law and detailed regulations, for example about the limits on Roman com-
manders in the field, made political debate much less important, or at least so Sulla
apparently hoped. Just because the names of many offices were the same does not
mean that this was a “restoration” of anything that had come before.
The instability and essentially short-lived nature of Sulla’s solution to the crisis
of the 80s is much easier to understand and to explain if we recognize how novel his
legislation was. If Sulla had indeed tried to restore the political system as it had
existed in the later second century, his dictatorship surely would have produced a
very different result. In fact, his reforms served as his own personal reaction to the
political unrest and partisan debate that he had experienced throughout his life-
time. He asserted that a new system was called for and that he would be the lawgiver
to put it in place. His gilded equestrian statue next to the new rostra and senate
house he had built presented his role as leader in a concrete form in front of his
fellow citizens in the Forum.27 His statue, in its new, highly charged political setting,
stayed in place at least until the end of the 40s and probably beyond.
But if a traditional republic came to an end in 88 bc, what should we call the
decades that followed? My suggestion is that the decisive break represented by
events in the 80s should encourage us to think in terms of several republics rather
than simply of one that somehow endured repeated civil wars even as it became
increasingly obsolete and fossilized.28 In practice, the republic of the second century
could not survive the Italian crisis, first stirred up by the Gracchan land distributions,
that led to an especially brutal and deadly type of civil war with the Italians at the
end of the year 91. Yet, military victory and political compromise in Italy did not
create any kind of political relief at home, especially when combined with the threat
posed by Mithridates VI of Pontus, who chose this moment to attack Rome’s empire
in the East.
By contrast, the rapid decision to extend the citizenship to any Italians who
would join the Roman side in the Social War proved to be the ultimate cause for the
actions in 88 bc of the tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus, who tried to distribute all
the new Italian voters into the thirty-five existing voting tribes. What Rome faced
then was truly a political crisis that took the form of a disagreement over who
should have the vote and how those votes should be cast in the traditional voting
assemblies (which passed legislation, elected magistrates, and heard some legal
cases). The final result, when Italian voters were eventually enrolled on an equal
basis, was a political revolution for a city-state like Rome.
In 1974 Erich Gruen wrote: “Civil War caused the fall of the Republic, not vice
versa.”29 He was, of course, thinking of events in the 40s bc rather than in the 80s.
Nevertheless, his characteristically bold line of argument provides an opportunity
for reflection on a variety of events at different periods in Roman history. The
reconstruction I describe here, which posits a fall of a republic in 88 bc, makes it
seem more likely that political problems indeed caused the outbreak of civil war,
which in turn marked a caesura in the political life of the community. Civil war was
so important because it represented the point of no return for all the political
players. When Sulla the consul turned to open warfare, and led an army of Roman
soldiers against their own capital city, he openly asserted that the rules of repub-
lican politics were no longer in operation. On the other hand, he did this because
he had been deposed by a tribune of the plebs and replaced as commander of the
war against Mithridates, in contravention of established custom, since the senate
traditionally assigned commands and had already allotted him this war. In other
words, it is not simply a question of who broke a rule first in 88, but of recognizing
that no one was any longer abiding by traditional rules. The old form of a republic
was now gone, and there is no extant ancient evidence that anyone spoke about
restoring it in the decade that followed Sulla’s first march on Rome.
5. Conclusions
I want to turn now to some conclusions, in the hope that I can restate my position
and sketch a variety of implications more clearly. Whether we want to call it a cause
or an effect, civil war in republican Rome often marked the decisive turning point
in a political revolution, as the old order crumbled. Meanwhile, the former political
system was not necessarily replaced immediately by a new one: this is a vital histor-
ical reality that can easily become obscured by simplistic chronological schemes.
Not surprisingly, struggles and debates were integral to the creation of a new
political order after or during a period of civil unrest and episodes of open war bet-
ween citizens. A number of principal observations seem to follow from this appre-
ciation of the importance of civil war for Roman political culture. I will outline
these below and then return at the end to the subject of civil war. Above all, the pre-
sent analysis stresses the seriousness of the outbreak of civil war as well as its dire
and long lasting effects.30
The traditional republican culture of what is often termed the “Middle
Republic” was dynamic but fragile. It could not withstand the civil discords that
resulted from the political murders of the Gracchi and, more particularly, from the
subsequent rise to unparalleled prominence of Gaius Marius, who was elected to
the consulship seven times. Nor could the traditional office-holding elites really
maintain control of the empire they had acquired by the end of the second century.
But above all, this traditional type of republic did not survive the first outbreak of
full-scale civil war in Rome in 88 bc.
The received and largely standard picture of a single Republic (c. 509–c. 49 bc),
caught in a position of stalemate soon after 133 bc but still able to continue func-
tioning, at least on some level, for a couple of generations, is misleading. Analysis in
terms of politics reveals a different picture. Civil war was more devastating; changes
came more quickly. This was not a “crisis without an alternative” that resulted from
either a stalemate in political reform or a failure of political vision and will.31
Rather, Sulla proposed and imposed a constitution that was very different from
any traditional, received version of what had come before. His “New Republic” was
a real alternative that had been thought out carefully and that contained an internal
logic of its own. At the same time, it no doubt represented the influence of many
others, notably Livius Drusus, the last man to attempt peaceful legislative reform
immediately before the Social War. It was this republic of Sulla, not a more tradi-
tional one, that proved so unstable in the 70s bc and beyond, as it slowly disinte-
grated, even as no second lawgiver emerged to propose a systematic and workable
revision of Sulla’s system of government.
Whether we think this Sullan republic ended in the year 60, as Asinius Pollio
may have suggested, or perhaps even earlier (e.g., with the reforms of Pompey and
Crassus in 70 bc), the anarchic and violent politics of the 50s should not be seen as
“republican,” let alone as reflective of any earlier political culture. The civil war of
49 did not, therefore, end a republic, for there was none left in Rome at the time.
Rather the war that pitted Caesar against Pompey and his senatorial allies was a
direct consequence of the failure of Sulla’s political alternative and of a period of
increasing unrest that had followed upon the gradual disintegration of Sulla’s New
Republic throughout the 70s and 60s bc.
It is time now to return to the topic of civil war, which is the central concern of
this volume. The analysis offered here is based primarily on politics and has argued
that civil war at Rome tended to result from political breakdown rather than being
its cause. Such would certainly seem to have been the case both in 88 bc and again
in 83–82 bc. Consequently, it was the violence of Rome’s civil wars from 91 to 81,
fought throughout Italy and also in other parts of the empire, that made a return to
a previous republican culture effectively impossible. The ranks of experienced pol-
iticians had been decimated by a devastating cycle of revenge, republican politics
had been suspended for nearly a decade, and extreme violence had allowed a dic-
tator to come to power who imposed a new constitution. This new political order
was rapidly reinforced by massive transfers both of property and of social influence
to Sulla’s veterans and political allies. Without in itself providing the original
impetus for political change in Rome, civil war went on to produce a new political
landscape and a definitive break in political culture as its most logical outcomes. It
is surely no coincidence that the generation of Pompey and Caesar that witnessed
these events as young men went on to enact its own version of political stalemate
followed by full-scale civil war. In other words, the effects of civil war in a Roman
republican context were so stark that in each case, starting most notably with the
first civil wars of the 80s bc, a new political order ensued. Sulla established a new
republic, Caesar set up a dictatorship for as long as he was alive, and Octavian
founded the principate as a result of his victory over Antony at Actium.
notes
My thanks to the organizers of the conference at Amherst in 2007: Brian Breed,
Cynthia Damon, and Andreola Rossi; to the panel respondent Geoffrey Sumi; to all those
who participated in the discussions; and to Michael Flower. I have benefited also from the
comments of the anonymous readers for the press.
1. Writing in his classic treatment entitled The Roman revolution (1939: 249), Syme is
speaking of Sallust’s Histories. Sallust’s text was written in the early 30s bc, soon after the
civil wars of the late 40s that led to the establishment of the Triumvirate (Octavian, Antony,
and Lepidus), but it described events in the 70s immediately after Sulla.
2. Lintott 1999b (first published in 1968) remains the classic treatment. In fact, any use
of violence against or among citizens can be seen as a challenge to a republican political
culture: to minimize the effects of such violence is to miss the whole point.
3. See Hölkeskamp 1987, 2004a, and 2004b; Flaig 2003.
4. Flaig 1992 examines challenges to the emperors. For the debate in the senate about
the possible restoration of a republic after the murder of Caligula, see Flower 2006: 152–54.
5. Levick 1999 gives the best overview of Vespasian and his reign.
6. Polybius’ sixth book is the classic ancient text about the Roman republican
constitution before the time of Cicero.
7. For res publica, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982) definitions in the following
order: “1. Activities affecting the whole people, affairs of state, an item of public
business . . . 2. The welfare of the state, the public good, the national interest, the resources
of the state . . . 3. The body politic or a constitution . . . 4. A free state in which all citizens
participate.” Tacitus uses the term to refer specifically to the pre-imperial state (Hist. 1.50.3;
Ann. 1.3.7 and 1.7.3).
8. For discussion, see esp. Raaflaub 2005, Forsythe 2005, and Smith 2006b.
9. For events after the expulsion of the Tarquins, see D.H. 5.31–35; Plin. Nat. 34.139;
Tac. Hist. 3.72 with Cornell 1995: 216–18.
10. Nippel 1995 provides the most accessible and comprehensive introduction to
issues of public order and police in republican Rome.
11. Badian 1972 remains the best overall discussion.
12. Linderski 2002 is powerful and persuasive. Wiseman 2009: 177–87 does not accept
Linderski’s reading of Nasica’s actions in terms of a consecratio.
13. Flower 2006: 69–81 provides a more detailed discussion.
14. See Ferroni in LTUR 1993 and Clark 2007: 171–76. There is no archaeological
evidence for an earlier Temple of Concord, although the area had been associated with this
cult for many years.
15. Badian 1984 is essential.
16. Volkmann 1958 gives a detailed discussion.
17. Lovano 2002 summarizes and discusses all the available evidence.
18. See Hinard 1984 and 1985 for the proscriptions. Vedaldi Iasbez 1981 investigates the
known descendents of Sulla’s victims.
19. For the Social War, see conveniently Gabba 1976 and 1994 with Lomas 2004. For
Sulla and the Italian élites, see Santangelo 2007.
20. As Syme (1964: 5) wrote, “In 91 the peoples of the Abruzzi seceded and created a
federal ‘Italia,’ with rebellion all the way from Picenum down to Samnium and Lucania.
Hence a murderous war, heralding a whole decade of chaos, for civil strife supervened on
the Bellum Italicum.”
21. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic (MRR) gives details and references for the
years 91–81 bc.
22. Badian 1964 provides a rather flattering picture of Cinna.
23. Mackay 2004: 130: “As the self-appointed guardian of the senate, Sulla now sought
to reform the constitution in order to restore the oligarchy’s political control.”
24. For Lepidus, see Christ 2002: 141–42. For Sertorius, see Spann 1987 and Konrad
1994.
25. Gaius Asinius Pollio (76 bc–ad 4), who had been a partisan of Caesar and then of
Antony, maintained a position of political independence under Augustus and wrote an
influential history, which started in 60 bc. See esp. Morgan 2000 for an incisive discussion
and a full bibliography.
26. For Sulla, see Hantos 1988 and Hurlet 1993.
27. For Sulla’s statue, see Sehlmeyer 1999: 204–9, Coarelli and Papi in LTUR 1999, and
coin no. 381, of 80 bc, in Crawford 1974. For Sulla’s public image and self-presentation, see
Thein 2002.
28. See Flower 2010 for a more detailed discussion of periodization and a new
proposal for dividing pre-imperial Rome into several republics.
29. Gruen 1974 has been widely read and influential.

30. In light of the legacies of the English and American experiences with civil war, it
seems especially surprising that scholars from English-speaking backgrounds should not
have offered a more nuanced appreciation of the lasting bitterness that can be caused by
civil war, especially when accompanied by a large loss of life.
31. Meier 1980b (first published in 1966) is the classic treatment that argues for the
crisis without an alternative and is reinforced by Hölkeskamp 2004a.
4
Civil War? What Civil War?:
Usurpers in the Historia Augusta
Cam Grey
1. Introduction
The third century ce witnessed a progression of military adventurers seiz-

ing and briefly holding imperial power, impelled and expelled by the
armies at whose heads they marched. However, the task of determining
the course of events in the period between the last gasp of the Severan
dynasty in the 230s ce and the reestablishment of (relatively) effective
central control under the Tetrarchy of Diocletian in the 280s ce is notori-
ously difficult. Distances in time and space from the events they describe,
the grinding of religious axes, and the influence of more contemporary
concerns render the literary sources intractable at best, willfully mis-
leading at worst, and in any event they are perilously thin on the ground.
Consequently, the aim of this essay is not to explicate what actually hap-
pened in the middle of the third century. Rather, it is to examine the
reportage in the text commonly known as the Historia Augusta (HA)—
perhaps our most intractable, most willfully misleading source1—of the
reign of the emperor Gallienus, a period of fifteen years between 253 and
268 during which some twenty or more usurpers, pretenders, and rebels
claimed or held imperial power. I do this through a comparison of the
author’s treatment of certain key themes in the life of Gallienus himself,
contained in the biography entitled the Lives of the Gallieni (VG), and in
the series of biographies called The thirty tyrants (TT).
This essay will focus on two interconnected sets of problems as they
emerge from these texts. First, I engage with the techniques the author
uses in his account of civil conflict in the third century, noting in particular the
role he ascribes to the military in initiating and perpetuating that conflict. I empha-
size the subtlety with which he exposes the problematic and contingent nature of
the soldiers’ Romanitas in the period and explore some implications of this repre-
sentation for our author’s portrayal of the nature of the Roman state. I note also
that the fragmentation and disunity of the state during the reign of Gallienus
problematizes the project of depicting this period as one of civil war. While our
author repeatedly has recourse in his writing to the tropes and images of civil war,
the fit between these tropes and the realities of a state characterized by multiple
claimants to the purple coexisting in a variety of competitive and collegial rela-
tions is imperfect at best.
Second, I suggest that the author uses the period as a tool for exploring the
ways in which an emperor might claim, retain, or lose legitimacy and power. In
particular, I emphasize the tension that he exploits between a supposedly legitimate
emperor whose behavior makes him unworthy of holding the imperium and a series
of apparently illegitimate usurpers whose actions are those of a legitimate ruler.
These themes infuse the Historia Augusta as a whole and are of particular relevance
for the author’s own time—probably toward the very end of the fourth century ce.
I argue that the consistency with which these themes are presented reveals a literary
artist in full control of his material—and, indeed, that it is in these two texts in
particular that his skills reach their apogee. And I offer a series of brief case studies
that illuminate the scope of our author’s project and the possible resonances it
might have had with the events of the reign of Theodosius I, himself a usurping
emperor. Given the fog of confusion that surrounds both the period and the text,
however, I begin with a brief discussion of the events of the middle of the third
century, so far as they can be reconstructed, followed by some comments upon the
aims and literary program of the author of the Historia Augusta.
2. The “Third-Century Crisis”
The half century between the Severans and the Tetrarchy may best be described as
an “Age of Ambition” analogous to the last decades of the Roman Republic.2 During
this period, control of the state was wrested from the grasp of the established ruling
classes by a new type of ruler, the soldier-emperor. The emergence of the soldier-
emperor is eloquent testimony to the military exigencies of the period, as Rome was
beset by a resurgent Persian empire under the Sassanian dynasty as well as by a
succession of attacks and raids by barbarian tribes on the northern and north-
western boundaries. The reigns of these individuals reveal also a harsh truth of
government first recognized by Tacitus—that emperors could be made elsewhere
usurpers in the historia augusta 89
than at Rome (Hist. 1.4.2). The emperors of the period resided in the empire’s erst-
while capital only infrequently, if at all, and as a consequence the Roman senate,
which convened there, was gradually marginalized as a source of power and legiti-
macy. New emperors were characteristically created on the battlefield on the fron-
tiers of the empire, acclaimed by their victorious troops. While a number of these
new emperors did travel to Rome to seek the confirmation of the senate, the journey
was in many ways a formality or of secondary importance to the real business of
ruling the empire—namely, protecting the frontiers, providing one’s army with any
and all of the booty, pay, and gifts it demanded, and ensuring that any rival was
swiftly put down.
In his account of the emperor Severus’ dying words to his sons, Cassius Dio
(77.15.2) offers a presage of the stark realities of power during the third century and
beyond: “Do not disagree with each other, enrich the soldiers, despise everyone
else.” Dio highlights three phenomena of particular importance for our current
project. First, he emphasizes in no uncertain terms the fundamental source of an
emperor’s legitimacy in the period—namely, the army. For an author who was him-
self a senator at Rome, and who had felt the frisson of terror that accompanied the
experience of observing an angry emperor, this was an unpalatable truth (77.8.2–5).
Second, Dio’s reportage of the events following the death of Severus reveals the
potential danger to the res publica of a son or sons succeeding a father. Severus was
no angel in Dio’s view, but there can be no doubt that his son Caracalla was worse.
Third, Severus’ decision to leave the empire to his two sons, and the resulting inter-
necine squabbling that it engendered, highlight a reality that was to become increas-
ingly apparent in the ensuing centuries: the empire could no longer effectively be
ruled by one man, but collegial rule was fraught with difficulty. Dio could not have
predicted how apt his scene would prove to be, for as we shall see, these themes
infuse the Lives of the Gallieni and The thirty tyrants.3
3. The Historia Augusta: Sources, Authorship, Literary Aims
The Historia Augusta is among our few narrative sources for the history of the sec-
ond and third centuries. The text purports to be a collection of biographies of
emperors, Caesars, and usurpers of the years 117–284 ce, written by several separate
authors, and later gathered together into a single collection. Until the late nineteenth
century, scholars accepted the explicit claims of this text and assumed that, in the
main, it constituted a reliable source for the emperors of the period. However, this
consensus was radically overturned in 1889 by Hermann Dessau, who suggested
that the Historia Augusta was, in fact, the work of one man, not six, and that this
man was probably writing in the late fourth century. Over a century later, Dessau’s
hypothesis continues to spawn controversy, but there is some general consensus

that one man was responsible for the entire work as well as some degree of comfort
with a late-fourth-century date.4 For our current purposes, two implications of this
broad consensus follow.
First, while scholars continue to haggle over the precise details, and complete
agreement is unlikely ever to be reached, the currently accepted dating of the text
places our author in the period around the death of Theodosius I and the more-or-
less permanent division of the empire into eastern and western halves, ruled in the
first instance by his sons, Honorius and Arcadius.5 Theodosius himself had formed
part of a college before emerging as sole emperor, as had most of the emperors of
the fourth century at one time or another. Anxiety over sons succeeding their
fathers and the phenomenon of collegial rule recur throughout the Historia Augusta.
The first theme infuses our author’s account of the rule of Gallienus, who is repeat-
edly compared to his father and found wanting in the comparison.6 The theme of
collegial rule is equally fundamental to our author’s purpose. He begins the collec-
tion with the life of Hadrian. It has recently been suggested that, by this decision, he
identifies Hadrian as the originator of the system of shared rulership that had
become by his own day an intensely problematic but ultimately necessary reality
and makes an explicit comparison between Hadrian and Suetonius’ Julius Caesar,
the progenitor of imperial rule but not an emperor himself.7
Second, acknowledging that a single author is responsible for the entire work
allows us to explore his manipulation of themes throughout the various biogra-
phies. Again, a number of these are established in the life of Hadrian—an emperor’s
acquisition and loss of legitimacy; the roles of senate and army in confirming and
maintaining that legitimacy; the relationship between the emperor and the res pu-
blica.8 These themes receive particular attention in The thirty tyrants, a text identi-
fied by Ronald Syme as the key to understanding the entire Historia Augusta.9 Not
only does the author accord vitae to princes, usurpers, and pretenders as well as to
recognized emperors, giving an indication of the broad brush with which he intends
to treat his themes, he also sets up a series of complex relationships between these
individuals, the res publica, the senate, and the army. As we shall see, it is upon these
sets of relationships that a figure’s legitimacy—in both the eyes of his contempo-
raries and the opinion of our author—ultimately rests.
In particular, collegiality is crucial to effective imperial rule. Simply to claim or
to hold imperial power, or to have the approval of army or senate, is not sufficient
in our author’s view. Ultimately, an individual must be prepared to share that power
if he is to retain it and maintain his legitimacy. However, while, broadly speaking,
our author seems to approve of shared rulership, he exhibits also a keen awareness
of the problems that the phenomenon might create, for it produced polyphonous
claims to the loyalty of the soldiers and was a potential source of tension or friction
between the parties involved. Collegiality also starkly highlighted discrepancies bet-
ween the needs of the army, the senate, and the emperor—and it is only rarely that
an individual, let alone a college, is presented as ruling with universal consent.
These themes of contingent collegiality, contested legitimacy, and the shifting alle-
giances of the military constitute the fundamental components of our author’s
account of a period that, to all intents and purposes, was one of almost continuous
civil war, and I explore them in the following section. But it is worth reflecting
briefly upon whether he does indeed consider the series of conflicts he presents to
be civil in nature and focusing attention on his representation of the soldiers, who
were most intimately involved in the various battles that characterized the unhappy
reign of Gallienus.
4. Writing Civil War in the Historia Augusta: Citizens, Soldiers,

and Romanitas
As we shall see, in his account of the period between the accession of Gallienus in
253 and his defeat by the usurping emperor Claudius in 268, our author focuses
particular attention on the actions and attributes of the various generals, emperors,
and would-be emperors whose struggles for power so dominated the period.10
However, lurking behind these individuals is the mass of the soldiery, who function
as both agents and architects of the ambitions of the few.11 In our author’s treatment,
these men are alternately fickle and constant, moral and immoral.12 They refuse to
acknowledge Gallienus, regarding him as a morally worthless emperor, but grow
tired of the figures they attempt to install in his place when those individuals seek
to instill discipline and morals into the army camps (TT 3.3, 5.1–4, 23.2–4, 31.12).
The clearest expression of our author’s attitude toward the military and the role of
soldiers in initiating or perpetuating the civil conflict of the third century may be
found in a comment about events surrounding the death of the emperor Probus
c. 282 ce. Our author reports that Probus’ death at the hands of soldiers could be
attributed in part to a remark he made to the effect that soon there would be no
need for soldiers. He goes on to offer the following encomium for the slain emperor
(Life of Probus 23.2–5):
What great bliss would then have shone forth, if under his rule there had
ceased to be soldiers! No rations would now be furnished by any
provincial, no pay for the troops taken out of the public largesses, the
commonwealth (res publica) of Rome would keep its treasures forever, no
payments would be made by the prince, no tax required of the holder of
land; it was in very truth a golden age that he promised. (3) There would
be no camps, nowhere should we have to hear the blast of the trumpet,

nowhere fashion arms. That throng of fighting-men, which now harries
the commonwealth with civil wars (qui nunc bellis civilibus rem publicam
vexat), would be at the plough, would be busy with study, or learning the
arts, or sailing the seas. Add to this, too, that none would be slain in war.
(4) O ye gracious gods, what mighty offence in your eyes has the Roman
commonwealth committed, that ye should have taken from it so noble a
prince? (5) Now away with those who make ready soldiers for civil strife
(qui ad civilia bella milites parant), who arm the hands of brothers to slay
their brothers, who call on sons to wound their fathers, and who deny to
Probus the divinity which our emperors have wisely deemed should be
immortalised by likenesses, honoured by temples, and celebrated by
spectacles in the circus!13
We observe here a series of relatively conventional tropes, although in each case our
author tweaks or manipulates the trope to his own purpose. In the first instance, he
offers a fairly standard presentation of the heavy financial burden that payments to
the military imposed upon the civilian population in the late empire: heavy exac-
tions in kind, the stripping of the imperial treasury, and the crushing weight of tax-
ation are commonplaces in the literature of the period. Our author’s particular
interest here is the economic robustness of the res publica. He connects that robust-
ness explicitly with the state’s political health, describing the soldier-less era that
Probus promised as “in very truth a golden age” (aureum profecto saeculum). That is,
the economic wastefulness that payments to the soldiers represent has a deleterious
effect upon the political integrity of the Roman res publica. However, this interest in
reducing waste does not extend to marshaling human resources: the impact of a
reduction in warfare upon the availability of manpower for the state is presented
here only as an afterthought. We witness also a definition of civil conflict that accords
well with standard historiographical representations of the phenomenon: brother
fights with brother, son with father. Expected, too, is the denunciation of the shadowy
figures who ready the soldiers for civil war (by which, we may surmise, he means
usurping generals).14 But we also observe certain novelties in our author’s presenta-
tion. In the repeated use of the plural bella civilia, he presents civil conflict as a repet-
itive, constant phenomenon in the period. Further, he emphasizes the extent to
which the soldiers themselves are implicated in perpetuating that conflict in order to
ensure their own continuing existence: the soldier exists here not to safeguard the
empire, but to perpetuate discord within it.
However, two cautions are necessary. First, we should be careful about over-
playing the portrait our author paints here and elsewhere in his text of a fundamental
and enduring antagonism between civil and military administration, or senate and
army, in the period, for this opposition was a firmly established trope in the histo-
riographical sources of the late fourth century (Whitby 2004: 179–80). Rather, we
should expect the relationship between the two, and of each with emperor and res
publica, to have been subtle and complex. As we shall see in the following section,
an emperor’s legitimacy rested somewhat shakily upon the extent to which he was
able to control or appease his soldiers, his relationship with the senate, the care he
showed for the res publica, and his attitude toward any other potential or actual
claimants to the purple. Second, while our author here attributes responsibility for
civil conflict to the soldiers, throughout his text he offers a deliberately inconsistent
account of the precise nature of these soldiers’ identity. At times they are explicitly
Romans; at others, implicitly barbarians; at others still, an untidy mix of Roman
and barbarian. It is possible that this inconsistency lies behind his apparent lack of
interest in preserving the lives of these soldiers so that they may be useful to the
state in other ways. Equally deliberate is his omission of the civilian population
from his account of the civil conflicts he purports to describe. The tactic takes the
form here of a catalog of roles that are presented as categorically at odds with the
profession of soldiering: farmer, man of letters, sailor. Each of these features has
implications for his characterization of the conflicts of the period as civil wars and
for any attempts to compare these conflicts with those of earlier periods.
Over the course of the third and following centuries, the armies of the Roman
empire experienced fundamental changes in their composition and organization.
One aspect of those changes was a growing reliance upon soldiers originating from
regions outside the bounds of the empire. We should be cautious about overplaying
the degree to which this phenomenon amounted to a “barbarization” of the Roman
army, but it certainly was the case that the “Romanness” of Roman soldiers in the
late Roman world was by no means as clear-cut as it had been in previous cen-
turies.15 Our author is not the first or only author of the late empire to recognize
this fact. A particularly illuminating example comes from Ammianus Marcellinus,
who describes heroic Roman soldiers raising their traditional barritus before battle
at Adrianople: the same rolling, sonorous cry appears in Tacitus, where it is placed
in the mouths of Germanic warriors (Ammianus Marcellinus 31.11, Tac. Ger. 1.3).
Romanitas was clearly a complex and contingent identity in the period. For our
current purposes, this raises questions about the extent to which we may charac-
terize the conflicts that our author describes as civil: that is, between Romans. In
legal terms, service in the Roman army entitled soldiers of barbarian origin to
access the Roman legal system. Equally, however, they might also retain their ethnic
citizenship or identity, with the result that an individual might be described or
describe himself as both a barbarian citizen and a Roman soldier. It would seem
that, by the fourth century, defining Roman citizenship was no longer simply a case
of distinguishing Romans from non-Romans.16 As a consequence, it had become
more difficult to maintain a clear distinction between internal and external con-
flicts. Our author is quick to exploit this fact in his account of the reign of Gallienus,
blurring the boundaries between the civil and foreign threats facing the emperor as
well as manipulating the markers of identity that he applies to such figures as
Odaenathus of Palmyra and the so-called Gallic Emperors.17
Nevertheless, the threats that are civil in nature retain a distinctly military
character, for the civilian population of the empire is reduced to playing the roles of
spectator and victim. In the Lives of the Gallieni, the populace appear as passive
observers of a series of public theatrical performances staged by the emperor in the
city of Rome. In attempting to preserve a façade of military success and control
over the empire, for example, Gallienus enacts an elaborate triumph-like parade,
complete with pantomime performances, a procession of matrons, slaves, and
priests, and men dressed in the costumes of Franks, Goths, and Persians.18 In our
author’s reportage, the spectators of this event are well informed: he observes that
during the parade the names of a series of pretenders were shouted out by various
members of the audience while others carefully scrutinized the faces of the sup-
posed Persian captives, in search, they said, of Gallienus’ captured father, Valerian.19
But they are spectators nevertheless. Elsewhere, the civilian population of the prov-
inces is kept separate from the soldiers. In certain contexts, they may be identified
using long-established ethnic characteristics and, in the process, are ascribed
responsibility alongside the military for the making of a pretender. Thus, for
example, Gauls are restless and intolerant of moral turpitude, whereas Egyptians
are prone to react with hysteria to even the smallest slight.20 In other contexts, how-
ever, they are excused any involvement in the events, although this does not save
them from suffering at the hands of a vengeful emperor. Indeed, our author uses
Gallienus’ cruel treatment of the civilian population as well as the soldiers of
Pannonia in the aftermath of Ingenuus’ usurpation as a tool for emphasizing the
emperor’s unworthiness to hold the imperium (TT 9.3–9).
Motifs of civil conflict underpin our author’s account of the reign of Gallienus.
Savage treatment of the inhabitants of besieged cities and conflict between family
members call to mind Tacitus’ account of the sack of Cremona. But these themes of
civil war are presented and explored in novel ways and transformed into explicit
criticisms of the emperor Gallienus as a cruel tyrant and unworthy son. Underneath
this frank exploration of imperial legitimacy sits an equally frank examination of
the role played by the military in the series of usurpations and conflicts that char-
acterized Gallienus’ tumultuous reign. Soldiers and armies are ever present in our
author’s narratives of the period, implicated in the rise and fall of usurpers, carrying
out the emperor’s orders and suffering his wrath. Unrest among the members of
the military is presented by our author as a constant, almost structural, aspect of the
state.
5. Imperial Power, Legitimacy, and Usurpation during the Reign

of Gallienus
In writing the reign of Gallienus, our author emphasizes right from the start the
characteristics that, in his mind, exemplify the life and character of a man who rep-
resents all that is bad in an emperor. The biography begins with a succinct sum-
mary of the key aspects of Gallienus’ rule (VG 1.1):
When Valerian was captured (for where should we begin the biography of
Gallienus, if not with that calamity which, above all, brought disgrace on
his life?), when the res publica was tottering, when Odaenathus had seized
the imperium of the East, and when Gallienus was rejoicing in the news of
his father’s captivity, the armies began to range about on all sides, the
generals in all the provinces to murmur, and great was the grief of all men.
We observe here a collection of themes that, together, amount to a subtle reconsti-

tution of long-established historiographical representations of civil conflict. Our
author emphasizes the parlous state of the res publica and the disruptive actions of
the soldiers. He signals unrest among the leaders of those soldiers and introduces
the figure of Odaenathus, king of Palmyra, here functioning as a viable alternative
to Gallienus. Most significantly, however, he identifies the key component of
Gallienus’ reign to be a conspicuous lack of filial piety. Gallienus is depicted rejoicing
at his father’s capture, neglecting to avenge, ransom, or rescue him, and thereby
bringing disgrace upon himself.
This emphasis on dysfunctional relations between a father and his son echoes
a familiar topos of the historiographical construction of civil war: conflict between
family members. Here, our author leaves us with an afterimage or photographic
negative of that motif in the form of a son’s enduring and persistent neglect of his
father. In this sense, discord within the emperor’s family matches and is matched by
civil discord throughout the empire.21 Gallienus’ reign is a civil conflict both because
it was characterized by an unprecedented series of usurpations and because it was
underpinned by a fundamental upsetting of the proper relationship between father
and son. This theme of problematic relations between fathers and sons recurs
repeatedly in the biography of the emperor, is scattered liberally throughout our
author’s account of the various usurpers who challenged him, and occurs elsewhere
in the Historia Augusta.22 It is surely no coincidence, for example, that the first
usurper he treats, an obscure (and largely fictional) figure by the name of Cyriades,
is characterized as the profligate son of a righteous father who fled to the Persian
king Sapor and then marched upon the Roman empire before murdering his father,
seizing power, and ruling tyrannously (TT 2).
This emphasis on Gallienus’ immoral, cruel, or profligate behavior serves to high-

light the illegitimacy of his reign. In part, that illegitimacy stems directly from his lack
of filial piety. By contrast, Odaenathus’ attempts to avenge Valerian function as a com-
ponent in his claims to legitimate rule (VG 9.2). This tension between the illegitimacy
of a confirmed, ruling emperor and the legitimacy of an unconfirmed, usurping pre-
tender infuses both this biography and The thirty tyrants.23 Gallienus is described in
terms that evoke exemplars of excessive, inappropriate imperial rule, such as Caligula,
Nero, Vitellius, and Domitian. He cruelly suppresses the army and civilian population;
shows no deference toward the senate in Rome; commissions magnificent, egocentric
artistic projects; consorts with actors and prostitutes; composes literary works and
indulges in inappropriate cultural pursuits; has unseasonable delicacies served at his
table.24 Odaenathus, on the other hand, is presented in turn as a foreign king; a suitably
deferential agent of the ruling emperor; a legitimate emperor and colleague in imperial
office.25 Indeed, in our author’s presentation, the only praiseworthy thing that Gallienus
does is recognize Odaenathus as a colleague in office.26
Collegiality, legitimacy, and the stark contrast between Valerian, the righteous
father, and Gallienus, his immoral son, are also at the heart of a discussion between
several of Valerian’s senior officers contemplating a coup. Ballista, praetorian prefect
to the captured emperor, urges Macrianus, one of his foremost generals, to take the
imperium on the strength of his similarity to Valerian: his bravery, honor, experi-
ence, and wealth. Macrianus agrees, reluctantly, before observing that the empire
can only be ruled by several individuals at once (TT 12.7–8):
To this Macrianus replied: “I admit, Ballista, that to the wise man the
imperial office is no light thing. For I wish, indeed, to come to the aid of
the res publica and to remove that pestiferous fellow from administering
the laws, but I am not of an age for this; I am now an old man, I cannot
ride as an example to others, I must bathe too often and eat too carefully,
and my very riches have long since kept me away from practicing war.
(8) We must seek out some young men, and not one alone, but two or
three of the bravest,27 who in different parts of the world of mankind can
restore the res publica, which Valerian and Gallienus have brought to
ruin, the one by his fate, the other by his mode of life.”
Macrianus, like Odaenathus, is presented here as a legitimate candidate for rule.

Gallienus is depicted as a danger to the res publica, a man who lacks the respect of
the army and conducts his life in a manner that is ruinous to the state.28 The meton-
ymous relationship between the conduct of the emperor and the health of his
empire is here again highlighted. Valerian’s imprimatur is used as validation for
Macrianus as a legitimate claimant to the throne and as a tool for further distancing
his son, Gallienus, from both the res publica and appropriate exercise of imperium.29
Indeed, upon Gallienus’ eventual defeat and death at the hands of Claudius, our
author reports that his name was entered into the records as a usurper (tyrannus)
as a means of appeasing the army. The term carries a particular moral valence here,
indicating strong disapproval. That the soldiers require the labeling of Gallienus in
this way is an explicit acknowledgment of their role in determining the legitimacy
of an emperor.30
This explicit act therefore merely confirms an implicit assumption in our
author’s biography of Gallienus: his reign cannot be regarded as legitimate. Indeed,
given Gallienus’ failings, a woman (or even two women) may be preferable.31 We
may conclude as much from our author’s account of the life of Zenobia, wife of
Odaenathus, who held power in Palmyra and the East following the death of her
husband.32 Zenobia ruled the East in contempt of Gallienus and in defiance of his
successors. Eventually she was defeated by the emperor Aurelian, led through the
streets of Rome in a triumph, then allowed to marry a senator and live out her days
as a Roman matrona. Our author places in Zenobia’s mouth his ultimate judgment
of Gallienus when he presents her reply to Aurelian’s interrogation of her motiva-
tions for rebelling in the following terms (TT 30.23):
When Aurelian had taken her prisoner, he caused her to be led into his
presence and then addressed her thus: “Why is it, Zenobia, that you dared
to show insolence to the emperors of Rome?” To this she replied, it is
said: “You, I know, are an emperor indeed, for you win victories, but
Gallienus and Aureolus and the others I never regarded as emperors.
Believing Victoria to be a woman like me,33 I desired to become a partner
in the royal power, should the supply of lands permit.”
Zenobia’s response highlights certain key elements in our author’s conception of

imperial rule. Ultimately, the list is not long, for it rests fundamentally upon mili-
tary success. Significantly, however, Zenobia also reveals an impulse toward colle-
gial rule, based upon partnership and compromise.
This mutual dependence between claimants to imperial power emerges also in
our author’s exploration of the complex relationship between an imperator and a
tyrannus, which he summarizes in his account of Zenobia’s qualities as a ruler (TT
30.16): “Her sternness, when necessity demanded, was that of a tyrannus, her clem-
ency, when her sense of right called for it, that of a good emperor (bonus princeps).”
The inextricable link between cruelty and clemency, military and civilian roles,
abusive and effective exercise of power is neatly encapsulated here. It is here also
that we observe a fundamental tension that infuses both the accounts of the reign
of Gallienus contained in the Lives of the Gallieni and The thirty tyrants and in the
Historia Augusta more generally: the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of power,
and therefore by extension, individuals identified as holders of legitimate or
illegitimate power, coexisted in a mutual relationship, each defining and refining

the other. To characterize this period as one of civil war, therefore, would be to miss
the subtle, nuanced interplay of claim and counterclaim and the fundamental
importance of mutual recognition as a strategy for two claimants to the imperium
to bolster each other’s legitimacy.
It is tempting to juxtapose this historiographical representation of imperial
power alongside the events of the reign of Theodosius I. Theodosius himself was a
successful general under Valentinian I, who ultimately claimed the purple while
Valentinian’s own sons, Gratian and Valentinian II, were ruling. Theodosius then
allied briefly with another usurping emperor, Magnus Maximus, in a type of
pragmatic collegiality. In the process, he gradually marginalized the sons of
Valentinian before eventually turning on Maximus himself and defeating him.
Ultimately, Theodosius’ pragmatic politics left him in sole command of the
empire.34 At his death, the empire was divided between his two young sons,
Honorius and Arcadius. Neither was the equal of his father as a commander or
statesman, and both quickly fell under the sway of influential figures behind the
throne. While the fit is by no means perfect, events of our author’s own time may
have provided him with some food for thought.
6. Conclusions: Civil War, Collegiality, and the Realities of Imperial

Rule in the Fourth Century ce
It would be rash to define the Historia Augusta as solely a meditation on power and
legitimacy. The text is too richly textured and complexly layered to be categorized so
simply. Likewise, it is reductionist to attribute all the complexities in relationships
between aspiring and ruling emperors represented in the text to the machinations of
Theodosius I, his predecessors, and contemporaries in the late fourth century.
Nevertheless, there are some suggestive parallels. It seems reasonable to suggest that,
for the author of the Historia Augusta, the political history of the later fourth century
provided a framework around which to array a series of fundamental questions:
What is the nature of imperial power? What renders an emperor legitimate? What
should an emperor do? Who is fit to rule? Ultimately, these questions remain unan-
swered in the text, but a sense emerges that for our author what defines a legitimate
emperor is the extent to which he behaves in a manner consistent with the acts of a
legitimate emperor and, perhaps most importantly, his attitude and behavior toward
the actions and claims of potential colleagues or actual competitors.
In this way, the notion of civil war itself is removed from the equation. The
Roman state in this period was, and continued to be, a multiheaded monster. For a
contemporary observer, a multitude of aspirants to the purple did not amount to
civil war. Nor did an inherently unstable state, ultimately predicated on the whims
and needs of the soldiery, necessarily have as its corollary a community wracked by
civil discord. In our author’s account, civil conflict is compartmentalized and
contained, confined to the (only partially Roman) soldiers and the men who nom-
inally led them. It occurs, for the most part, on the margins of the empire and dis-
plays only its results in the urban center itself, in the form of triumphing emperors
seeking senatorial confirmation or the approval of the urban population. Indeed,
when confronted by the realities of power in the period, a citizen of the city might
justifiably remark, “Civil war? What civil war?”
notes
1. Note, for example, the discussion of the sources for the period by John Drinkwater
(2005: 65–66), who observes that “the colourful biographies of most of the third-century
emperors and usurpers which conclude the Historia Augusta are no more than fanciful
elaborations of Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, and are usually best ignored.” See also the
detailed discussion of the problems in Brandt 2006.
2. Garnsey and Humfress 2001: 10–15 offers a succinct treatment. See also the more
recent Whitby 2004, which focuses on changes in the nature of the army and its relationship
with emperors, and Drinkwater 2005, which offers further discussion and fuller bibliography.
3. These themes are set up in the Life of Hadrian (VH) and are present also in the Life
of Septimius Severus (VS). See, for example, VH 24.1–2 and the discussion of Callu 1992:
xliv, lxxi. Also VS 6.1, 7.6–7, 19.6, 20, and the discussion in Timonen 1992: 69–71. More
detailed exploration of the text of the Historia Augusta promises to reveal further connec-
tions and thematic linkages between the individual lives.
4. The literature is vast. See, for recent treatments, White 1967, Barnes 1978, Syme 1983,
Honoré 1987, Callu 1992, Den Hengst 2002. Note also Momigliano 1954, against single
authorship.
5. The debate over dating continues to excite much attention. Soverini 1983: 52
suggests some time in the late fourth or early fifth century. Honoré 1987 is more specific,
postulating that the author was a student of Ausonius or some other Gallic grammaticus
and that he wrote his work between 394 and 395. For current purposes, it is not necessary to
pinpoint an exact date.
6. VG 3.9, 9.2, 10.5. Cf., for example, Life of Probus (VP) 24.4–5 on the senate’s fears
about Carinus succeeding his father Carus. By contrast, one of the criteria advanced in
favor of Macrianus’ candidacy for the purple is the availability of two energetic and capable
sons as successors: TT 12.8–10.
7. Callu 1992: xxiii–xxv.
8. Legitimacy: VH 4.6–6.2; the senate: VH 7.3–9.1; the army: VH 10.1–11.7; the res
publica: VH 6.2.
9. Syme 1971: 287n1. Note also the provocative comments of Poignault 2001,
suggesting that the text should be approached as a work of fiction as much as as a work of
historiography. This insight accords well with arguments in Callu 1992 about the literary
ambitions and strategies adopted by the author of the Historia Augusta and allows for
analysis of The thirty tyrants in particular, and the Historia Augusta more generally, using
tools developed in the study of the ancient novel. For recent discussions of the current state
of scholarship on the novel, see, for example, Morgan 1996, Elsner 1997, Francis 1998.
10. In writing the following section, I have benefited immensely from reading Michael
Levin’s unpublished honors dissertation, “Roman, barbarian, and soldier in the Scriptores
Historiae Augustae” (University of Chicago, 2006). I wish to thank him for making the
manuscript of this dissertation available to me.
11. Note, for example, our author’s description of the usurpation of Ingenuus in
Pannonia, where he observes that “in no other case had the soldiers taken better counsel for
the commonwealth (res publica)” than in choosing him, before detailing Ingenuus’ reasons
for seizing the purple: he was brave, essential to the res publica, and popular with the
soldiers, and therefore feared becoming an object of suspicion to the ruling emperors
Valerian and Gallienus: TT 9.1–2. Compare the experience of Aemilianus, who, our author
reports (TT 22.4–5), “was constrained to assume the imperial purple, knowing that he
would have to die in any event.” The decision was backed by the soldiers, “chiefly out of
hatred for Gallienus.” Also TT 11.1, 12.12, 23.2. The soldiers had long fulfilled the role of
arbiters of imperial power. See, for example, Ammianus Marcellinus 14.10.15, 27.6.12, 30.10.1,
and the comments in Lee 1998: 224–25.
12. Note our author’s account of the grammatical wordplay that eventuated in
Regalianus’ soldiers hailing him as emperor: TT 10.3–7. For the execrable behavior of the
soldiers, see, for example, TT 24.2.
13. Translations are taken from the Loeb Classical Library edition, with some minor
emendations.
14. Characteristically, these individuals are labeled tyranni, although the term is used
in a variety of ways in the HA and the period: see the discussions in Barnes 1996 and, more
generally, Escribano 1997. The accusation that these figures furthermore refused to deify
Probus is puzzling, for the former emperor was certainly recognized as divine by the time
of Constantius. It is possible that our author is here speaking in the voice of the fictional
biographer who supposedly penned the Life of Probus.
15. Note the recent, nuanced treatment of the subject in Whitby 2004.
16. See the detailed and perceptive discussion of this subject in Mathisen 2006.
17. Civil and foreign threats combined: VG 5.6. Odaenathus as foreigner: VG 9.2, TT
15.2; as Roman: VG 10.7, TT 15.1. Gallic emperors as Gallic: TT 3.4; as Roman: TT 3.6, 5.5–6.
Note also Aurelian’s triumphal procession, where he displayed the last Gallic emperor,
Tetricus, in Gallic dress and Zenobia, wife of Odaenathus, in Eastern finery, before
appointing the former Corrector Lucaniae and allowing the latter to marry a Roman
senator: VA 33; cf. TT 24.4–5, 30.27.
18. VG 8–9. Cf. VG 3.7, and our author’s dry observation (VG 13.4) that, upon the
death of Odaenathus, and with the aid of one of his generals, Gallienus prepared for war
against the Persians and “played the part of a skilful prince” (sollertis principis rem gerebat).
19. Pretenders’ names: VG 9.1; seeking Valerian: VG 9.5–6.
20. Gauls: VG 4.3, TT 3.3–4. Cf., for example, Ammianus Marcellinus 30.10.1 and the
comments in Lee 1998: 225–26. Egyptians: TT 22.1–3.
21. Cf. the emperor Tacitus’ letter to Probus, wherein he exhorts Probus to regard the
res publica as a part of his own familia: VP 7.3–4.
22. See, for example, VG 3.9, 9.2, 10.5, TT 4.1, 13.1, 16.1, VT 6.8–9, 14.1, VP 24.4.
23. Cf. Barnes 1996: 58, for a comparable example of contrast between a tyrannical
emperor and a usurper labeled princeps in the correspondence of Cyprian (Ep. 55.9).
24. The army: VG 7.2, 18.1; the civilian population: TT 9.3–9; the senate: VG 16.4;
inappropriate projects: VG 3.6–8, 8.1–7; actors and prostitutes: VG 17.7, TT 8.9; literary
works: VG 11.6–9; delicacies: VG 16.2.
25. Foreign king: TT 15.2; agent: VG 3.5; legitimate emperor: VG 3.3.
26. VG 12.1. Note Bleckmann 2007: 54–55 on the complexity with which relations
between the two are handled in the Historia Augusta and elsewhere in the literature of the
period. Cf. also the comment of our author at TT 18.12 that the murder of Ballista may have
been carried out “in Odaenathi et Gallieni gratiam.” Cf. TT 24.5, where Aurelian is praised
for honoring Tetricus after defeating him, even at times referring to him as imperator.
27. It is, perhaps, worthy of note that the young men in question are Macrianus’ sons.
28. Cf. also TT 12.2, where Valerian’s officers agree that, with Gallienus far away and
Aureolus in power in the west, they must act quickly lest some tyrannus rise and seize the
throne.
29. Valerian’s approbation as a legitimating factor in the imperial claims of various
emperors infuses the TT and subsequent Vitae. See, for example, TT 3.8–11, 10.14–15,
12.16–18, 18.5–11, 23.1, VP 4.1–7.
30. VG 15.2. The label functions as a term of abuse for unsuccessful usurpers and
defeated rivals in the fourth century: Barnes 1996: 55–56.
31. For the theme of Gallienus being less worthy than a woman, cf. TT 1.1, 12.11, 31.1,
31.7. For more general discussion of the role of women in the Historia Augusta, see Frézouls
1994.
32. For fuller discussion of the structural and thematic role of Zenobia in the Lives of
the Gallieni, The thirty tyrants, and the Life of Aurelian, see Krause 2007.
33. Victoria appears to have been the power behind the throne in the latter stages of
the Gallic Empire. Our author records her installation of a series of emperors in Gaul as
well as according her a biography of her own: TT 6.3, 24.1, 25.1, 31.
34. For brief comment on Theodosius’ machinations, see Barnes 1996: 64 with note 19.
part ii
Cycles
5
“Learning from that violent
schoolmaster”: Thucydidean
Intertextuality and Some Greek
Views of Roman Civil War
Christopher Pelling
It was easy to ridicule Thucydides’ imitators. Here is Cicero talking (and

he talks again in Brutus, esp. 287–88) of those orators who were misguided
enough to take Thucydides as a model (Orator 32):
Huius tamen nemo neque verborum neque sententiarum

gravitatem imitatur, sed cum mutila quaedam et hiantia locuti
sunt, quae vel sine magistro facere potuerunt, germanos se
putant esse Thucydidas.
Still, nobody imitates the heavyweight qualities of the man’s

phrasing or thought, but as soon as they have mouthed some
broken, incoherent remarks, which they could have managed
without anyone to teach them, they think they are
Thucydides’ twins.
Dionysius (esp. de Thuc. 52), and more memorably Lucian, take as their
target the historians who followed Thucydides slavishly, including the
benighted “Crepereius Calpurnianus of Pompeiopolis,” who “wrote up the
war of the Parthians and the Romans, how they fought one another,
beginning just as it started,” and went on to bring in a “Corcyrean orator”
in Armenia and to visit a plague on the people of Nisibis that—just fancy
that—“began in Ethiopia” and “descended into Egypt,” then spread through
“most of the land of the Great King” (Lucian, How to Write History 15).
106 cycles
Most of the examples I shall be treating here are subtler than that. But equally
it is hard to find subtlety everywhere. If one sifts the distinctively Thucydidean
phrases in Appian, Cassius Dio, Plutarch, and Dionysius diligently collected in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dissertations,1 some of them are very
thought-provoking in their contexts; some are rather less so, or the thoughts they
provoke may not be specially reverend ones. Take Appian. In the appendix at the
end of this essay, I take as a sample the first cases relevant to the Civil Wars quoted
in each of the categories used by H. G. Strebel in his very useful dissertation on the
appreciation for and effect of Thucydides’ history in ancient literature: phraseology
by nouns and verbs, particular borrowings, cases where Thucydides is the only
author to use a word or phrase, cases where he is just distinctive. One is hard put to
find any of the specific Appianic contexts interpretatively enriched by the
Thucydidean flavor (which is admittedly more contestable in some cases than in
others). The most promising example is mdqacah¨ferhai, which comes in one of
Thucydides’ most memorable passages, Pericles’ argument that the alternative to
empire is “to play the gentleman in safety” (2.63.2; echoed by Cleon at 3.40.4). It
surely is unmistakably Thucydidean, if anything is. But the Appianic echo concerns
the pirate Metrodorus, when he suspects that the time has to come for him to desert
but decides that it would be good to “perform some heroic action” first: not much
is added by the Thucydidean intertext there.
The same goes for many contexts where patterns of thought or analysis are in
point. It is reasonable for scholars to find a gesture to Thucydides in Dio’s liking for
generalizations about “human nature,”2 but once again the Thucydideanism often
seems shallow. Thus, when Dio is discussing why loudmouths like Metellus, Cato,
and Favonius eventually buckled down and meekly took the oath to respect Caesar’s
agrarian legislation in 59, one of his explanations is that this was “according to a
norm of human nature” (jas sø mhq›peiom) “whereby many people utter prom-
ises and threats more readily than they carry them out in practice” (38.7.2, so there is
a kæco|/ìqcom antithesis at work as well); a little later it is a similar matter of human
nature when political alignments change quickly—you never can tell who is likely to
do you a favor: 39.6.1; earlier he had told us that piracy continues and will continue
“as long as human nature remains the same” (ëx| d$
m ô aÃsó fi ri| mhq›pxm
£̃, 36.20.1–2, a very close imitation of Th.3.82.2). None of those contexts make points
on a Thucydidean level; in fact, Thucydides’ point on piracy in the Archaeology had
been to stress how much piracy changed with the times (1.4–5.1), and even though
Dio is also stressing some element of historical change as well as continuity nothing
much is added by recalling the Thucydidean analysis.3 Once, in a distempered mood,
I talked of Dio’s political analysis being “after Thucydides” and quoted the onscreen
credit for The Boys from Syracuse: “After a play by William Shakespeare. Long, long
after.”4 A bit unfair, but not always wholly unfair.
intertextuality and some greek views of roman civil war 107
Still, even when we cannot do much in context with particular pieces of

Thucydidean texturing, there may be a broader contribution that they make: we
might borrow an idea from recent Homeric criticism (one that in a way goes back
to Milman Parry and his discussion of what Homeric formulae add to their con-
texts)5 and speak of a “resonance,” one that is given to an entire work by the whole
background that phrases conjure up, and need not be context-specific. To be
reminded of Thucydides is to be reminded of that whole hard-edged political and
military world that Thucydides described, where words were so often at odds with
deeds, where decisions were so often reached on the basis of expediency and profit
but also in anger and miscalculation, where morality suffered, and where—partic-
ularly relevant for this volume—stasis, civil conflict, provided the prism through
which the most brutal and unsettling aspects of warfare became particularly visible
and stark. Naturally such echoes elevated both war and writer as well, with the
implied claim—not unlike Thucydides’ own claims for his war, 1.23—that this is as
big and bloody as the great wars of the past and that the present writer too is a
modern Thucydides-counterpart: that was after all, presumably, the wretched
Crepereius’ point (if he is not a figment of Lucian’s imagination). But it is not coin-
cidence either that it is particularly, though not exclusively, Thucydides who lent
himself to such modeling, given Thucydides’ own insistence that his work would be
useful for those trying to understand not merely his own war but also things that
would be “the same or similar in the future, given the human condition” (1.22.4),
phenomena that—in the passage that we have already seen Dio echoing—“happen
and will always happen as long as human nature stays the same, but in more or less
intense and different forms according to the changes in the accompanying circum-
stances” (3.82.2). A Thucydidean patina emphasizes that similar things are indeed
coming back and lays claim to the sort of universalizable significance, with its
implied potential for future lesson learning, that so often formed part of a histori-
an’s program and aspirations.
It is worth dwelling more on this relation of intertextuality and universaliz-
ability. The “literary turn” of historiographic criticism in the last generation has
often focused on intertextual patterning, but we too often talk and write as if this is
purely an artistic feature, an intellectual game wherein a knowing audience bonds
with a narrator and congratulates itself on its sophistication as it identifies a
Homeric or a Herodotean or a Thucydidean phrase. It may be that as well, but it is
also a basic tool of historical interpretation. For one thing, it makes a story more
credible. If we recognize a pattern that is familiar from canonical authors, we are
more likely to believe that it obtains in the present case as well, just as modern juries
are more likely to convict if they recognize a pattern that they know from other
events and other stories (and that includes stories from LA Law and Double
Indemnity).6 But there is a broader point: patterning is also basic to historical
108 cycles
explanation. If we think of historical explanation as in some way parallel to scientific,

then it is a basic scientific principle that if one replicates the conditions then the
same consequences will (normally or universally) follow: given that one cannot
play history over again experimentally, the only way a writer or reader of history
can do that is to recall other past sequences that share enough of those crucial con-
ditions to be comparable. That process may often be unconscious or implicit, but
that makes it all the more powerful: if Dio and Thucydides are felt to be analyzing
parallel events, then it is more plausible that the same factors—human nature, say,
or more specifically the way that words change their connotations under the
pressure of war—are operating in both. And if we think of historical explanation as
more a matter of narrative codes, of choosing a story pattern that an audience will
use to make sense of the events, then it is evident that those story patterns have to
come from somewhere: it is familiarity with past stories that gives an audience the
templates that will fit the new ones. That is particularly important when we are
dealing with civil war—for what is a civil war? The definition was not always clear.
Was fighting Cleopatra (and Antony) a civil war? No, claimed Octavian initially,
declaring war on Cleopatra alone (Dio 50.4.3–4, 6.1, etc.); perhaps, implied Augustus
in retrospect, claiming to “have put an end to civil wars” (RG 34.1).7 It mattered.
And if it looked like a civil war, if its story sounded like a civil war, then it was a civil
war; and Thucydides was the most authoritative guide to how a civil war looked
and sounded.
Such considerations play on the grandest scale, but sometimes similar ideas of
recurrence are on point in particular contexts, for instance those cases where the
Great Battle in the Harbor is echoed in a sea battle (App. BC 4.71.301–4, Plu. Ant.
65–66 and, rather differently, D.C. 49.1)8 or where Dio echoes the sufferings of the
Athenians as they retreated from Syracuse (D.C. 49.6–7);9 naturally there is
something of emulative imitatio in those cases as well, but one should not stress
this—the descriptions tend to be short and perfunctory, and if the later authors
were trying to rival Thucydides artistically they were clearly going to lose. We might
compare the strictures that Plutarch aims at Timaeus at Nicias 1, pointing out the
stupidity of trying to take on Thucydides in precisely those passages where he is at
his best. It may be more of a shorthand, in fact, alerting readers to the ways they can
fill out the description because they know what sorts of things can be expected to
happen in a case like this;10 and it is not even a particularly misleading shorthand,
as even with a four-hundred-year time lag there were limits on how different two
naval battles or two desperate retreats could be.
So far I have been stressing continuities, but we should remember that phrase
“in more or less intense and different forms according to the changes in the accom-
panying circumstances”: once Thucydides’ war—itself a civil war, of course, if one
thinks pan-Hellenically—is set up as the great comparandum, then thoughts can
naturally dwell on the differences as well as the similarities, and that too can be an
aid to interpretation, bringing out what is distinctive and in need of explanation.
Alain Gowing has shown that Appian’s description of the proscriptions recalls
Thucydides’ Corcyra but that this emphasizes the points of contrast as well as of
sameness: true, ruthlessness and greed are once again at play, and true, kinship once
again goes to the wall, but this time the really deadly element is concord, ¡læmoia,
rather than antagonism (BC 4.14: Gowing 1992: 266–67). Even cases that may seem
just part of the “Thucydidean patina” can easily provoke some such thoughts. Take
BC 3.126, spring 44, where the military tribunes urge Antony to make his peace with
the young Octavian because of the threat from Brutus and Cassius in the East: con-
cord is needed, é| søm låkkomsa ja≠ ≈rom o–px paqæmsa pækelom, “for the war
that is going to happen and is almost upon us”—a close verbal echo of the
Corcyreans at Th. 1.36.1, urging that they and Athens have a shared common interest
in view of the imminent war. Is this just the “Thucydidean patina”? Or do we reflect
that the forces at play in Thucydides were whole nations, but now are individuals,
and that this tells a tale about Rome? Do we also note that the same forces of self-in-
terest are indeed at play, again bringing together uncomfortable bedfellows
(remember that those Corcyreans seem to be oligarchs)? Do we recall the other
great relevance of Corcyra in the histories and reflect on how badly it all ended for
the Corcyreans too, just as it will now end badly for Antony? Even those of us who
may not want to rule out questions of authorial intention in principle will admit
that we cannot read Appian’s mind on this occasion to know how much he
“intended”: but once he, or any of the rest of them, has started putting the
Peloponnesian War thought provokingly into our minds, there can never be a
question of stopping how far the thoughts would go. (And this is one reason why I
make no attempt here to discriminate among the different authors’ techniques. It is
in the nature of intertextuality to promote readerly reflection on similarities and
differences and leave most of the work to the reader, and this particular reader’s
reflections may or may not happen to reconstruct the ones that were in Appian’s or
Dio’s own minds. We cannot pin those down: that would be a case of the undisci-
plinable in pursuit of the unverifiable. The authors set the agenda and raise the
questions, and if the argument here is right, they do so in broadly similar ways and
for broadly similar purposes—that is what matters.)
Or take Dio 45.11.1–2, in a similar context, once again the exchanges of Antony
and Octavian soon after the Ides of March.
Caesar and Antony were directing all their actions against one another
but had not yet openly broken out into war (oÃ låmsoi ja¨ fiameqx̃|
px rtmeqq›ceram): even though in fact they had become enemies, they
tried to disguise this at least in appearances. As a result everything else in
110 cycles
the city was also in a state of great indeterminacy and confusion. They
were both at peace and already at war; there was a show [or perhaps a
“mirage”: éfiamsfeso] of forms of freedom, but what was happening
was a matter of one-man rule. On the face of it Antony was getting the
better of it, given that he was consul, but people’s enthusiasm was much
more on the side of Caesar (ô dç dó rpotdó sx̃m mhq›pxm é| søm
Ja¨raqa époëi), partly because of his father, partly because of the
hopes he promised, and especially because they were irritated with
Antony’s great power and took the side of Caesar who was not yet strong.
There are strong Thucydidean echoes11 there at the beginning—this war that had
not yet broken out openly (cf. Th.1.66, oÃ låmsoi ≈ ce pækelæ| px ntmeqq›cei)—
and at the end, the popular goodwill going much more one way rather than the
other, just as at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War people largely favored
Sparta, in particular because they were seen as the champions of Greek freedom (cf.
2.8.4, ô dç e–moia paq pokÀ époëi sx̃m mhq›pxm lãkkom é| soÀ|
Kajedailæmiot|, kkx| se ja≠ pqoeipæmsxm ≈si sóm Ekkda éketheqo‹rim).
So once again the players have become individuals rather than states:12 the language
is in fact strained at the beginning—“Caesar and Antony . . . had not yet openly
broken” is odder in Greek, rtmeqq›ceram, than in English, as a war can “break”—
break out—much more readily than a person can. (LSJ’s “dash together” rather
understates the “breaking” aspect of the verb.) But the end is interestingly different
too from the Thucydidean original. There is now no thought of “freedom” in the
reasons why popular opinion favored Octavian: those “promises” and “hopes” are
purely material ones. People disliked Antony because he was too powerful, and
Octavian was the weaker; but that is not just because they are behaving like the
well-mannered British middle classes cheering on the underdog at Wimbledon. It
is because they think it will therefore be easier to use Octavian to bring Antony
down and then go on to discard Octavian in turn—a version, in fact, of the
Machiavellian plan that Cicero had in real life. Dio tends to make all his principals
think and plot in the same way (rather as Zvi Yavetz pointed out that Ronald Syme
makes all his politicians calculate in ways very much like one another and a bit like
Syme himself 13); here Dio is, not wholly plausibly, making the people calculate the
same way too. It is as if they have already learned the hard lessons that it would take
the rest of Thucydides’ war and Thucydides’ narrative to teach, that impressions of
altruism tend to be deceptive and that championship of freedom can turn very
sour. “There was a fiamsarä of the forms of freedom, but what was happening was
a matter of one-man rule”: the people are not too taken in by that dream-like
“show,” that mirage. They are all Thucydideans now, more Thucydidean indeed
than the yet-to-be-disillusioned majority in the Thucydidean original.
Let us move on to Plutarch and back to a context a little earlier in the civil wars.
There has just been the uncharacteristically tranquil moment at the Rubicon,
where—equally uncharacteristically—Caesar hesitates and reflects before casting
his die. The tumultuous action that follows is in stark contrast (Caes. 33.1–5):
With the fall of Ariminum, it was as if the broad gates of war had been
opened to every land and sea. No respect was paid to the laws of the city,
just as none had been given to the boundary of Caesar’s province. It no
longer felt as if men and women were dashing terrified across Italy—that
had happened before—but now it was more as if whole cities were rising
up to flee and rushing across one another. (2) Rome itself was filled by a
torrent of flights and migrations from the nearby towns, and it was no
easy matter for any leader to control the city by persuasion or to restrain
it by words. It was a swirling maelstrom; Rome all but destroyed herself.
(3) Contending passions and violent impulses dominated everywhere
(phg cq ms¨paka ja≠ bäia jaseπve jimñlasa pmsa sæpom).
Some were pleased, but even their jubilation had no quiet: in a great city
it clashed time and again with fear and pain, and its brash confidence
about the future gave rise to violence and quarrels (o–se cq sø vaπqom
ôrtväm ò̃cem, kk s{ ˜ dedoijæsi ja≠ ktpotlåm{ jas pokk
rtlpπpsom ém leckz pækei ja≠ hqartmælemom Õpçq so‹ låkkomso|
di$ éq¨dxm òm). (4) Pompey himself was bewildered, hounded on every
side by conflicting criticisms. Some accused him of being the one who
had built Caesar’s power and claimed he should now be held responsible
for his dominance; others protested that Pompey had allowed Lentulus
and his group to insult Caesar just when he was giving way and offering
a reasonable solution. (5) Favonius told him to stamp on the ground, for
Pompey had once boasted to the senate that they need not trouble
themselves about any war preparations: he had only to strike his foot on
the earth to fill all Italy with armies.
There is a lot going on there. Virgilian ears will prick up at those “Gates of War,” and
the “swirling maelstrom” contrasts elegantly with the eerie calm of the night scene
at the Rubicon. But let us concentrate on paragraphs 2–3, where the ghost of
Thucydides is walking especially tall. It is partly a specific Thucydidean moment
that is evoked, that moment at the beginning of the war when people flooded into
Athens from the surrounding demes (2.14–17)—something that it is hard to believe
was historically accurate for the situation in Rome, for a month later Cicero is still
expecting that Rome might soon be full of refugees (Att. 8.1.3). It is partly, too, the
Thucydidean manner: note especially those distinctive neuter abstracts (sø vaπqom,
sø dedoijø| ja≠ ktpo lemom) and those highly Thucydidean words and concepts
112 cycles
(phg . . . ms¨paka ja≠ bäia . . . jimñlasa). And, as usual, think Thucydides,

think too what does not happen now but what Thucydides might have led us to look
for or expect. This is civil war, and we know from the Corcyrean chapters what civil
war leads to (and will always lead to as long as human nature remains the same):
brutality, bloodshed, old scores being settled, the knife in the back in the middle of
the night, the collapse of morality, those caught in the middle suffering worst.
Striking, then, that Caesar is so ostentatiously moderate, sparing his enemies, saving
lives where he can, respecting (unlike Pompey) the choices of those who wished to
remain neutral: the intertext here points not or not only to recurrence, but to sin-
gularity. Yet also, of course, the bloodshed and the knife in the back, or the front, are
not going to stay away for very long, and the Life will end with the Ides of March,
then the carnage at Philippi. Perhaps Thucydides’ universalizing was right after all,
and eventually the essentials of the horrid pattern are inescapable.
There are implications for Pompey as well as for Caesar. All this is happening
“in a great city,” “and it was no easy matter for any leader to control the city by
persuasion or to restrain it by words”: one naturally thinks of Thucydides’ Pericles,
who used persuasion and words to “restrain”—jasåveim, the same word as in
paragraph 3 here—the Athenian democracy in a manner worthy of free people
(2.65.8), whereas the wrangling of his successors “in a great city” led to the Sicilian
disaster (2.65.11).14 A Pericles is needed again now, just as in the collapse of morale
that the influx to Attica in 431 may have helped to generate (because it promoted
the spread of the plague: Th. 2.52; cf. Plu. Per. 34.5); but now “Pompey himself was
bewildered, hounded on every side by conflicting criticisms”—no Pericles he,
then, and his response to personal criticisms is also much less impressive than
that of the Thucydidean Pericles (2.59–64). Here Pompey is left without a reply at
all to Favonius’ gibe: contrast App. BC 2.146–47, which gives Pompey a spirited
answer:
You can find those armies, if only you follow me and do not think it so
dreadful to leave Rome—and if need be Italy too. Power and liberty do
not consist in the places and buildings that men own, but the men
themselves have these in their possession, wherever they may be.
Fine language: mdqe| cq pæki|, in fact (Th. 7.77.7), so there is Thucydides here
too: the tag has admittedly become a commonplace by now, but this is not the only
time where Appian’s Pompey has a hint of Thucydides’ Nicias.15 Not a good sign,
not at all. So for Plutarch not a Pericles; for Appian, a Nicias: Thucydides helps both
authors to indicate what sort of man Caesar has to deal with, a winner confronting
someone who, however massive he may now seem, has the stamp of a loser.
I will end with a different sort of civil war context, this time in the case of the
man who famously admitted that people these days could not understand Thucydides’
speeches (de Thuc. 51): Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Here we are going earlier, and to
civil conflict, the Struggle of the Orders, rather than civil war—an important dis-
tinction, for it is one of Dionysius’ big points that the early Romans managed to
avoid bloodshed in their bitter wranglings because they managed to resolve every-
thing by speech (7.66): this distinctively Greek city—and that is another of
Dionysius’ big points—managed to learn that most distinctively Greek lesson of all,
the power of kæco|. (And that is Dionysius’ reason, or at least his excuse, for having
quite so many speeches, going over the same ground again and again and again.)
Indeed, this Greek city had therefore managed to do so much better than Greece
herself (7.66.5):
they would talk to one another about fairness and justice, and settle
their quarrels through persuasion and talk, and not allow themselves to
do anything irreparable or wicked against one another. Contrast what
the Corcyreans did during their faction, and the Argives, and the
Milesians, and all Sicily, and many other cities.
“What the Corcyreans did during their faction”: and Emilio Gabba (1991) has
brought out how Thucydides’ Corcyra is much more broadly in the background of
these books.16 So this is another case where Rome had managed to avoid falling into
the Thucydidean pattern—or at least had avoided it then, even if they had not
avoided it forever. All because of kæco|.
The first piece of spoken kæco| in Dionysius’ Antiquities is Aeneas’ speech to
Latinus at 1.58:
We are natives of Troy, not the least distinguished city among the Greeks.
The Achaeans took this away from us when they conquered us in a
ten-year war, and since then we have been wanderers, going around for
lack of a city and a land to dwell in for the future. We have followed the
orders of the gods and have come here, and—so the oracles of the gods
tell us—this land alone is left to us as the haven at the end of our
wanderings. We are taking from the country what we need, in a way that
shows our misfortune rather than telling to our credit; we should not
have wished this to be so. But we will pay with many good actions in
recompense, putting at your disposal bodies and souls that are well
schooled in facing danger, keeping your own land unravaged and joining
you enthusiastically in conquering that of your enemies. We beseech you
as suppliants not to be angry at what we have done, taking into account
that these have been deeds of involuntary necessity rather than wilful
violence; and what is involuntary deserves forgiveness ( pam dç
r ccmxlom sø jo riom). We are stretching out our hands to you
114 cycles
(veπqa| pqoevolåmxm), and you should not take a contrary view about
us. If you do, we will call on the gods and daimones of this land to forgive
us for what we are forced to do, and will attempt to defend ourselves
against you, who would be the ones who instigate the war (pokålot
qvomsa| Õlã| l merhai). This would not be the first nor the biggest
war from which we would reap the consequences—
—a menacing way to end.

“Troy, not the least distinguished city among the Greeks” is a striking way to
start, especially as Troy’s “Greekness” is still unexplained:17 it is all connected with
Atlas, Arcadia, and Evander, but that only comes out a few chapters later. (Perhaps
the Aeneid would have helped, presumably in circulation fairly soon after Virgil’s
death in 19 bce and therefore available by the time of Dionysius’ publication twelve
years later.18) Then paragraphs 4–5 are an amalgam of Thucydidean allusions. pam
dç r ccmxlom sø jo riom recalls Cleon’s words at Th. 3.40.1, where he is arguing
(not wholly consistently) that the Mytileneans’ behavior was not involuntary and
therefore deserves uncompromising punishment, that is, death. The next sentence
recalls various aspects of the Plataean debate (of course, closely juxtaposed with the
Mytilenean debate in Thucydides’ original), where “holding out hands in supplica-
tion” becomes a key phrase, used first by the Plataeans and then thrown back in
their faces by their uncompromising Theban adversaries; “calling on the gods of
this land” is also a key concept there.19 pokålot qvomsa| Õlã| l merhai also
recalls Pericles’ uncompromising reply to the Spartans at Th. 1.144.2. This is a case
where it does help to recall not just the words, but the Thucydidean contexts from
which they come as well; if we do, the effects I earlier associated with the
“Thucydidean patina” are even starker, summoning up that Thucydidean world
wherein moral arguments are used only when they happen to be convenient, force
is met with force, and the gods—those gods on which Aeneas now calls just as the
Plataeans called in their day—are nowhere.
Yet it would be hard to imagine anything further removed from the world that
we have here, where both Latinus and Aeneas have already been primed by the gods
to be nice to one another. Within a few lines everything is hugs and kisses and
treaties.
So—what to make of it? We have the choice of two Dionysiuses. One is the one
who is closer to the conventional picture:20 a rather simple soul, who brings to the
party nothing much except stylistic virtuosity, and here applies Thucydidean tags
with no inkling of quite how inappropriate they are; we will be back with something
like the not-very-context-sensitive Appianic examples with which I started. The
other is the Dionysius that I would prefer, one who is using the echoes more dynam-
ically: the point can now be closer to the one I have been making, that the worlds
are so different. The “Greekness” of Rome is only part of it: the other part is to bring
out how Rome, right from the beginning, adds something of its own to the mix and
how it is this mix of divinely approved moral worthiness and the mailed glove in
the background that makes men like Latinus realize that this is something special,
special enough to mean that the Thucydidean match-force-with-force mindset
does not work—is indeed outdated in this world even though it is actually eight
hundred years earlier than the Thucydidean model it is evoking. For Rome, morality
works; and here it works in avoiding the civil war that otherwise threatens, even
if—an addition that an Augustan audience would find all too easy to make—it had
not gone on working well enough to avoid the civil wars of more recent times.
That last aspect is important as well, once again suggesting that Thucydides
might have been right after all, and any absence of callousness and carnage can only
be temporary, that the same things will indeed keep coming back, eventually. . . . But
that, and how we get there, is another Dionysian story, not one for here. For the
moment, let us concentrate only on what has been this essay’s main theme, the
value of intertextuality in general, and Thucydidean intertextuality in particular,
for historical interpretation: for pointing to patterns that recur and indicating the
factors that may explain why they have recurred; for indicating what is different
and distinctive about the Roman experience and what therefore points to new
factors that are in play; and for the recurrent suggestion that perhaps, after all, the
Roman experience is not so very different as all that. In short, intertextuality tells us
what sort of story it is to tell; and a grim, Thucydidean story is what it so often turns
out to be.
Appendix: Thucydidean Echoes in Appian’s Civil War
The following examples are drawn from Strebel 1935: 73–91. In each case it is the
first example relevant to Appian’s Civil War in one of Strebel’s categories, though
I have omitted a few where the Thucydidean echo is particularly implausible.
(a) diapolpñ: App. BC 3.341, 5.299 (also Hisp. 398) ~ Th. 6.41.4 (but in BC
the word concerns messages exchanged between Antony’s and Lepidus’
camp in 43 bce and negotiations between Sextus and the triumvirs in 39
bce; in Thucydides, it is the suggestion of the Syracusan general that they
send round to potential allies).
(b) cmxrä: App. BC 2.495 (random killings in the panic on the Ides
because people fail to recognize one another) ~ Th. 8.66.3 (difficulty of
knowing how many people died in the oligarchic bloodletting at Athens
because of the size of the city and people’s failure to know one another).
116 cycles
(Strebel also quotes Luc. Tim. 42, concerning Timon’s decision to live a
hermit-like life with no visitors to recognize; other cases in LSJ concern
failure to recognize the facts of the case, as Eur. Med. 120, or in the N.T.
ignorance of God.)
(c) mcqapso|: App. BC 4.92 (“written up” on proscription lists), 4.286
(monuments “inscribed” in the Rhodians’ honor at Rome) ~ Thuc.
1.129.3 (Xerxes’ promise that Pausanias’ kindness will be always “written
up in our house”).
(e) mdqacah¨ferhai: App. BC 5.420 (Metrodorus’ aspirations for a last
heroic deed) ~Th. 2.63.2 (Pericles) and 3.40.4 (Cleon). The only other
instance cited in LSJ is [Arist.] de virtutibus et vitiis 1250b 4; TLG adds a
handful more pre-Byzantine cases; among these, Thucydidean echoes
can be sensed at Dio 43.17.1 (a speech of Caesar, in which we might sense
unpersuasive disingenuousness), 44.37.2 (Antony’s funeral speech for
Caesar), 60.3.5 (jimd mx| mdqacah¨ferhai points heavily to the
Thucydidean original, but Corbulo’s point there is that generals of old
could “be heroic safely” on the battlefield: the acerbic point is that the
real dangers come from superiors at home).
(f) ém lfiibæk{ eÆ̃mai: App. BC 4.524 (Brutus before Philippi, encouraging
his troops to think that the Caesarians are “in peril” because of a threat
to their communications) ~Th.2.76.3 (a defenders’ stratagem at the siege
of Plataea, building a crescent fortification to leave the attackers “in
peril”).
(g) “Pompey” (App. BC 2.95) “was everything (pmsa)” in Rome at the time
or “Caesar” (2.138) or “Antony” (4.439) ~ Th. 8.95.2 (“Euboea was
everything to them”) (but Strebel also notes Hdt. 3.157.4, 7.156.1: add
Dem. 18.43, 23.120).
notes
1. In particular, Strebel 1935; for studies of particular authors, cf. also Flierle 1890 on
Dionysius and Litsch 1893 and Kyhnitsch 1894 on Cassius Dio.
2. So most elaborately Reinhold 1985 and 1988: 215–17; also Rich 1989: 89, n9; and, on
D.C. 36.20.1, Millar 1964: 76n4.
3. Unless there is a hint that Pompey will turn out to be something of a new Minos,
who “suppressed maritime piracy, so it seems, to increase his revenues” (Th. 1.4.1)? But the
point seems feeble.
4. In Pelling 1997: 123n30.
5. On Milman Parry, see Parry 1971: xxvi–xxx; Barbara Graziosi and Johannes
Haubold (2005) define resonance as Homeric epic’s “ability to evoke a web of associations
and implications by referring to the wider epic tradition” (9); “[r]epeated words or
phrases . . . suggest connections in the mind of audiences and readers that are crucial to the
story, yet do not appear to be consciously manipulated at the moment of performance”
(53). This approach has a great deal in common with the idea of “traditional referentiality”
elaborated by J. M. Foley (e.g., 1991 and 1999); for illuminating critical discussion, see also
Kelly 2007: 5–14, e.g., on p. 9: “an apparently incongruous element resonates beyond its
individual occurrence to attract a source of associative meaning which . . . adds considerably
to the force of the paradigm” (though Kelly’s own focus rests on more specific traditional
story patterns and the poems’ subtle exploitation of audience expectations).
6. On this see Dershowitz 1996; in Pelling 1999: 343–53 I discuss some of the
implications for historiography and expand on some of the theoretical points I make
briefly here.
7. On this important point and often neglected point, see esp. Woodman 1983b:
212–13.
8. Cf. Melber 1891: 219n32; Pelling 1988: 283 on Antony (which has a touch of
Herodotus’ Salamis too, p. 282); on Dio 49.1, see again Melber 1891 and Millar 1964:
42—though Millar does not bring out the important nuance noted in n. 10.
9. Gowing 1992: 197n46, again citing Melber 1891: 211–36, 222–28.
10. That is particularly pertinent at Dio 49.1, where the point is that Octavian there
expects the battle to be fought on the Great Harbor model, but events prove him wrong. We
can understand Octavian’s expectations by reference to the classic model, and Dio can thus
express it succinctly.
11. Noted in Manuwald 1979: 40.
12. A similar point can be extracted from those passages wherein Appian closely
echoes the same Thucydidean original: BC 1.374, where in 83 bce public “goodwill greatly
favors” the consuls Norbanus and Scipio over Sulla “because, even if they were self-
interested, they had the pretext of fighting for the state”; 5.106, where Italian “goodwill
greatly favors” Lucius Antonius over Octavian because he seemed to be taking their side
against the colonists. The remark at 1.374 draws a moral about self-interested
disingenuousness that is itself true to Thucydides, though it is not made explicit at Th. 2.8.4
itself; naturally, 5.106 recalls the earlier Appianic passage as well as Thucydides, and the
intratextual implications of this might lead the reader of book 5 to suspect that any hopes
placed in Lucius Antonius are likely to be as fruitless as those placed in the consuls of 83 as
well as those in Thucydides’ Sparta.
13. Pelling 1997: 144, quoting Yavetz 1990: 28.
14. Within Thucydides that is symmetrically echoed at 6.39.2, where the Syracusan
demagogue Athenagoras talks of the difficulty of controlling oligarchic aspirations “in a
great city,” this time Syracuse itself.
15. As again at 205 and perhaps 204 ~ Th. 7.50.4: cf. Pelling 2006: 272n34.
16. But Gabba does not bring out clearly enough the weaknesses as well as the
strengths of the Roman ways, which are not always as distant from Thucydides’ Corcyra as
all that, in the way for instance that both with the demos and with Coriolanus internal
divisiveness can outweigh loyalty to the state (notice how Coriolanus repeats one crucial
divisive tactic among the Volscians: 8.11.2 ~ Th. 7.19.4, and here too it turns out badly for
118 cycles
him: 8.57 ~ Th. 7.63–64). The very words “tyranny” and “liberty,” never mind “justice” itself,
are bandied about tendentiously, exemplifying in action Thucydides’ insight about “words
changing their connotation” when applied to events (Th. 3.82.4); a more straightforward
example comes later, at 9.53.6. The process of law must be a strength, but it can become a
travesty too when tribunes are irresponsible: Dionysius brings that out as clearly as anyone
(7.65) and is equally forthright about the excesses of the patricians (e.g., 10.33.3, 10.43).
17. Tim Rood suggests to me that there may be an echo of Hermocrates’ opening at
4.59.1, and if so that too may be suggestive: Hermocrates too is mixing a “moral” register—
the pan-Sicilian rhetoric—with more than a hint of the mailed fist. But the nature of the
moral register remains eloquently different.
18. Not that Dionysius’ version is identical with Virgil’s, e.g., in the voyage taking two
years rather than seven.
19. “Holding out our hands”: Plataeans at Th. 3.58.3. Thebans at 3.66.2 (veπqa|
pqoirvolåmot|). “Gods and daimones of this land”: possibly Archidamus at 2.74.2 as well
as Plataeans at 3.58.
20. Hoffmann 1942: 4: “Aber auch als Vertreter der griechischen Geschichtsschreibung
hat er sehr bedingten Wert; im Grunde zeigt er nur, in welchen Ausmaß ein Grieche die
römische Geschichte mißverstehen konnte.”
6
Tarda Moles Civilis Belli:
The Weight of the Past in
Tacitus’ Histories
Rhiannon Ash
optima civilis belli defensio oblivio est
The best defense in the case of civil war is forgetfulness.

Sen. Con. 10.3.5
1. Introduction
In the Annals, during the opening survey of political developments before

Tiberius’ accession to the principate, Tacitus poses a significant question
for anyone setting out to consider the impact of the past in historical nar-
ratives: “The younger men had been born after the victory at Actium, and
even the old men had been born during the wars between citizens. How
many people were left who had seen the republic?” (Ann. 1.3.7: iuniores
post Actiacam victoriam, etiam senes plerique inter bella civium nati: quotus
quisque reliquus, qui rem publicam vidisset?).1 Now, if this distance was
tangible for citizens living at the end of Augustus’ principate and looking
back at the republican civil wars, then for Tacitus’ readers of the Histories,
published circa ad 109, the chronological (and perhaps also emotional)
gulf between the republican past (including the republican civil wars) and
their own present day was even greater.2 In addition, we can see that the
gap of forty-five years between the present day in the final year of Augustus’
principate (ad 14) and the battle of Actium (31 bc) is only a little longer
than the forty years that separated Tacitus’ contemporary readers from the
120 cycles
events of ad 69. So, with the publication of the Histories around ad 109, what we
have is a situation in which Tacitus’ salient question in the Annals could equally well
be posed to his contemporaries about the civil wars of ad 69. On top of that, given
that the primary subject matter, the civil wars of 69, is unlikely to have been expe-
rienced personally by many of Tacitus’ audience, then the republican civil wars of
the first century bc were of course at an even greater remove from them. Tacitus’
readers would have experienced that past entirely at one remove through the
medium of such historical narratives as Livy’s Ab urbe condita and such epics as
Lucan’s Civil war.3 Yet as we will see, Tacitus still freezes the main action of his nar-
rative at significant points (Hist. 1.50.1–3, 2.38, 3.51) to introduce the republican civil
wars as a crucial reference point.
To modern readers, it may seem a paradox that Tacitus holds up the civil wars
of the distant republican past as a meaningful yardstick to measure more recent
imperial civil wars, with which people should, at some level, have been more
familiar. We can see a similar phenomenon in play during the memorable sequence
from Lucan’s Civil war (2.67–233).4 Here, an unnamed elderly survivor of the civil
wars between Marius and Sulla takes center stage and delivers a long speech recall-
ing the grisly events of these earlier conflicts, apparently seeking precedents for
what he calls his “great fear” (2.67). For added conviction, this old man, who pur-
ports to be giving us his own experiences, is set up as an eyewitness and activates
the device of autopsy through which he gains more credibility.5 One could almost
see him as warped type of authoritative Nestor figure, using a long, backward-
looking speech to mediate between the here and now of the present and the more
distant past. Yet whereas the Homeric Nestor usually projects the world of the past
as a bigger, brighter, better place, Lucan’s old man sees, first at the opening of his
speech, grim consistency between the horrific civil wars of the past and present
(2.68–70), but by the time he has finished speaking he fears that the present will be
worse than the past (2.225–26). This is an interesting twist on the usual nostalgic
dynamics of the Homeric Nestor’s speeches.6
Tacitus too, in one of the three passages from the Histories that will be the focus
of this chapter, has the “gaze” back to previous civil wars mediated by protagonists
in the text (1.50.1–3) but not ones like Nestor or Lucan’s unnamed old man, who
have themselves seen the events to which they allude. In the other two passages
(2.38, 3.51), the mediating presence is instead the author himself, Tacitus. Yet as we
will see, the three passages from the Histories are still pointedly interlinked in their
technique of freezing the primary narrative of ad 69 to incorporate painfully reflec-
tive passages about earlier civil wars, which provocatively collapse the chronolog-
ical distance between past and present to engage in a moralizing and cumulative
three-way synkrisis. All three passages, pointedly set off from the continuous narra-
tive, establish an ongoing dialog with the civil wars of the past, which would
the weight of the past in tacitus’ histories 121
otherwise lie beyond the chronological scope of the text. As we will see, the
relationship that Tacitus develops between past and present is curiously agonistic.7
2. What’s the Use in Trying? Past Civil Wars Justify Present Apathy
(Tac. Hist. 1.50)
The first extract we will consider is the bridge passage recording people’s reactions
after Galba’s murder, once it becomes clear that the conflict between Otho and
Vitellius will now continue the civil wars (Hist. 1.50.1–38):
Here then were the two most despicable men in the whole world by
reason of their unclean, idle, and pleasure-loving lives (impudicitia
ignavia luxuria), apparently appointed by fate (fataliter) for the task of
destroying the empire. Not only the senate and the knights, who had
some stake and interest in the country, but the masses (volgus), too,
expressed sorrow openly. Conversation no longer centered on recent
precedents for the brutality of peace. Minds went back to the civil wars,
and they spoke of the many times Rome had been captured by its own
armies, of the devastation of Italy (vastitatem Italiae), of the sack of
provinces, of Pharsalia, Philippi, Perusia, and Mutina, famous names
associated with national disasters. The whole world, they reflected, had
been practically turned upside down when the duel for power involved
good men (inter bonos), but the empire had survived the victories of
Julius Caesar and Augustus. The republic would have done the same
under Pompey and Brutus. Yet were they now to visit the temples and
pray for Otho? Or for Vitellius? To pray for either man would be
impious, to offer vows for the victory of either equally blasphemous. In
any war between the two, the only certainty was that the winner would
turn out the worse.9
What is particularly interesting about this passage and what distinguishes it from
the other two passages to be discussed is that the focalization conspicuously lies
with the bemused onlookers at the time rather than with Tacitus as author. This
creates an interesting dynamic, for although the detailed reflections of the citizens
about civil wars concentrate on the declining caliber of the imperial candidates bet-
ween now and then, the outer frame shows something rather extraordinary going
on, which must complicate our reaction to this passage. Unusually, it is not just the
senators and the equites (the “stakeholders” of the state) who are expressing their
pessimism openly, but also the volgus, so often cast by Tacitus as self-indulgent
hedonists who care nothing about politics so long as their bellies are full.10 Could it
122 cycles
be that the civil wars of ad 69 are actually having a beneficial impact, however
briefly, in fostering concordia between the different strata of society? It is almost as
if we are being presented here with an instance of metus hostilis in miniature,
wherein fear of the enemy has a beneficial effect in healing internal divisions, except
of course that in this case the fear is triggered by two Roman citizens, Otho and
Vitellius.11 If so, there is some foreshadowing in play, since the theme of the victo-
rious Vitellius and his troops treating Italy as if it were a defeated foreign country
will become increasingly insistent as the narrative progresses (2.87.2, 2.88.3, 2.89.1,
2.90.1, 3.72.1).
At the same time, however, it seems as if the traumas of civil war are prompting
these onlookers to make some distinctly odd comments about the past in order to
make sense of their present. Where we are brought up short, arguably, is when the
onlookers reflect that the world had been practically turned upside down when the
duel for power took place inter bonos. At best this appears to be an over-simplifica-
tion, but how plausible is it really to categorize men such as Julius Caesar and
Augustus as boni? To question this label, we only have to turn to Tacitus’ later rep-
resentation of popular views in the immediate aftermath of Augustus’ death, in
particular to Ann. 1.10, where the negative assessment of the dead emperor by at
least some of the Roman people is laid out.12 Consider for example the snapshot
there of the battle of Mutina (Ann. 1.10.2):
Next, when by a decree of the senators, he had assailed the power of the
fasces and the prerogative of a praetor, after Hirtius and Pansa had been
slaughtered (whether the enemy had eliminated them, or Caesar, the
contriver of trickery [machinator doli], had got rid of Pansa by having
poison applied to his wound and Hirtius by means of his own soldiers),
he had seized the forces of both men.
This synopsis reminds us that when the onlookers in ad 69 refer back to the battle
of Mutina as a point of comparison, it is not easy to concede that the victorious
Octavian (the machinator doli) was unambiguously bonus.13 There were certainly
contemporary rumors that Augustus had resorted to some underhanded tricks to
eliminate the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, as Suetonius also makes clear (Aug. 11).14 It
may even be the case that Tacitus has deliberately made the onlookers in the
Histories passage position the reference to Mutina (43 bc) last in the sequence after
Pharsalia (48 bc), Philippi (42 bc), and Perusia (40 bc), and out of chronological
order, precisely to prompt readers to analyze it more closely.
Of course, one way to make sense of the onlookers’ assessment in ad 69 is to
suggest that we need to understand a tacit “relatively” as modifying boni and that
the protagonists of these previous civil wars are not to be taken as good men in any
absolute sense, but only in comparison with Otho and Vitellius, who envelop our
passage by ring composition. That may well be the case, but even so the artificially
polarized assessment relayed in this passage between the boni of then and the vil-
lainous imperial contenders of now is still expressive. Here the civil wars of the
republican past are represented as having at least some redeeming features, in that
the rivals were men of considerable stature who were not marred by the propensity
for impudicitia, ignavia, and luxuria that marked the substandard Otho and
Vitellius. Yet the onlookers have been conveniently selective in choosing their exam-
ples: Antony, for instance, whose negative image in the historical tradition might
have suggested some inconvenient points of contact with the character traits mani-
fested by some of the imperial pretenders in ad 69, has been conspicuously omit-
ted.15 The onlookers’ assessment of the civil wars of the republican past is warped,
superficial, and unnuanced, but above all it is expressive of their aporia. All they can
envisage themselves as doing is going to the temples to pray for one or other man
to win, but even that proves impossible given the caliber of the pair. So, senate,
equites, and common people alike dubiously use the exempla of the past to ratio-
nalize their own passive response to the current civil wars and to explain away their
default mode whereby they leave their future in the hands of the armies. What ini-
tially seemed like concordia now seems closer to passive fatalism. And indeed the
language of fatalism is there from the start, as the onlookers suggest that Otho and
Vitellius had been chosen fataliter to destroy the empire.16
3. Are You Really Surprised? Continuity between Past and Present

Civil Wars (Tac. Hist. 2.38)
The onlookers, as I have been calling them, show us one way in which the weight of
the past can be mustered to respond to the troubles of the present, though not nec-
essarily in the most constructive fashion. We turn now to a second case study,
wherein Tacitus introduces the civil wars of the Republic in rather a different way
when he suspends the action before narrating the first battle of Bedriacum to for-
mulate a thundering digression in the style of Sallust (Tac. Hist. 2.3817):
From time immemorial, humans have had an innate passion for power,
but with the growth of the empire, it has ripened and run wild. For, as
long as resources were limited, equal standing was easily maintained, but
after the world was subjugated and rival cities or kings were cut down to
size (aemulis urbibus regibusve excisis), we were free to covet wealth in
safety, and the first struggles between the senate and people blazed up.
Unruly tribunes alternated with excessively powerful consuls, and there
were trial runs for civil wars (temptamenta civilium bellorum) in the city
124 cycles
and in the forum. Then Gaius Marius, who rose from the lowest ranks of
the people, and Lucius Sulla, the most savage of the nobles, destroyed the
republican constitution by force of arms and replaced it with despotism.
After them came Gnaeus Pompey. He was more guarded but no better
(occultior non melior), and from then on the one goal was autocracy. The
legions of citizens did not shrink from civil war at Pharsalus or Philippi,
so it is hardly likely that the armies of Otho and Vitellius would have laid
aside war voluntarily. The same (eadem) divine anger, the same (eadem)
human madness, the same (eaedem) criminal incentives drove them into
conflict. The fact that each war was decided as it were by a single
knockout blow is only down to the feebleness of the emperors (ignavia
principum). However, my reflections on ancient and modern ways have
made me stray too far, so now I return to the proper sequence of events.
We can see here that there are some points of contact with the onlookers’ represen-
tation of the civil wars of the republican past, in the mention of Pharsalus and
Philippi, for example, and also when Tacitus zooms in on the ignavia principum as
a way to explain why the civil wars of ad 69 did not last longer. Yet there are also
significant differences between the two passages. For one thing, Tacitus as author
offers us a much broader chronological sweep than the onlookers did: where they
cited examples from a narrow time frame (the 40s bc), Tacitus as author begins his
survey much earlier, incorporating a veiled reference to the destruction of Carthage
in 146 bc in the phrase aemulis urbibus . . . excisis, and within the first century bc,
pulling the focus back to include Marius and Sulla. There are also signs that at
Hist. 2.38 Tacitus is quietly “correcting” some of the naive assertions made by the
onlookers at Hist. 1.50. So where the onlookers had suggested that an important
difference between now and then was that the earlier struggle had taken place inter
bonos, Tacitus appears to challenge this when he calls Pompey occultior non melior,
“more guarded, but no better.”18 The immediate point of comparison is of course
with Marius and Sulla, who have just been mentioned, but the clear message is that
all three individuals are flawed and dangerous and that these protagonists of the
earlier civil wars cannot plausibly be called boni.
Also, where the onlookers had characterized the republican civil wars as a
destructive phenomenon that seemed to come out of nowhere and their current
troubles as being imposed fataliter, Tacitus ruthlessly traces the causes of civil war
back to the original conflict of the orders under the Republic, the struggles between
the senators and the people that he so vividly characterises as temptamenta civilium
bellorum, “trial runs for civil wars.”19 So where the senators, equites, and populus at
Hist. 1.50 are now temporarily (and unusually) united in the face of adversity,
Tacitus at 2.38 introduces irony by seeing their current troubles as being rooted in
their own long history of conflict during the Republic.20 Tacitus’ authorial gloss on
the onlookers’ highly selective representation of the republican civil wars is implic-
itly critical and suggests that they would have benefited from a more robust intel-
lectual engagement with the historical records of their own republican past.21
This brings me to a crucial aspect of this passage, namely, its Sallustian style. A
detailed analysis of the passage at Hist. 2.38 shows that Tacitus draws especially on
themes and language from Sal. Cat. 10–11, Jug. 41–42, and Hist. 1.7 and 1.12.22 Tacitus’
inclusion here of a Sallustian history in miniature shows what a different and
self-critical view of the past can be gleaned from a thoughtful and analytical engage-
ment with his predecessor’s works. It is interesting, for example, that the onlookers’
synkrisis includes one phrase, vastitatem Italiae (Tac. Hist. 1.50.2), that is Sallustian
in tone (cf. vastitas Italiae, Jug. 5.2), but it is as if they have pointedly taken on board
Sallust’s depiction of the effects of civil war without looking at its causes.23 The full
Sallustian passage in which the phrase appears is pretty damning (Jug. 5.1–2):
bellum scripturus sum quod populus Romanus cum Iugurtha rege

Numidarum gessit, primum quia magnum et atrox variaque victoria fuit,
dehinc quia tunc primum superbiae nobilitatis obviam itum est; quae
contentio divina et humana cuncta permiscuit eoque vecordiae processit
ut studiis civilibus bellum atque vastitas Italiae finem faceret.
I intend to write about the war that the Roman people waged with
Jugurtha, king of the Numidians, firstly because it was huge, fierce, and
had varying degrees of success, and secondly because it was then for the
first time that a challenge was made against the arrogance of the nobility.
This struggle threw everything, human and divine, into chaos and
reached such a pitch of madness that war and the devastation of Italy was
the culmination of civil discord.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the senators, equites, and populus at Hist. 1.50 steer clear
of following Sallust and blaming the conduct of their own ancestors as the root
cause of the current civil wars, leaving it to Tacitus as author to fill in the
unpleasant gaps.24 What seems to be happening at Hist. 2.38 is that Tacitus as
author is superimposing his own, more damning assessment of the relationship
between the civil wars of the past and those of the present on the selective and
superficial engagement of the onlookers at Hist. 1.50. Where they stressed decline
in the caliber of the leaders, Tacitus pointedly draws our attention to continuity
in the causes of civil war, particularly with the insistent anaphora of
eadem . . . ira . . . eadem . . . rabies . . . eaedem . . . causae (with phrasing made tauter
by asyndeton) at the end of the passage. Perhaps after all, though, we should not
be too critical of the onlookers, who are directly caught up in confusing and
126 cycles
devastating events. We can draw a parallel here with Horace’s question to the
Roman people when he asks why these civil wars are happening (Epod. 7.13–16):
furorne caecus an rapit vis acrior

an culpa? responsum date!
tacent, et ora pallor albus inficit,
mentesque perculsae stupent.25
Does some blind fury drive you on, or some stronger power or collective
guilt? Give a reply! They remain silent, and a ghostly pallor tinges their
faces, while their minds are shattered and dazed.
In comparison with Horace’s Romans, at least Tacitus’ citizens do not remain silent,
but in some sense, it is fair to say that their minds are still shattered and dazed.
A synkrisis of the two passages, Hist. 1.50 and 2.38, shows that it is up to the historian,
from a perspective sharpened by his detailed knowledge of the past, and with his
perceptions clarified by the passing of time, to put forward causes and explanations
for these civil wars after the event.26
4. What Could I Do? Past Civil Wars Offer Guidance in the Present
(Tac. Hist. 3.51)
We have seen how Tacitus superimposes his more candid moralizing analysis of
civil war on the comparatively ineffectual efforts of the onlookers as they try to use
the past to make sense of current events. If Tacitus pits his historian’s acumen
against the bemused contemporaries of the civil war in ad 69, our third passage
shows him doing something rather similar with his fellow historians. This is a
passage that has understandably attracted much interest from modern critics
because of what it can tell us about Tacitean historiography and his attitudes toward
the republican past (Hist. 3.51):
In some very widely read historians (celeberrimos auctores) I find

endorsement of the following story. The victors displayed such disregard
for right and wrong that a common cavalry soldier claimed that he had
killed his brother in the recent battle and demanded a reward from his
leaders. Common morality did not allow them to reward the murder, but
the very nature of civil war prevented them from punishing it. So they
decided to put the man off by claiming that the reward he deserved was
too great to be paid on the spot. And there the story ends (nec quidquam
ultra traditur). However, an equally ghastly crime (par scelus) had
occurred in a previous civil war, for in the battle against Cinna on the
Janiculum, a soldier of Pompeius Strabo killed his brother, and then,

when he realized what he had done, committed suicide. So Sisenna
relates. So earlier generations were more sharply attuned than we are
both to the glory created by good deeds and to the remorse caused by
wicked actions. At any rate, it will be appropriate for me to cite these and
similar anecdotes from ancient history when the context calls for
examples of good conduct or consolation for evil.27
This chapter, with its focus on fratricide during civil war, goes right to the heart of
the topic of this volume and can be approached from many different angles, but let
us consider it first from a historiographical point of view. Tacitus’ appeal to celeber-
rimi auctores at the opening of the story about this rogue Flavian soldier is most
intriguing. It may suggest that he anticipates skepticism from his own readers and
that he therefore appeals preemptively to the weight of the historical tradition to
bolster the plausibility of the story. Particularly as the incident involves a soldier
from the victorious Flavian army, it could indeed be the case that his audience
would be suspicious, either because such discreditable stories do not usually attach
themselves to the victorious side in a civil war or because it is peculiarly similar to
an earlier story told about a Vitellian soldier, Julius Mansuetus, who inadvertently
kills his own father (Hist. 3.25.2–3). The insistent appeal to celeberrimi auctores cer-
tainly sets alarm bells ringing for A. J. Woodman, who argues that neither story is
genuine, since two poems attributed to Seneca the younger describe a very similar
incident in the civil war between Octavian and Antony about soldiers unwittingly
killing their brothers ([Sen.], Epig. 69 and 70).28
Whether or not the basic story is true, it is likely that Tacitus has two reasons
for incorporating it. In the first place, Tacitus sets himself up in a competitive rela-
tionship with the unnamed celeberrimi auctores whose works he has consulted: so,
multiple sources appear to have related the incident involving the fratricidal soldier,
but as the dissatisfied concluding remark nec quidquam ultra traditur shows, they
do not give details about what happened next, and they tell the tale as an isolated
incident from ad 69. In comparison, Tacitus trumps his fellow historians and shows
off his rigorous efforts to carry out proper comparative research by introducing a
par scelus from Sisenna’s account of an incident from 87 bc (also featured at Liv.
Per. 79), when a soldier inadvertently kills his brother and then commits suicide
after realizing what he has done.29
Yet there is more at stake here than just scoring points from fellow historians.
Tacitus also includes the story about the Flavian fratricide because it allows him
scope to broaden the focus of his narrative by engaging in comparisons between the
republican and imperial civil wars. The dynamics at work here have something in
common with our first extract: where the onlookers point to a decline in the caliber
128 cycles
of the leaders, so that Vitellius and Otho are pale shadows of the likes of Julius
Caesar and Augustus, so Tacitus uses his two stories to demonstrate that the
common soldier in Sisenna’s account is morally superior to the Flavian fratricide in
ad 69 because he at least commits suicide when he realizes the horror of what he
has done. However, where Tacitus parts company with the onlookers is in his will-
ingness to use the comparison between present and past to admit collective respon-
sibility for these civil wars at all levels of society. Finding fault with the caliber of the
leaders is all very well, but in fact all Roman citizens, from the highest to the lowest,
need to examine their own conduct against the standards of the past, even when
that past is tarnished and preserves incidents about which most people would
rather forget. In making comparisons between past and present civil wars, Tacitus
is to some extent mirroring what the protagonists of civil war themselves tend to
do. We should think here of Pompey’s famous tag: “What Sulla could do, I can do”
(Cic. Att. 9.10.2: Sulla potuit, ego non potero?). Yet rather than using the negative
examples of the past to justify the misdeeds of the present, Tacitus is showing his
audience that it is possible to respond to the civil wars of the past more construc-
tively. Rather than simply closing one’s eyes to previous civil wars, it is better to
contemplate them for what can be gleaned about good conduct on an individual
basis, however ugly the collective circumstances. This utilitarian stance has
something in common with Tacitus’ famous assertion in the Agricola that there can
be great men under bad emperors (Ag. 42.4).
5. Conclusions
To conclude, each of these passages, focalized in the first case through internal pro-
tagonists and in the second two instances through Tacitus himself as author, is for-
mally marked off from the surrounding narrative as a conspicuously reflective
moment. As such, they repay comparative analysis. The first passage (Hist. 1.50)
opens up the dialog between past and present civil wars, but in a flawed and
imperfect way, as the confused onlookers try to make sense of the current circum-
stances by comparing them with previous civil wars. Yet this only serves to reinforce
their sense of aporia. In the second passage (Hist. 2.38), we see Tacitus superimpos-
ing the more nuanced interpretation of a historian and quietly correcting the
onlookers’ reading of the situation with a more honest and authoritative engage-
ment with the past. He embraces a much broader chronological sweep in his bird’s-
eye view of the past, and he is also prepared to admit collective responsibility and
to stress the timeless continuity in the reasons why civil wars happen.
Given that civil war is likely to be a recurrent phenomenon for Romans, Tacitus
moves to a more utilitarian mode in the third passage (Hist. 3.51).30 Here, Tacitus sets
himself up in a competitive relationship with his fellow historians, but this is not just
an exercise in scoring points; it is intended to introduce practical precedents from

previous civil wars. These show that even a single individual can behave in better or
worse ways, however dire the collective circumstances. Seneca the Elder put into the
mouth of the Augustan orator Titus Labienus the memorable aphorism that “the best
defense in the case of civil war is forgetfulness” (Con. 10.3.5: optima civilis belli defensio
oblivio est). For Tacitus, the civil wars of the past can (and should) serve as a kind of
route map to the civil wars of the present (and the future). Individual leaders came
and went, but the phenomenon of civil war was constant. Those of his readers who
disagreed only had to contemplate the near miss of a civil war under Nerva, when a
complete lack of clarity about the succession raised the ugly possibility of civil war,
particularly after a praetorian mutiny in the summer of 97.31 Trajan’s adoption luckily
forestalled trouble, but in reading Tacitus’ extensive account of ad 69, his audience
could easily have visualized an alternative version of their own recent history.
notes
I would like to offer warm thanks to Cynthia Damon, Brian Breed, and Andreola Rossi
(as well as to Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst) for hosting
such a stimulating and memorable conference. I would also like to thank Merton College,
Oxford, for financial assistance in enabling me to attend.
1. Cf. Henderson 1998: 268 on the early chapters of Annals 1: “Tacitus’ Rome will be
measured against the grid programmed here.”
2. For a reader of the freshly published Histories, Actium was already 140 years in the
past, and the year of the four emperors had taken place 40 years before.
3. Of course, we should not forget that for ancient readers, the past was arguably more
“alive” than it sometimes can be for us today. The pervasiveness of exemplarity in history
and oratory, the practice of keeping imagines on display in aristocratic homes, and even the
palimpsestic physical fabric of Rome herself all contribute to this phenomenon. On this last
topic see the essays in Larmour and Spencer 2007. In addition, it is striking that Tacitus
formulates his question in terms of whether anyone had seen the Republic, not in terms of
whether anyone remembered it.
4. Fantham 1992: 90–121 and Conte 1968 offer helpful analysis of this passage.
5. See Gowing 2005: 85. On the power of autopsy, see Woodman and Martin 1996: 168–70.
6. It is typical that the last time we see Nestor in the Iliad (during the funeral games,
which form an envoi for many central figures from the epic), he is reminiscing about the
past (23.626–50). Even so, as Roisman 2005: 21 notes, there is an interesting twist when in
his catalog of sporting victories, he actually mentions a defeat in a chariot race during his
youth (23.638–42). Ovid has some typical fun at Nestor’s expense: over the course of a long
speech in which Nestor the archstoryteller reminisces about Caenis and the battle of the
Lapiths and Centaurs (Met. 12.182–535) and then Hercules (12.542–76), the Trojan war has
apparently moved from its early stages to its tenth year (12.584).
7. On the agonistic relationship between past and present in a different but related
context, see Moles 1993 on Livy’s preface.
8. On this passage, see Damon 2003: 201–2.
130 cycles
9. Translations of passages from the Histories are taken from the Penguin translation
of Wellesley, revised by R. Ash.
10. It is striking that Plutarch at Oth. 9.5 includes a similar negative assessment of
Otho and Vitellius in comparison with the protagonists of the republican civil wars
(specifically Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey) but attributes it to the soldiers of both
armies before the first battle of Bedriacum, when the men are contemplating finding their
own emperor as an alternative. Tacitus includes a more detailed public reaction to the two
rival principes at Hist. 2.31.1.
11. Keitel 1984 analyzes how Tacitus uses the urbs capta motif in his accounts of the
principates of Tiberius and Nero to imply that “the princeps was waging a kind of war in
peace-time against his own people” (306).
12. For an interesting negative assessment of Julius Caesar, see Plin. Nat. 7.92.
13. Goodyear 1972: 159–60, citing Haverfield 1912: 195–200, esp. 197–99, reminds us that
this section appears to contain a subversive allusion to the opening section of Augustus’
Res gestae.
14. Cf. Brutus’ letter to Cicero (ad Brut. 1.6.2) written on 19 May 43 bc, which
mentions that Pansa’s doctor Glycon had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in
Pansa’s death. Yet in comparison, App. BC 3.75–76 gives Pansa a deathbed speech delivered
to Octavian in which there is no sign of foul play (and at BC 3.71 Hirtius is simply killed in
battle, fighting against the enemy). Dio 46.39 mentions that Octavian was charged with
causing the deaths of Hirtius and Pansa so that he could take over the consulship, but no
details are given about who made this accusation. Velleius Paterculus 2.61.4 notes the deaths
of the two consuls but says nothing about Octavian’s involvement, while Florus Epit. 2.25
makes no mention of Hirtius and Pansa and is highly flattering toward Octavian. Keitel
1984: 314 sees a suggestive link between Tacitus’ citation of the suspicious deaths of Hirtius
and Pansa (who stand in Octavian’s way) and the equally suspicious deaths of Gaius and
Lucius Caesar (who stood in the way of Tiberius: Ann. 1.3.3).
15. The negative focus on alcohol, for instance, links Antony and Vitellius; see Ash
1999: 95, 99.
16. The adverb fataliter is itself rare and conspicuous. Before Tacitus (who has it again
at Hist. 1.71.2), it appears only at Cic. Div. 2.19 and Ov. Met. 12.67; then Suet. Jul. 59.1,
Justinian Dig. 50.16.135, five times in the Historia Augusta, and fourteen times in Servius’
commentary on the Aeneid.
17. On this passage, see Ash 2007: 180–83.
18. Tacitus later criticizes Pompey as gravior remediis quam delicta erant suarumque
legum auctor idem ac subversor, quae armis tuebatur armis amisit (Ann. 3.28.1). See further
Woodman and Martin 1996: 255–56.
19. Temptamentum is a very rare and eye-catching word in this sense (OLD 1), only
here in Tacitus and infrequent elsewhere (Ov. Met. 15.629, V. Fl. 1.102).
20. See Raaflaub 2005. The first secession of the plebs is supposed to have taken place
in 494 bc (Liv. 2.31.7–33.3 with Ogilvie 1965: 309–18).
21. Even the civil war between Marius (e plebe infima) and Sulla (nobilium saevissi-
mus) is pointedly presented as reflecting the conflict of the orders. The contrasting social
origins of the pair is of course acknowledged elsewhere (e.g., Marius: Vell. 2.11.1, Plu.
Mar. 3.1; Sulla: Sal. Jug. 95.3, Vell. 2.17.2, Plu. Sull. 1.1), but the sharp polarization of Tacitus’
tags for the pair (both preceding their names) is significant.
22. See Syme 1958: 198–99, 738–42, Ash 2007: 176–77, 180–83.
23. It is possible that the onlookers are meant to be seen as using the phrase without
being aware of the Sallustian heritage. It also crops up at Cic. Att. 9.10.3. Shackleton Bailey 1968:
378 cites Tyrell and Purser 1904–33: 247: the phrase “would appear to be a kind of fixed and
recognised expression in Latin.” Cicero is certainly devoted to it (Catil. 1.12, 4.2, Sul. 33, Flac. 1,
Sest. 12, Div. 1.49, Fam. 10.33), but it is also associated with Hannibal (Liv. 21.22, V. Max. 1.7 ext.),
reminding us again of the sort of foreign enemy ideally to be confronted by Romans in warfare.
The citation at Cic. Fam. 10.33 is particularly relevant because the phrase appears in a letter of
Asinius Pollio to Cicero referring to the devastation of Italy after the battle of Mutina in 43 bc.
24. An interesting coda to this discussion can be found in Gowing 2005: 98 discussing
Nero’s principate: “In a regime whose theme was innovation, not restoration, celebrating
the Republican past simply had no place in the agenda. It is no accident, I think, that the
Republican past, much less the civil war, figure in no serious way in Neronian literature or
in Neronian historiography (such as we know it). This is why, of course, Lucan’s Pharsalia
seems so out of place; and why Eumolpus’ own poetic version of the civil war in Petronius’
Satyricon seems so simultaneously comical and unnerving. Ironically, if we believe Cassius
Dio (62.29), the only person to have addressed Republican history directly was Nero
himself: he contemplated writing a 400-book epic on Roman history.” If this reading is
right, perhaps the surprising thing is not that the onlookers drew unnuanced comparisons
with the republican civil wars, but that they made the comparisons at all.
25. Mankin 1995: 149 comments on the significant shift from the second person to the
third person as Horace no longer speaks directly to the Romans, “perhaps in disgust at his
audience’s stupidity (16), or in despair at knowing the cause but not the cure for what
afflicts them.” See too on this passage Watson 2003: 279–82.
26. For Tacitus conspicuously drawing attention to his own role in providing analysis
of causes, see Hist. 1.4.1 (ut . . . ratio etiam causaeque noscantur) with Damon 2003: 100–101,
1.51.1 (initia causasque . . . expediam), 2.1.1 (initia causasque) with Ash 2007: 74, and Ann. 4.1.1
(initium et causa penes Aelium Seianum) with Martin and Woodman 1989: 79–80.
27. Hardie 1993a discusses this passage and similar instances from epic.
28. See Woodman 1983a, esp. 116–19 = Woodman 1998: 1–20, esp. 13–16.
29. There is a similar instance at Ann. 4.53.2, when Tacitus cites the commentarii of
Agrippina the younger for an incident relating to her mother’s life and shows off his own
diligence by relating something a scriptoribus annalium non traditum. See Martin and
Woodman 1989: 219.
30. Plin. Nat. 2.174 is also interesting, for in a passage outlining how far water
encroaches on available land, he sees all warfare as a recurrent and inevitable feature of the
human sphere because the extent of decent land in the orbis terrarum is limited. Wars
happen because there is not enough territory to go around, so the same areas have to serve
again and again as a means for the ambitious to acquire glory. On a different note, one of
the anonymous readers for this volume asked the intriguing question whether civil war is
in fact a necessary complement to empire.
31. See Berriman and Todd 2001 and Grainger 2003: 96–100. On Nerva’s career before
96, see Murison 2003.
7
Aeacidae Pyrrhi: Patterns of
Myth and History in Aeneid 1–6
David Quint
The Roman civil wars haunt the Aeneid, and not only in the poem’s second
half where the anguished poet-narrator asks Jupiter why he allows Trojans
and Italians destined to live in eternal peace to clash in battle (12.503–4). At
the divine council in book 10 (11–13), Jupiter had himself declared that the
time for fighting would come in Rome’s struggle against Carthage for
mastery over the Mediterranean. But, in the first half of the poem, Rome’s
future foreign conflicts cannot, in fact, be separated from the civil war that
is supposed to be its opposite. The Aeneid simultaneously articulates and
questions the ideology of the Augustan regime that described the last
round of the civil wars, the conflict with Mark Antony, as a war against
Cleopatra, of West against East. The episodes in books 1–4, the Trojans’
sojourn in Carthage and Aeneas’ earlier wanderings through the lands of
the Greeks who defeated him at Troy, project not only a history of Roman
conquests over non-Roman peoples but also the victory at Actium that
continues and completes that history. The underworld in book 6 provides
a retrospect both on the epic’s first half and on Rome’s history; it repeats
the coupling of vanquished Carthaginian and Greek enemies, even as it
confesses to enemies within and a reality of civil war.
1. Greeks and Carthaginians
Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy and the subsequent wanderings of his
Trojan remnant through the territory of the victorious Greeks in books 2
134 cycles
and 3 of the Aeneid. His narrative is enclosed by frame episodes that in a typically
Virgilian fashion take the form of a chiasmus or reversal of terms. Two Greek sup-
pliants, each the companion of Ulysses—Sinon at the beginning of book 2,
Achaemenides at the end of book 3—implore the Trojans to have mercy on them,
and each calls on the stars and the gods to witness his account (2.154–55 and
3.599–601):1
vos, aeterni ignes, et non violabile vestrum

testor numen
You, ever-lasting fires, and your inviolable power, I call to witness
per sidera testor,

per superos atque hoc caeli spirabile lumen,
tollite me, Teucri.
By the stars I swear, by the gods above and this light of heaven that we
breathe, rescue me, Trojans.
Priam himself (2.146–47: ipse . . . Priamus) frees Sinon, while no one less than
Anchises, who has replaced Priam as the authoritative Trojan elder in book 3, offers
his hand (3.610: ipse pater dextram Anchises) to the entreating Achaemenides. Of
course the Sinon who begs for his life (2.143–44: oro, miserere laborum / tantorum,
miserere animi non digna ferentis; “I beg you, have pity on sufferings so great, have
pity on a spirit that has borne things undeserved”) is a liar and false suppliant,
whose treachery leads the Trojans to bring the wooden horse into their city and
makes possible the Greek victory engineered by Ulysses in book 2. But, by the end
of book 3, the situation has been reversed and the suppliant (3.592: supplex)
Achaemenides, marooned survivor of the encounter between the cyclops
Polyphemus and a now unfortunate Ulysses (3.691: infelicis Ulixi), is found to be a
true and worthy object of Trojan pity and aid (3.667: supplice sic merito).
This reversal of the positions of Trojans and Greeks between books 2 and 3 is
mirrored, as Michael Putnam (1980) has pointed out, by a second pair of contrast-
ing supplication scenes in books 1 and 4 and a similar reversal, this time in the
situation between Trojans and Carthaginians. In book 1, the Trojan Ilioneus, playing
the same role as ambassador that he will later play to the Latins in book 7, comes
with his companions “begging the favor” (1.519: orantes veniam) of Dido; he suc-
cessfully implores her to grant a harbor to their ships (1.524): Troes te miseri, ventis
maria omnia vecti, / oramus; “in our wretched state we Trojans borne by the winds
across all seas beg you.” It is a moment that Dido, in her fury at Aeneas for leaving
her, recalls to him in book 4 (373–74). Now she sends her own ambassador, her sister
Anna, to seek Aeneas’ final favor (4.435: extremam hanc oro veniam) and to put off
patterns of myth and history in aeneid 1–6 135
his sailing until the spring, and she assumes the position of a suppliant (414, 424:
supplex). But Anna can obtain nothing from Aeneas; the fates stand in the way.
The mirroring of these supplication scenes in the poem’s narrative present at
Carthage and in the inset, retrospective story that Aeneas tells of the Trojans’ disaster
and ensuing wanderings produces a clear-cut and troubling contrast. The Greek
Achaemenides, who himself acknowledges that his fighting at Troy may place him
beyond the Trojans’ mercy (3.602–6), nonetheless receives their assistance. Anna is
refused any comfort for a Dido to whom Aeneas and the Trojans bear a real debt for
her own merciful hospitality; cursing the Trojans and their posterity, the spurned,
enraged queen will have turned at the end of book 4 into a version of the Homeric
Polyphemus from whom Achaemenides is rescued. The Aeneid reflects in these two
episodes on the future Rome’s relationship to the Greek and Carthaginian worlds it
will conquer, turning both into its suppliants. With whatever historical injustice
and implied Roman culpability, Punic–Carthaginian culture is cast away and even
demonized as something monstrous. With due caveats made against its Sinon-like
treachery, Greco–Hellenistic culture is taken on board for Rome’s journey through
history. Exhibit number one for this absorption of Greek culture is the Aeneid itself,
with its emulation of Homeric epic, which Virgil here improves on by including a
character whom both Ulysses and Homer forgot on the coast of the cyclopes. The
poem’s myth of Trojan ancestry provides a politically acceptable version of this
Hellenization, for Homer’s Trojans seem to be culturally Greek—they worship the
same gods as the Achaeans—while ethnically and racially distinct from their
enemies. When, in the second half of the poem, Virgil uses the convention of giving
Greek names to the Trojans fighting against the native Latins in Italy, he does so to
suggest not only that they are now assuming the role of victorious Greeks in a
replay of the Trojan war but also that they are the bearers of Greekness to a more
backward, rustic Italic world. Aeneas and his Trojan remnant can import Greek civ-
ilization into the future Rome on the condition of not being Greeks themselves.
2. Pyrrhus and King Pyrrhus
The structures of reversals we have described in books 2 and 3, where Greeks are
first victorious over and then suppliants to the Trojans, then in books 1 and 4, where
Trojans first supplicate Carthaginians and then Carthaginians supplicate them in
turn, play out on the small scale the larger chiasmus of the Aeneid, where defeated
Trojans of the first six books set in the Mediterranean go on to be victorious in the
last six books set in Italy. They also tell of Rome’s historical ascendancy over the
Greek-speaking world and of its eventual victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars;
the two projects famously coincided in the year 146 bce, when Roman armies sacked
136 cycles
both Corinth and Carthage. The unfolding of the poem artfully confuses this
historical chronology, presenting the Trojan/Roman contact with Carthage first in
the narrative sequence of the poem but recording, in Aeneas’ account to Dido, a still
earlier confrontation with the Greeks: Rome thus takes on the Greeks both before
and in between its great struggles with Carthage. In fact, Rome had fought a formi-
dable Greek enemy, the Macedonian King Pyrrhus of Epirus, in the wars of 280–75
bce before the first of the Punic Wars broke out in 264 bce; it would fight the
Second and Third Macedonian wars against kings who claimed, as Pyrrhus had
done, to be descendants of Achilles, before the Third Punic War of 149–46. These
events correspond to the sandwiching of the Greek books 2 and 3 between the
Carthagian ones, 1 and 4; they also suggest the prominence in books 2 and 3 of
Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles.
The contrast of the suppliants Sinon and Achaemenides at either end of the
narration of books 2 and 3 is only one example of how the two books mirror each
other.2 At the center of each book is an episode involving Pyrrhus. In book 2, Aeneas,
having gained access to Priam’s palace through a secret passageway where
Andromache used to bring Astyanax to visit his royal grandfather (453–57), watches
in horror as Pyrrhus—the name the poem uses interchangeably with Neoptolemus
to designate the hero—kills Priam’s son Polites before the eyes of Priam and Hecuba.
Priam calls into question the paternity that Pyrrhus claims from Achilles for this act
of impiety, an impiety that Pyrrhus redoubles by dragging Priam to the sacred
household altar before killing him, telling him to bear news to his father in the
underworld of the acts of his “degenerate Neoptolemus” (2.549: degeneremque
Neoptolemum narrare memento).3 Aeneas concisely describes the double act again
when he is trying to persuade Anchises to abandon Troy (2.662–63):
iamque aderit multo Priami de sanguine Pyrrhus,

natum ante ora patris, patrem qui obtruncat ad aras.
Soon Pyrrhus will be here, bathed in the blood of Priam, he who strikes
down the son before the face of his father, the father at the altars.
In book 3, retribution has found Pyrrhus out. Aeneas sails into Buthrotum and is
astonished to find that Priam’s son Helenus is the king there, having taken posses-
sion of both the scepter of Achillean Pyrrhus (3.296: Aeacidae Pyrrhi) and of
Andromache, whom Pyrrhus had taken and then set aside as his wife. Helenus has
made over Buthrotum into a small-scale reconstruction of Troy. It now becomes
clear that Virgil mentioned Andromache and Astyanax and their passageway just
before the great episode of Pyrrhus, Polites, and Priam in book 2 precisely in order
to create a mirroring effect in book 3, for Andromache soon appears to tell Aeneas
how Pyrrhus met his end: “the maddened Orestes surprised him and cut him down
on his father Achilles’ altars” (3.331–32: furiis agitatus Orestes / excipit incautum
patriasque obtruncat ad aras). The echo and the reciprocity are clear.
Pyrrhus’ fate, which is felt to be a merited requital for his more-than-Achillean
ferocity and impiety at Troy, is a centrally placed emblem for the more general
downfall of the victorious Greeks in the Aeneid’s depiction of the aftermath of the
Trojan War: the line of Achilles is cut off, that of Agamemnon is hardly better off in
fury-driven Orestes, Ulysses is unfortunate, and Diomedes in book 11 (255–56) lists
the punishments of all those who violated the fields of Troy. This reversal reflects as
well on the fortunes of historical Greece and Greeks as they were to fall beneath the
political domination of Rome.
The Buthrotum episode reflects especially on the beginning of this historical
turnaround, for it strongly connects the mythological Pyrrhus of the poem to the
historical King Pyrrhus, a figure who haunted Roman historical memory, where he
routinely was coupled with Hannibal as the foreign invaders who almost destroyed
the republic.4 Pyrrhus won two battles over Roman armies at Heraclea (280 bce)
and Asculum (279), victories so costly that they gave rise to the term “Pyrrhic,”
before he was defeated at Beneventum (275) and withdrew from Italy. Virgil’s
Buthrotum itself lies in King Pyrrhus’ old kingdom of Epirus; “Epirus” is men-
tioned at either end of the episode as a kind of verbal frame to it (3.292, 503). The
Pyrrhus of the poem has passed his kingdom on to the Trojan son of Priam and seer
Helenus; King Pyrrhus had a son named Helenus who inherited his father’s
domain.
Rome’s conflict with King Pyrrhus had been the subject of book 6 of Ennius’
Annales, of which only fragments have come down to us.5 Their editor, Otto Skutsch
(1985), suggests that Virgil’s Aeacidae Pyrrhi (3.296) may be an echo of Ennius’
Aeacida Burrus (Ann. 475), and Aeacida reappears in two other places in the frag-
ments as a patronymic for the Epirote king who asserted his descent from Achilles.6
More intriguingly, Skutsch connects the inscription that Aeneas, in the episode of
book 3 that immediately precedes the visit to Buthrotum, sets up with a trophy of
captured Greek armor at the temple of Apollo near the future site of the battle of
Actium: Aeneas haec de Danais victoribus arma; “Aeneas won these arms from
the victorious Greeks” (3.288) with a scene reported by Orosius where it is King
Pyrrhus who dedicates an inscription in the temple of Jupiter in Tarentum in words
presumably drawn from the Annales:
qui antehac
Invicti fuere viri, pater optume Olympi,
Hos ego vi pugna, vici victusque sum ab isdem.7
those men who previously were unconquered, best father of Olympus,

those I conquered by force of battle, and am conquered by them.
138 cycles
Ennius’ Pyrrhus already seems to recognize that his victories are Pyrrhic and that,
in spite of appearances, Rome is winning the day. The highly conjectural link
Skutsch suggests between the two passages gains some force, I would suggest, from
the proximity of Aeneas’ Actium inscription to the Buthrotum episode with its
Pyrrhus who recalls the King Pyrrhus in question.
Quite apart from the question of an Ennian model, this proximity, both narrative
and geographical, couples these two episodes, as does the narrative detail of Helenus
giving the departing Aeneas, as if in substitution for the arms that he suspends as a
trophy at Actium, the arms of Neoptolemus/Pyrrhus himself (3.467–69); the visit to
Buthrotum is framed on either end by arms taken from once victorious Greeks. The
two episodes spell out the same historical destiny: the thwarting of Greek victors and
of would-be, but in the end degenerate, descendants of Achilles who find themselves
defeated by Roman arms. This destiny will culminate and perhaps be sealed once and
for all when Augustus defeats Antony and Cleopatra and the Greek-speaking East at
Actium. By coordinating Actium and Pyrrhus’ Buthrotum in Aeneas’ mythic adven-
tures, Virgil can suggest the continuity of Rome’s ascendance from its first repulse of
King Pyrrhus to the most recent victory of Aeneas’ Julian heir. In between Rome
fought the Second Macedonian War against Philip V, whom, in Livy’s account (31.8–14)
the Roman consul Publius Sulpicius in his appeal for war depicted as an imminent
invader of Italy much more dangerous than Pyrrhus; Rome fought the Third
Macedonian War against his son Perseus; both Philip (see Sil. 15.291) and Perseus (see
Prop. 4.11.39) claimed descent from Achilles. After Aemilius Paullus defeated Perseus
at Pydna in 168 bce, Rome subjected Epirus to exemplary punishment: seventy cities
were sacked, and a hundred and fifty thousand persons were made slaves. In 44 bce,
in spite of lobbying efforts against it by Cicero, a Roman colony was planted at
Buthrotum, and much of the native Greek population was replaced.8 In the wake of
Actium, Augustus sponsored new building projects at Nicopolis, the site where Aeneas
hangs up his trophy and inscription.9 All of these events may be reflected in Virgil’s
fiction where Epirus is dispossessed from Achillean Pyrrhus and colonized by Trojans
who make a city in the image of their lost homeland.
Books 2 and 3 are prophetic of Rome’s historical conquest of Greece and the
Greek-speaking East just as books 1 and 4 predict Rome’s victory over Carthage.
The epic evokes Hannibal, the Carthaginian scourge, as the mythological Dido’s
avenger (4.625: ultor) in her curse that pledges continual war from North African
shores, just as it names Hannibal’s Greek counterpart, King Pyrrhus of Epirus,
beneath the equally mythological Pyrrhus. In the narrative sequence of the poem,
these first four books attest to Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean world through
foreign war, while its last four books depicting the strife between Trojans and Latins
in Italy reflect on the civil wars that succeeded that conquest. But Actium, the last
Roman victory over Greek and Eastern arms, complicates this apparent historical
sequence. The senate dominated by Octavian had in 32 bce declared war on

Cleopatra, the Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, but the real target was Mark Antony, and
the war was a civil war. Of course, not only does Dido stand at the origins of Rome’s
future conflict with Carthage but as a North African Queen who loves a Trojan–
Roman general and eventually commits suicide, she also stands in for Cleopatra.
And Cleopatra was a Greek: the placing of the Greek books 2 and 3 inside the
Carthaginian books 1 and 4 suggests how these two historical enemies of Rome
have been reborn together in Antony’s Egyptian consort.
This idea concludes Propertius 3.11, where the poet praises Augustus’ victory at
Actium:
Hannibalis spolia et victi monumenta Syphacis, 59

et Pyrrhi ad nostros gloria fracta pedes? 60
Leucadius versas acies memorabit Apollo: 69
tantum operis belli sustulit una dies.10 70
[Where are] the spoils and trophies of defeated Hannibal and Syphax and
the glory of Pyrrhus broken at our feet? Leucadian Apollo will retell the
routed ranks at Actium: one day of battle destroyed so great a work of war.
Cleopatra is the new Hannibal, the new Pyrrhus; Actium is the continuation, if also
the incomparably glorious—one day is all it took!—and culminating stage of
Rome’s conquest of dangerous foreign enemies. The testimony of this other
Augustan poet spells out the terms of the new regime’s propaganda and also explains
how Virgil has coordinated the Carthaginian and Greek books of Aeneas’ wander-
ings and the prominent placement of the mythological Pyrrhus at the respective
centers of the latter books 2 and 3. But if, following the terms of this propaganda,
the Aeneid papers over the last of Rome’s recent civil wars as a foreign war, those
same terms suggest a converse interpretation of history and its continuities: that
Rome’s foreign conquests already contain the seeds of, and cannot be separated
from, her internecine strife. The chronology that seems to be traced by Virgil’s epic,
Rome’s domination over the Mediterranean in the first half of the poem, her descent
into civil strife in the second, is short-circuited when external enemies (Dido/
Hannibal, Pyrrhus/King Pyrrhus) already seem poised to come back, like a ghostly
return of the repressed, as internal ones.
3. Anchises Explains Roman History
This return is literally reenacted among the ghosts of the underworld in book 6, and
here, too, chronology is short-circuited: in the parade and catalog of Aeneas’ Roman
140 cycles
descendants that Anchises points out to his son. Virgil constructs the episode through
two different ring compositions or chiasmus forms. One of these begins with Aeneas’
encounters with the shades of Dido (6.450–76) and Deiphobus (6.494–547), who
recapitulate the first four books of the poem. The Carthaginian queen turns away in
silence from Aeneas, who too late expresses his regrets and unwillingness to part
from her; she, with her people, remains the enemy (472: inimica) of the Trojan hero
and of the future Rome. Deiphobus, the slain son of Priam, rankling at the treason
of Helen, whom he wed after the death of Paris, calls for vengeance against all Greeks
(6.529–30): di, talia Grais / instaurate, pio si poenas ore reposco; “Gods, repay the same
to the Greeks, if I ask for their punishment with pious lips.” Coupled with Dido—the
two respectively play the roles of the angry Ajax and the wronged husband
Agamemnon whose ghosts Odysseus meets in his consultation with the underworld
in the Odyssey (11.542–67, 387–464)—Deiphobus speaks where she is silent and takes
over, in however reduced and gnomic a form, her curse from book 4, a curse that is
directed not, as is hers, against the Trojans and their Roman descendants, but, in an
opposite direction, from a Trojan against the Greeks. The retribution he seeks has
already been demonstrated in book 3, particularly in the fate of Pyrrhus, the son of
Achilles; it is the ghost of Achilles whom Odysseus meets between those of
Agamemnon and Ajax in Virgil’s Odyssean model (Od. 11.465–540) and who is
momentarily consoled for his underworld existence when he asks about his son
Neoptolemus and is given a glowing report by Ulysses, a report that the Aeneid goes
to some length to gainsay.11 The ghosts of Dido and Deiphobus in book 6 thus repeat,
in the same narrative ordering of the Aeneid itself, the visit to Carthage and Aeneas’
subsequent retelling of the fall of Troy and his wanderings through Greek territories,
and they evoke the double historical focus of the first four books on Rome’s future
victories in the Punic Wars and her conquests over Greeks.
This double focus returns at the end of Anchises’ parade of the shades who will
be great figures in Roman history. The catalog itself has the form of a chiastic ring
composition: Romulus and the kings are succeeded by Brutus and by early repub-
lican heroes of the fourth century bce, then a jump to the civil war between Caesar
and Pompey, a return backward into republican history of the second and third
centuries bce that ends with Marcellus, the third winner of the spolia opima, which,
in Virgil’s apparently deliberate variation of the story, Marcellus dedicates not to
Jupiter, but to Quirinus, the deified Romulus and first winner of this best of tro-
phies, thus bringing Anchises’ pageant back to where it began: Romulus and kings—
republic—civil war—republic—Romulus.12 This historical overview seems to
recoil from the civil strife at its center and to double back on itself to Rome’s begin-
nings: a similar idea initiates the catalog with its jump from beginning to end, from
Romulus to Augustus, the second Romulus who turns time back to the golden age
(792–94). Romulus, born from the line of Aeneas’ second son, Silvius (760–65),
is juxtaposed with Augustus and the Julian line that descends from Iulus, the older
Trojan heir (789–90: Caesar et omnis Iuli / progenies; “Caesar and all the offspring of
Iulus”). The at least threefold effect is to cast Augustus as the refounder of the
Roman state, to associate him as far as the poet dares with kingship, and, most rad-
ically, to insinuate that all Roman history before Augustus—including Romulus
himself—has been a usurpation by the cadet line of Aeneas’ descendants and has
been waiting all along for the restoration of its rightful Julian dynast. The Augustan
regime thus seems to rise from mythic origins rather than from a more recent his-
tory of civil war: it seems to lie both in and outside of Roman history.
In fact, the subsequent unfolding of Anchises’ catalog quickly jumps forward
through the history of the Republic to reach an impasse with the civil conflict bet-
ween Julius Caesar and Pompey. It is both a historical and logical leap: Caesar’s war
against his son-in-law Pompey is aligned with the slayings of their sons by Brutus
and Torquatus (820–25) and suggests a killing off of the future that has been built
into the republic since its beginning (6.830–31):13
aggeribus socer Alpinis atque arce Monoeci

descendens, gener adversis instructus Eois!
The father-in-law [Caesar] descending from Alpine camps and the

fortress of Monoecus [Monaco], the son-in-law [Pompey] provided
against him with armies of the East.
It appears that history cannot go forward from this point of national cataclysm.
A related, if different, question arises with the natural death of the destined heir
Marcellus (860–86) in the mournful supplement to the pageant. Instead, Anchises
starts going backward to celebrate the heroes of Rome’s foreign wars (6.836–46):
There is he [Mummius] who, having triumphed over Corinth, will drive

his chariot as victor to the high Capitol, famous for the Achaeans he has
killed; that one [L. Aemilius Paullus] will overturn Argos and
Agamemnon’s Mycenae and that descendant of Achilles [Perseus], from
the lineage of Achilles strong in arms, the revenger of his ancestors of
Troy and of the violated temple of Minerva. Who would leave you in
silence, great Cato or you, Cossus? Who the family of the Gracchi, or the
twin Scipios, two thunderbolts of war, calamitous to Libya? Or you
Fabricius rich in poverty? Or you, Serranus [C. Attilius Regulus], sowing
the furrow? Where do you sweep my weary steps, o Fabii? You are that
[Q. Fabius] Maximus who alone restored our state by delaying.
The list moves generally backward in time and from victories over Greeks to
victories over Carthage, although it contains its own mini-chiasmus between its
142 cycles
opening mention of the destruction of Corinth in verse 146 and the mention of the
two Scipios in verses 842–43, the second of whom, Lucius Aemilius Scipio, con-
quered and razed Carthage in the same year. In between, in the longest vignette, the
poem celebrates the victory of Aemilius Paullus at Pydna in 168 over Achillean
Perseus, Aeaciden (839), as revenge against the Greeks for the Trojan War. Deiphobus’
earlier call for retribution has been fulfilled. Aeacida was also the poem’s earlier
epithet for Pyrrhus and had been used by Ennius for his King Pyrrhus; the latter is
recalled by the naming of his Roman foe Fabricius at verses 843–44. The catalog
alternates between Greek and Carthaginian enemies:
Greece:
Mummius 146 bce
L. Aemilius Paullus against Perseus 168
Carthage:
Scipio Africanus 202
Scipio Aemilianus 146
Greece:
Fabricius against Pyrrhus 278
Carthage:
C. Attilius Regulus 257
Q. Fabius Maximus 217
M. Claudius Marcellus (co-consul with Fabius Maximus) won
spolia opima 222
By placing the Roman victors over Carthage last in this sequence, the passage thus
closes the ring composition that opened earlier in the book with Dido and
Deiphobus: just as Dido precedes Deiphobus and the narrative of the larger poem
begins in Carthage before turning, in Aeneas’ inset narration, to tell of Greece, so
here, in a reverse sequence the catalog moves from Rome’s more recent conquests
over Greeks to its earlier confrontation with Carthage, although, in doing so, it
chronologically “misplaces” the still earlier defeat of King Pyrrhus, much as Aeneas’
recounting of the earlier crimes and death of Pyrrhus is contained within the larger
Carthage episode.
In this switch in book 6 from the showdown between Julius Caesar and Pompey
to a backward rehearsing of Roman heroism against Carthaginian and Greek foes,
the Aeneid repeats on the small scale and makes explicit the ideological stakes that
govern the fiction of its first half. The civil wars that brought Augustus to power
cannot be told and, in fact, lead to a dead end. The way out of this impasse is to
disguise them as foreign wars, as latter-day versions of Rome’s earlier conquests in
the Mediterranean. These conquests have been the historical corollary and refer-
ences of the mythological wanderings of Aeneas and his defeated Trojans through
Greece and Carthage in the preceding books of the poem. The fiction has invoked
the future specters of King Pyrrhus and Hannibal, but the reader knows that history
has turned prior defeat into Roman victory, already suggested by the fates of Pyrrhus
and Dido. Moreover, the Aeneid constructs a typology of Rome’s twofold history of
conquest over its foreign enemies so that Augustus, Aeneas’ decendant, may be seen
to have fulfilled it by crushing the Greek/African Cleopatra at Actium. Virgil may
suggest here in book 6 that Julius Caesar’s battles against Pompey’s Eastern armies
of the Greek-named dawn (Eois 831) are already transformed into foreign conflict:
at the battle of Actium depicted on the shield of Aeneas in book 8 (686), Antony will
be characterized as victor ab Aurorae populis: “victor from the peoples of the
Dawn.”14 But the struggle between the in-laws Caesar and Pompey is unmistakably
civil, and its juxtaposition with the history of Rome’s encounters with Greece and
Carthage makes the strategy of the poem glaringly visible. Civil war remains at the
center of Anchises’ pageant, however much its ring composition and retreat to the
past may seek to contain it, and the same may be true for the Aeneid as a whole.
notes
1. All citations from the Aeneid are taken from Mynors 1969.
2. Aeneas’ repeated plunges back into the fallen city of Troy in book 2 in spite of the
repeated supernatural urgings that he leave by the ghost of Hector (289–95), by Venus
(589–620), by Anchises after the portent of the flames surrounding Iulus’ head (701–4),
finally by the ghost of Creusa (771–89) are matched in book 3 by his repeated sidetracking
of his mission to reach Italy by the failed buildings of cities in Thrace (13–68) and Crete
(121–71), which are versions of the little replica Troy he will encounter at Buthrotum
(293–94), as well as by the stormy seas that carry him off course to the homes of the
monstrous harpies (192–93) and cyclopes (554–55), preludes, we now realize, to the great
storm of book 1 that will take Aeneas and the Trojans to Carthage, one more version of a
Troy doomed by history, and to the Polyphemus-like Dido. In both books, forward progress
toward the future Rome is countered by the regressive pull of the past: by the actual city of
Troy in book 2, by nostalgic versions of it in book 3.
3. The criminality of Pyrrhus’ act was recognized in antiquity; according to Arrian
(An. 1.11), when Alexander the Great paid a visit to Troy before embarking on his conquest
of Persia, “he offered sacrifice to Priam upon the altar of Zeus the household god,” that is,
on the altar where Pyrrhus had killed him, “deprecating the wrath against the progeny of
Neoptolemus, from whom Alexander himself was descended” (trans. E. J. Chinnock, in
Godolphin 1942, 2:416).
4. For examples, Cic. Off. 1.38; Hor. Carm. 3.6; Liv. 22.59, 31.7, 35.14; Prop. 3.11 (cited
below); a topos by the time of Juvenal: 12.108, 14.161–62.
5. For a consideration of the fragments thought to come from book 6 of the Annales,
the book of Pyrrhus, see Fantham 2006.
6. Skutsch 1985: 634; see frr. 167 and 197.
7. Skutsch 1985: 345–46 on fr. 180.
144 cycles
8. The efforts of Cicero and of his friend Atticus on behalf of the Greek inhabitants
of Buthrotum, whose lands were being confiscated to be given to Julius Caesar’s veterans,
are recorded in the Letters to Atticus between 14.10 and 16.16; see esp. 15.19, 15.29, 16.2, 16.4,
16.16. See Bergemann 1998; for the earlier history of the province, see Cabanes 1976.
9. Servius ad A. 3.501 links the little Troy at Buthrotum to Nicopolis. On the link
between the two colonies, see Stahl 1998.
10. The text printed here is that of Butler and Barber (1933); Heyworth has a different
order of the couplets in his recent Oxford Classical Text.
11. In Od. 11, the ghost of Agamemnon also asks after his son, Orestes (11.457–61). I have
argued elsewhere that Virgil also imitates this underworld scene in book 3 in the Buthrotum
episode, where Andromache seems to answer the questions of both the ghosts of Agamemon
and Achilles by revealing that the maddened Orestes has killed Neoptolemus, goes on in the
same passage to imitate those ghosts by herself asking about the surviving son Ascanius, who
might continue the prowess of his uncle Hector by whose empty tomb Andromache is
mourning (3.330–43) and who is also, she later suggests, a substitute for her own dead Astyanax
(3.482–91). The inference is that Buthrotum, fixed in the Trojan past, is itself a kind of
underworld and place of the dead, that Andromache is a living ghost. See Quint 1993: 58–61.
Virgil rewrites the underworld scene of the Odyssey twice. Were he to have followed its logic
completely in book 6, Virgil would have included an encounter not only with the Trojan
equivalent of Agamemnon, Deiphobus, but also with the Trojan equivalent of Achilles, Hector.
But the earlier rewriting of Od. 11 in book 3, Andromache at Hector’s empty tomb, as well as
the still earlier apparition of the ghost of Hector to the sleeping Aeneas in book 2.280–97, have
already taken the place of such a meeting in the Virgilian underworld. Significantly, the first
thing that Aeneas sees on waking from his vision of Hector is the burning house of Deiphobus
(2.310–11). One might compare Deiphobus’ question to Aeneas (6.531–33):
sed te qui vivum casus, age fare vicissim,

attulerint. pelagine venis erroribus actus
an monitu divum?
But come in turn tell us what circumstances brought you here alive. Do you
come driven by the wanderings of the sea or at the behest of the gods?
with Andromache’s earlier question (3.337–38):
sed tibi qui cursum venti, quae fata dedere?

aut quisnam ignarum nostris deus appulit oris?
But what winds, what fates appointed your course? Or what god has driven you
to our shores in ignorance?
both of which depend on Od. 11.155–62, the question that the ghost of his mother Antikleia
poses to Odysseus.
12. On the spolia opima, see Harrison 1989, Putnam 1985.
13. For an opposite reading of Brutus, see Lefèvre 1998, esp. 103–7. This account leaves
out Virgil’s qualification of the first Brutus’ motives: laudumque immensa cupido; “measure-
less desire for praise” (6.823).
14. J. D. Reed (2007: 159–61) has discussed the relationship of the two passages and the
casting of Pompey in book 6 as an “Oriental” like Antony.
8
Ab Urbe Condita: Roman
History on the Shield of Aeneas
Andreola Rossi
The age of Augustus is a time of reckoning. Rome has fulfilled its destiny, or
so we are told. It has become the caput mundi, the urbs aeterna, the city that
seems to have defied even the harshest laws of nature. At the summit of its
telos, Rome can finally halt, turn back, and, in light of its recent accomplish-
ments, celebrate its own cultural, religious, and historical past. In his Res
Gestae Augustus proudly attests that in addition to his many new projects, he
also oversaw the rebuilding (refeci) of eighty-two of the city’s temples, which
he returned to ancient (or improved) splendor (RG 20). Under his patronage
the so-called Fasti Capitolini, a permanent record of Rome’s past magistrates
and triumphatores from the expulsion of the kings to the present, were com-
piled and publicly displayed on the interior surface of the triple arch of
Augustus,1 the last of Rome’s triumphatores. And to the age of Augustus we
can possibly date also the ambitious eighty-book edition of the Annales
maximi, a year-by-year chronicle of the res gestae of the urbs on the model of
the ancient chronicle of the pontifex maximus (Frier 1979: 197). But in the
Augustan political program antiquarian inquiry went hand in hand with a
process of systematic “reorganization” of Rome’s historical past. One example
will suffice. In the forum of Augustus, one of the princeps’ most ambitious
and ideologically loaded building projects, Roman history is literally carved
in the form of statues (and corresponding tituli) into a complex architectural
construct that is, as has often been noted, a powerful reflection of Augustan
one-dimensional, telos-oriented rewriting of the past.2
But Augustus’ was not the only version of Roman history. In the same
period, for example, Livy composed his Ab urbe condita, a history of Rome
146 cycles
from its origin to Livy’s own present that offered a somewhat alternative recon-
struction of the Roman past.3 And in this past-obsessed age, the Aeneid too does
not fail to present the reader with important representations of that past. In this
chapter I focus on one of them, the one engraved on the shield of Aeneas.
Although the version of Roman history presented on the shield of Aeneas is
not the poem’s only historical prolepsis, it differs from the others in one important
respect. The prophecy of Jupiter in Aeneid 1 and the so-called “parade of heroes” in
Aeneid 6 are each narrated by a character of the tale, Jupiter and Anchises, respec-
tively. The speech frame makes readers fully aware that they are presented with an
already packaged version of the Roman past. James J. O’Hara, for example, has been
especially persuasive in analyzing the rhetorical proficiency of the above-mentioned
speakers, who often distort, embellish, or omit events for an all-too-obvious
self-serving purpose.4
Differently from the other prolepses of the poem, the account of Roman his-
tory in Aeneid 8 presents readers with an object, an all-important shield, on whose
round surface is engraved the history of the city from its foundation to the present.
The shield is an artifact to be gazed upon. But by whom? When in Aeneid 1 Aeneas
comes face-to-face with the images of his own past, the fall of Troy depicted on
Juno’s temple, the reader views these images through an identifiable intermediary,
Aeneas. Aeneas at first marvels (456: miratur), then sees (456: videt; 466: videbat),
and finally recognizes (470: agnoscit lacrimans; 488: se quoque . . . agnovit). Aeneas’
response to what he sees is inseparable from his own personal experience of the
events, and, in turn, his response directs the readers’ response (Barchiesi 1997: 275;
Putnam 1998: 23). But in Aeneid 8, Aeneas does not, or cannot, play a similar role.
True, he is the all-important recipient of the shield, but he fails to be our inter-
preter. As he receives the wondrous gift from his mother, Aeneas marvels (730:
miratur) and rejoices (730: gaudet), but his is a happiness coupled with or, maybe,
stemming from ignorance: “ignorant of the subject matter he rejoices in the image”
(730: rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet).5 This is a drastic turnabout from Aeneas’
agnosco lacrimans of Aeneid 1.6 Aeneas-less, the reader seems to be left staring
directly at the elusive object without a guide, without an intermediary who can
direct his gaze and construe a meaningful, albeit selective, narrative of the object.
How do we readers understand and make sense of the scenes of the shield?
I believe that Aeneas’ reception of the story of the fall of Troy on the temple of
Juno can be used as an important model for the reader’s reception of the history of
Rome depicted on the shield: just as Aeneas’ response to the scenes sculpted on the
temple is inseparable from his personal experience of the fall of Troy, so too our
response to the scenes of the shield seems to be inseparable from our personal
experience of the story of the Aeneid (and our experience of the voice of the epic
narrator). The multiple interpretations of the ekphrasis attest to that. In keeping
roman history on the shield of aeneas 147
with a patriotic reading of the poem, Douglas Drew (1927: 27–28) divided the shield
into four groups of scenes corresponding to the four virtues of Augustus. In a sim-
ilar vein, R. D. Williams (1972–73, 2:265–66) in his commentary stressed the “moral”
aspects of the shield and viewed the initial scenes as positive exempla of the Roman
character.7 In a study that analyzes the Aeneid’s incorporation of cosmological
models, Philip Hardie (1986: 336–76) posited how, by replacing the shield of Achilles
with the shield of Aeneas, the Aeneid unequivocally has the history of Rome (shield
of Aeneas) replace the history of the world (shield of Achilles).8 In line with their
more ambivalent readings of the Aeneid, Michael Putnam (1998: 119–88) and Robert
Gurval (1995: 200–47) analyze how the various scenes of the shield problematize
Rome’s history by blending successfully the positive and the negative, the glory of
war with its horror and tragedy, courage with sacrifice and loss. In the present essay
I try to articulate yet another narrative of the shield that has been so far somewhat
occluded, one that complements, yet does not elide, the others and that is based on
an experience of the Aeneid as a poem of civil wars.
It comes as no surprise that the narrative of the shield opens with a description of
the “two infants,” the twins, Romulus and Remus. They, or at least one of them, will
be the founders of the city whose story is celebrated on the shield. But here, the
twins are not placed in any direct relation with Rome. Quite the opposite. They are
shown lying in a green cave, innocently playing in the grass while the she-wolf (631:
lupam), their surrogate mother (632: matrem), allows them to suck her milk without
fear while she fondles the boys and fashions their bodies with her tongue. The scene
is pointedly set in a pre-Roman context and in a marked bucolic environment.
True, the emphatic genitive Mavortis links the site with Mars, the father of the infant
twins, but the green cave (630: viridi . . . in antro) in which they lie is also the place
where the Virgilian shepherds of the Bucolics find relief from the hardship of toil
and, more importantly, the place they will be forced to abandon because of Roman
civil wars. In Eclogue 1 a distressed Meliboeus laments his fate and forced exile,
remembering precisely that green cave from which he used to watch from afar his
goats hanging from a bushy rock (1.75: viridi . . . in antro). The spatial dimension in
which the twins appear to live is thus markedly nonurban or, rather, antiurban. In
this bucolic setting, they are allowed to live joyfully (632: ludere) as twins (631: gemi-
nos), as two (634: alternos). This is the story that could have been but was not. As in
Eclogue 1, the walls of Rome loom too closely on the horizon, nec procul hinc Romam
(635), and their glorious rising shatters the very existence of this world. The rape of
the Sabines and the war with Alba, the myths of foundation that on the shield cel-
ebrate the coming into existence of the urbs, mark a sudden turn to violence, “the
Sabine women seized without sanction” (635: raptas sine more Sabinas), and, even
more importantly, a dramatic failure of that harmonious coexistence of kin that
148 cycles
had characterized the pre-Rome lives of Romulus and Remus, for these two myths
of foundation seem to conjoin Rome’s rise with the rise of its intestine war. In his
detailed account of the rape of the Sabines, Livy famously has the Sabine women
dash dramatically into the middle of the fray to halt the bloodshed between kin,
their fathers and husbands (1.13.3): “If your relationship—if our marriage—is hate-
ful to you, turn your anger against us! We are the reason for the war, we the cause of
wounds and slaughter for husbands and fathers. It would be better to perish than to
live without one of you, either widowed or orphaned.” Commenting on the nature
of the war between Rome and Alba, Livy once again does not fail to identify its
intestine quality (1.23.1): “Both sides made extraordinary preparations for a war,
which closely resembled a civil war between parents and children, for both were of
Trojan descent, since Lavinium was an offshoot of Troy, and Alba of Lavinium, and
the Romans were sprung from the stock of the kings of Alba.” Our epic narrator is
not so explicit, but hints at the civil quality of these wars are many and have been
duly noted by Gurval (1995: 219). I add only a few additional points. At 638, the nar-
rator defines the war between the Romans and the Sabines as a war between “the
sons of Romulus and old Tatius and the stern inhabitants of Cures” (Romulidis
Tatioque seni Curibusque severis). Gurval (1995: 219) rightly notes that the charac-
terization of the two antagonists, the sons of Romulus and the old Tatius (who is
never so labeled in any other tradition), calls attention to the peculiar nature of the
war, sons against fathers (or actually future fathers-in-law). But the epithet “sons of
Romulus” is significant for other reasons as well: it becomes the all-important
reminder that after the foundation of the urbs (or because of the foundation of
urbs) only one of those young twins, whom we just saw happily playing together in
the cave, will have survived to give the name to the race. Cures is also noteworthy in
this context. We know, again from Livy, that once peace between the two nations
was reached, the Roman people were named Quirites from the town of Cures:
Quirites a Curibus appellati (1.13.5). Civil war overtones are difficult to miss. The
line reads ominously: the race of Romulus fought against the Quirites, that is, the
Roman people.
Of the war with Alba, there is only one detail engraved on the shield, the killing
of the treacherous Mettus. Addressed emphatically as Albane, a critical reminder of
his kinship to Rome,9 Mettus on the shield is represented in the moment in which
his body is dismembered by two four-horse chariots driving in different directions
(8.642–45):
haud procul inde citae Mettum in diversa quadrigae

distulerant (at tu dictis, Albane, maneres!),
raptabatque viri mendacis viscera Tullus
per silvam, et sparsi rorabant sanguine vepres.
Not far from here two four-horse chariots rushing in opposite sides had
torn Mettus apart (but Alban, you should have kept your word!), and
Tullus was dragging the guts of the deceitful man through the woods and
the bespattered brambles dripped with bloody dew.
The punishment is labeled cruel and un-Roman by Livy (1.28.11; similarly, Gurval
1995: 221–23).10 But it is also tempting to read Virgil’s choice as a symbolic represen-
tation of the intestine war between Rome and Alba. Mettus’ dismemberment is
chosen by the narrator from among all the other episodes of the war because it
defines symbolically the nature of the war between Rome and Alba. The tearing
apart of Mettus’ body and the dragging of his entrails (viscera), a term all too recur-
rent in the imagery of civil wars, are emblematic of a war that has torn apart a civic
body that should have remained united. We may remember that Sallust in his
Bellum Jugurthinum had used a similar metaphor to describe the beginning of
Roman civil discord: “thus the community was split into two and the republic,
which found itself in the middle, was torn asunder” (41.5: ita omnia in duas partis
abstracta sunt, res publica, quae media fuerat, dilacerata).
True, on both occasions reconciliation does follow. On the shield, the episode
of the rape of the Sabine women is significantly resolved by the ratification of peace
(641: iungebant foedera) formalized by sacrifice. And on both occasions, Livy sug-
gests that peace does not simply put an end to the struggle between the kindred
people. It brings about a greater Rome, Roma aucta. As a result of Rome’s war with
the Sabines, the city of Rome is doubled (1.13.5: ita geminata urbe). As a result of
Rome’s war with Alba, Rome doubles in the number of its citizens (1.30.1: duplicatur
civium numerus), it extends its physical boundaries (1.30.1: Caelius additur urbi
mons; “the Caelian hill is added to the city”), and admits among the patrician fam-
ilies the Alban aristocracy (1.30.2: principes Albanorum in patres ut ea quoque pars
rei publicae cresceret legit Iulios, Servilios, Quinctios, Geganios, Curiatios, Cloelios;
“the leading men of the Albans he incorporated into the patricians, so that that
part of the republic would also grow, the Julii, Servilii, Quinctii, Geganii, Curiatii,
Cloelii”).11 But this process of gemination, duplication, and expansion comes at the
price of internal conflict. The epic narrator’s choice to introduce the history of
Rome with these two problematic myths (and possibly, as I have stated earlier, with
an allusion to the very foundation of the city that brings about the elimination
from history of one of the twin boys) seems to underscore this key, almost genetic,
quality of Rome’s history. In a dramatic historical paradox, Rome’s potential for
expansion stems from, and is inextricably connected with, internecine conflict, its
fighting its double.
We now turn to three apparently more inspirational stories that celebrate
Rome’s great accomplishments: the Romans’ glorious fight for liberty, Manlius’
150 cycles
heroic repulsion of the Gallic attack against Rome’s Capitol, and Catiline hanging
on a menacing crag in the underworld as a deserved punishment for his conspiracy
against Rome. I begin with the story at the top of the shield: the Gauls’ surprise
attack on the Roman citadel. The year is 390, the Gauls have full control of the lower
part of Rome, and the Romans are besieged on the citadel. When one night the
Gauls attempt a surprise attack climbing up the Tarpeian rock, Manlius, awoken by
the geese, single-handedly averts the danger, repels the attackers, and saves the
Capitol. The story is indeed one of the most glorious moments in Roman history
and one of deep moral and religious significance.12 But, unfortunately, the connec-
tions between Manlius and the Tarpeian rock do not end here. They develop well
beyond this glorious episode. The rock that witnessed Manlius’ glorious action is
also the place from which Manlius was hurled down by the Roman people, an omi-
nous coincidence noted by Livy (6.20.12):
tribuni de saxo Tarpeio deiecerunt locusque idem in uno nomine et

eximiae gloriae monumentum et poenae ultimae fuit.
The tribunes hurled him from the Tarpeian rock, and the same place for
one man was the monument of exceptional glory and final punishment.
The Tarpeian rock that on the shield brackets the name of Manlius, Tarpeiae Manlius
arcis (652), is a reminder not only of Manlius’ glory but also of his disgraceful end.
The crime for which this former savior of the country met such an unfortunate fate
is no less important. Again, Livy reports the story in detail. The man who belonged
to a patrician family (6.11.2) and who had rescued Rome in its moment of danger,
stirred by excessive ambition (nimius animi) and ill will toward Camillus (6.11.3), the
other excessively (in Manlius’ opinion) celebrated savior of the country, establishes
himself in the role of “liberator,” liberator, “father of the Roman plebs,” pater plebis
Romanae, and “champion of the liberty of the plebs,” vindex libertatis plebis (6.14.5
and 10 with Kraus 1994 ad loc.). Challenging patrician power on behalf of the people,
he stirs up an insurrection (seditio) that brings Rome to the brink of an intestinum
bellum (6.19.2): “a large part were crying out that a Servilius Ahala was needed, who
would not aggravate a public enemy by ordering him thrown into chains but would
put an end to an internal war through the sacrifice of a single citizen.” And yet his-
tory turns out differently from what Manlius had hoped. The would-be champion
of the people’s freedom is first suspected (6.18.16: “it is from there the beginning of
his agitation for kingship is said to have begun”) then formally charged and con-
victed of plotting to restore the monarchy, crimen regni, by the same people he had
tried to defend, so odious had his name become to them for his “desire for kingship”
(Liv. 6.20.4–5: cupiditas regni).13 The same charge is attested in Cicero (Rep. 2.49):
“Spurius Cassius and Marcus Manlius and Spurius Maelius are said to have desired
to seize kingship.”14 In his final tribute to him (6.20.14), Livy comments that Manlius
would have been a man worthy of memory (memorabilis) had he not lived in a free
city (nisi in libera civitate natus esset).
The account on the shield of Aeneas does not retell Manlius’ entire history but
rather focuses most closely on the first part of the glorious life of the hero, with the
description of the Gauls’ ascent to the Capitol occupying eight lines out of the
eleven. But the mention of the Tarpeian rock on the shield is not the only reminder
of Manlius’ two-sided life.15 The first three lines that describe Manlius’ “relation” to
the Capitol are filled with ambiguous language. Manlius held the heights of the
Capitol (653: et capitolia celsa tenebat) the night of the Gauls’ attack, but the Capitol,
the center of Roman republican power, is also “held” by Manlius as the gravitational
point from which he organizes his secession and threatens the libertas of the city in
his quest for sovereign power. So Livy (6.19.1): “on the other side, however, the sen-
ate were discussing this secession of the plebs to a private house, which happened to
be situated on the Capitol, and the great danger with which liberty was menaced.”16
And the symbol of monarchical power, the royal palace, is not far away; it makes its
appearance in the following line: “and the fresh (new) royal dwelling was bristling
with the thatch of Romulus” (654: Romuleoque recens horrebat regia culmo). The
line has troubled commentators since antiquity because the palace of Romulus was
usually connected with the Palatine Hill, not with the Capitol.17 Heyne thought the
line was spurious. Ribbeck, following the Parma manuscript, inserted it after 641.
Conington (1882–83, 3:148) retained it on account of its descriptive value but added
that “it is natural that the Capitol should be represented with the accessories familiar
to a Roman, whether they formed a part of the historical scene or not, and Virgil
doubtless meant to note Vulcan’s art in giving the effect of the ‘strawbuilt shed’ in
gold, just as in Il. 18.548 we are told that the blackness of the ploughed land was
represented in gold.” Thus he takes recens as referring both to the freshness and
sharpness of Vulcan’s work and as an allusion to the constant renovation of the casa
Romuli in the historical times attested by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.79). This
reading is adopted also by K. W. Gransden and Putnam.18 And yet there could be
more to the line. The adjective recens does not simply refer to the newly made arti-
fact or to the physical restoration of the Romulean hut. Rather, the term recens is
possibly suggestive also of the “ideological” restoration of the Romulean hut, with
an implicit reference to Manlius’ outrageous attempt to “restore” a regnum on the
Capitol, the very center of republican power. Thus, the story of Manlius placed
prominently on the top of the shield, in summo (yet another reference to Capitolinus’
quest for the summit), becomes disturbingly two-sided. Manlius is savior and
champion of Roman freedom on the one hand and conspirator against his own
state and a would-be monarch on the other.
152 cycles
In this latter role Manlius matches the two important characters who frame
him on the shield, Tarquinius and Catiline, both guilty, just like Manlius, of waging
war against their own state and fellow citizens out of cupiditas regni. In an attempt
to reestablish the monarchy, the exiled Tarquinius, with the aid of Porsenna,
marches against his own city and engages in what is defacto another internal
struggle, a notion emphasized by eiectum, “exiled,” in the opening line.19 Catiline,
represented in the shield as hanging on a menacing crag and trembling at the faces
of furies in Tartarus, is guilty of a similar crime. In Sallust’s narrative of the famous
conspiracy, Catiline is a man who, inflamed by cupiditas, stirs a conspiracy to over-
throw the res publica and establish a regnum (Cat. 5.6):
hunc post dominationem Luci Sullae lubido maxuma invaserat rei

publicae capiundae; neque id quibus modis adsequeretur, dum sibi
regnum pararet, quicquam pensi habebat.
After the domination of Sulla the man had been seized with a mighty
desire for getting control of the government, having little thought by
what manner he would achieve it, provided he made a kingdom for
himself.20
As pointed out by both Christina Kraus and Stephen Oakley,21 Livy portrays
Manlius in ostensibly Catilinarian terms, underscoring the connection between the
two and casting Manlius as Catiline’s legitimate ancestor.22
Among the many threads that connect the scenes of the shield, another one
emerges, a thread that, this time around, outlines a troubling pattern of Roman
history. In a pre-Roman and nonurban spatial dimension, twins are allowed to live
harmoniously together and coexist as kin and equals. Once the walls of Rome rise,
the urbs seems to follow a process of growth founded on the intestine assimilation
(not without struggle) of its kin, a process that in its extreme aspect threatens to
incorporate the city itself and the body of the republic into the body of the one
man, the unus vir.
In his analysis of the shield of Aeneas, David Quint has effectively shown that
in the battle of Actium, the shield’s famous centerpiece, the forces of the two con-
tenders, Augustus and Antony, are differentiated by a set of binary oppositions that
range from concrete details of the historical and political situation to abstractions
of a mythic, psychosexual, and philosophical nature (West/East, One/Many, Male/
Female, Control/Loss of control, Cosmic order/Chaos, Olympian gods/Monster
gods, Permanence and reason/Flux and loss of control) that effectively transform
the recent war of civil strife into a war of foreign conquest, that is, a bellum inter-
num into a bellum externum.23 The reading seems all the more compelling if, as
Alessandro Barchiesi (1997: 276) suggests, Augustus himself is represented as the
ideal spectator: “it is therefore striking that the prince, included in the very center
of the visual artifact, and displaced one millennium into the future, is represented
as performing the act of not only of viewing but also of recognizing” (720–22):24
ipse sedens niveo candentis limine Phoebi

dona recognoscit populorum aptatque superbis
postibus, incedunt victae longo ordine gentes
He himself, sitting at the snowy threshold of shining Phoebus, reviews

the gifts of the nations and hangs them at the proud doorposts: the
conquered nations pass in long array.
And yet the interpretation of the scenes that physically frame the battle of Actium
(and that the reader “views” first) may function also as the interpretative frame of
the object in the middle and allow for a different reading. From the perspective of
the narrative of the perimeter, the battle of Actium, which is both the center of the
shield and the culmination of that Roman history described by the surrounding
scenes, can also be interpreted exactly for what it is: the culmination of the process
that has defined the course and development of Roman history. With the last of its
civil wars, Rome has brought to completion its potential for growth. The urbs has
become one with the orbis, symbolically represented by the shield (Hardie 1986:
367). At the same time, the urbs has finally become one with the unus vir, who
sitting in review of the spoils of war on the threshold of the white marble temple of
Apollo at the top of the Palatine Hill—the umbilical point of the shield—has effec-
tively shifted back Rome’s center of power from the Capitol (the summit of Roman
republican power and the summit of the shield) to a new center, the Palatine Hill,
the place where the old regia of Romulus was once built.
In the narrative that introduces the shield of Aeneas, the reader is presented
with an exhaustive list of the major themes represented in the wondrous object
(625–29):
clipei non enarrabile textum.

illic res Italas Romanorumque triumphos
haud vatum ignarus venturique inscius aevi
fecerat ignipotens, illic genus omne futurae
stirpis ab Ascanio pugnataque in ordine bella
And the text of the shield that cannot be narrated. There the god of fire,
not ignorant of the prophets or unknowing of the coming age, had
fashioned the history of Italy and the triumphs of the Romans. There all
154 cycles
the generations of the stock born from Ascanius and the wars fought in
succession.25
Central to the summary is the theme of war (626: triumphos; 629: bella), a topic
indeed apt both for the shield as martial instrument and for the circumstances of
its delivery to Aeneas, who is about to wage a war that will bring a step closer the
founding of the city whose story is engraved on the shield. And yet, this introduc-
tion builds up expectation for a martial narrative that seems never to be fully deliv-
ered. Hardie (1986) noted the inconsistency and explained it as the result of a
selection, that is, understanding that the scenes narrativized are just some of the
many scenes depicted on the shield (346), and as a conspicuous attempt to
concentrate entirely on the success of Augustus in achieving world dominion
(350–51). This may indeed be correct, but in light of this reading of the shield,
another explanation is possible. The promises of a martial narrative are not, after
all, ignored altogether. The shield is, indeed, a narrative of the Roman wars narrated
in their chronological order, but the types of war are not entirely what we were
expecting. Vulcan, the craftsman, who is not ignorant of the words of the prophets,
has crafted an artistic object that parallels the ambiguous language of the prophets.
He has created a textum that is a maze of narrative threads and in which the story
of the glorious development of Rome from its unshaped form to world dominion
is sprinkled with traces of another history. Vulcan has created a text that is non
enarrabile,26 a text that is not only too beautiful,27 too long to tell,28 but also a text
that is literally impossible to narrate. It tells of multiple stories, and each reader is
allowed to choose his own narrative.
notes
1. Frier 1979: 145. On the Fasti Capitolini, see also Feeney 2007: 172–83.
2. See Zanker 1988: 210–15. Cf. also Barchiesi 2005, esp. 285–88. On Augustus’ building
projects, see also Kellum 1990, Favro 2005.
3. Luce 1990: 123–38 notes the marked difference between Livy’s version of Roman
history and the elogia of the forum.
4. O’Hara 1990: 132–63 (prophecy of Jupiter), 163–72 (parade of heroes).
5. See also Barchiesi 1997: 275.
6. Aeneas’ attitude here comes close to the joyous enthusiasm with which Cupid,
Venus’ other son, anticipates his mother’s gift of a well-rounded ball (yet another symbol of
the globe). For the episode, see A. R. 3.131–44 with Hunter 1989 ad 135.
7. For a similar patriotic reading, cf. Becker 1964, Binder 1971: 150–282, McKay 1998,
Miller and Lynn 2003, Scott 1997 (which compares Aeneas’ shield with the shield of the
Athena Parthenos). Cf. also Clausen 1987: 80–81. Although in many ways Clausen
emphasizes a more nuanced interpretation of the epic, he too reads the scenes of the shield
as glorifying Rome’s archaic pristine virtues and offering a vision of Roman history that
aligns the shield with the Augustan reconstruction of Rome’s past. Cf. also O’Hara 1990:
173–75, which concludes that “while the rest of the Aeneid does not depict right or wrong so
simplistically, the shield is propaganda and presents the distorted victor’s version of the
struggle between Antony and Octavian.”
8. For yet another reading, cf. Harrison 1997, which elaborates Warde Fowler’s
suggestion and views the “material escape of the city-state of Rome itself from destruction
or from demotion from its Italian and (later) Mediterranean hegemony” (70) as the
unifying principle of the scenes.
9. All the more so because at 629, the narrator states that the scenes of the shield
include also the story of the generations of the stock born from Ascanius, the same
Ascanius who in Aen. 5 (597–600) is explicitly hailed as the founder of Alba: “Ascanius,
when he circled Alba Longa with walls, brought back this custom and taught the ancient
Latins to celebrate it, in the way he had as a boy, and the youth of Troy with him; the
Albans taught it to their sons.” See also Gurval 1995: 222, which notes that the Alban race
evokes the long list of Alban kings that Virgil includes in the underworld as ancestors of the
Roman race. For the wordplay albane (clear, white of character) and mendax (given to
blemishes of soul) and for the lack of inner candor that leads to brambles stained with the
red dew of human blood, see Putnam 1998: 126.
10. For silvam possibly alluding to Silvius, the posthumous son of Aeneas, see Gurval
1995: 223. For maneres emphasizing the difference between “remaining whole” and
laceration (Mettus’ punishment), see Putnam 1998: 126.
11. Cf. also 1.28.7 (speech of Tullus Hostilius): Albani, populum omnem Albanum
Romam traducere in animo est, civitatem dare plebi, primores in patres legere, unam urbem,
unam rem publicam facere; ut ex uno quondam in duos populos divisa Albana res est, sic nunc
in unum redeat; “Men of Alba, it is my intention to transfer the entire population of Alba to
Rome, to give citizenship to your common people, to enroll the leading men in the senate,
to create one city, one republic; as once the state of Alba was divided from one into two
populations, so let it now return to unity.”
12. See Hardie 1986: 348, Clausen 1987: 81. Cf. also Putnam 1998: 157. By contrast,
Gurval 1995: 227 points to the connection between the Tarpeian rock and the story of
Tarpeia, the young woman who, bribed by golden gifts, admits the enemy into the
fortress. The mention of the Tarpeian rock would, thus, serve as a reminder of the greed
of the Gauls and the shameful bargaining of the Romans in the occasion of the Gallic
capture of Rome.
13. For the charge of crimen regni, see Bruno 1966. More generally for Livy’s
representation of Manlius, see Kraus 1994: 141–56, Jaeger 1997: 74–93, Oakley 1997–2005,
1:476–93, Wiseman 1979.
14. For the story of Spurius Maelius, see Lowrie in this volume.
15. Although I am not necessarily arguing that Virgil had Livy’s version in mind
(accounts of the seditio Manliana were present in earlier Roman annalists; see Oakley
1997–2005, 1:486–92), the second pentad was most certainly published toward the
beginning of the period 30–25 or, at the latest, before 23, and Virgil may have been able to
read Livy’s account. Cf. Oakley 1997–2005, 1:110: “One important consequence of this
discussion is that we have established that books vi–x predate the publication of Virgil’s
Aeneid.”
156 cycles
16. Cf. Kraus 1994 ad loc.: “If taken to its natural extreme, Manlius’ secession would
entail plebeian occupation of the arx, an enemy at the city center pushing the patres out
from within.” For Manlius and the Capitol, cf. also Jaeger 1997: 74–93.
17. On the basis of Vitruvius 2.1.5. Gransden 1976 ad loc., however, believes in the
improbable existence of two Romulean huts, one of which, supposedly, was on the Capitol
Hill; cf. also Eden 1975 ad loc.
18. Grandsen 1976 ad loc.; Putnam 1998: 130: “this verbal complex design . . . verbally
complements Vulcan’s own accomplishment that, remarkably, can both bristle and have the
appearance of freshness.”
19. Gurval 1995: 224, which also notes that the patronymic “sons of Aeneas” may
allude “to the association of the most famous descendant of Aeneas, Augustus Caesar, with
the claim of libertas and civil war.”
20. For the conspiracy as internal struggle, cf. Cic. Catil. 1.23: “But if you prefer to
work in the interest of my praise and glory, depart with your troublesome band of
criminals, join up with Manlius, incite dissolute citizens, separate yourself from the good
men, bring war to the fatherland (infer patriae bellum), exult in wicked banditry, so that
you might appear not to have been cast out among strangers by me, but to have gone to
your people at their invitation.”
21. Kraus 1994: 147, 154, 172, 176–77, 183, 187, 199, 204–5, 207, 209; Oakley 1997–2005,
1:481–84.
22. Cf. also Gurval 1995: 229 on the presence of Cato (Uticensis) as evoking in the
minds “of contemporary readers painful memories of civil conflict and defeat.”
23. Quint 1993: 24–31. See also Hardie 1986: 97–104 (a gigantomachy) and Harrison
1997. For a more ambiguous reading, see Gurval 1995: 236–44, which connects the narrative
of the shield with the narrative of the poem and especially Antony with Aeneas and
Cleopatra with Dido. Cf. Putnam 1998: 138–54, which emphasizes deep sympathy for the
defeated.
24. Barchiesi makes him the ideal spectator of the shield, but possibly (as the language
seems to suggest) he is the ideal spectator of his own scene.
25. For the meaning of textum as a written text in Virgil, see Bartsch 1998, esp. 327–28.
26. For interpretations of non enarrabile textum, see Eigler 1994 and Faber 2000.
27. Gransden 1976 ad loc.
28. Servius ad loc.
part iii
Aftermath
9
Creating a Grand Coalition
of True Roman Citizens:
On Caesar’s Political Strategy
in the Civil War
Kurt A. Raaflaub
1. Caesar’s Spanish Speech
In the summer of 49 bc, after a campaign that lasted only seven weeks,
Julius Caesar accepted the capitulation of the Pompeian forces in Spain
that were commanded by Afranius and Petreius. The second part of book
1 of Caesar’s own commentarii on the civil war, which we call Bellum civile
(Civ. 1.34–87), offers a highly artful and dramatic narrative of this
campaign.1 I recapitulate here only its end. Caesar’s determined soldiers
have trapped the Pompeians and prevented them from escaping to Further
Spain (63–70). In full sight of both armies Caesar’s cavalry has cut down
four Pompeian cohorts, further demoralizing the enemy (70.4–5).
Erat occasio bene gerendae rei: “this offered an opportunity to do
things well,” says Caesar (71.1). His army urged him to attack: the
Pompeians, thoroughly discouraged, would not be able to resist for long
(71.1–4). Not so Caesar. I quote (72.1–3; trans. Gardner 1967):
Caesar had come to hope that, since he had cut off his
opponents’ food supply, he might be able to settle the conflict
without involving his men in fighting or bloodshed. Why
should he sacrifice some of his men, even for a victory? Why
should he allow the troops who had done him such excellent
service to be wounded? Why, finally, should he tempt fortune?
160 aftermath
Especially since a good commander should be able to gain as much by

good counsel as by the sword. Besides, he was stirred by pity for the
citizens he knew must be killed; he would rather gain his ends with them
being safe and unhurt.
Caesar’s soldiers were not pleased, but he persisted—and was soon vindicated. The
next day, in the absence of their leaders, the Pompeian soldiers began to fraternize
with Caesar’s, thanked them for having spared their lives, and explored ways to
reach a peaceful settlement (72.4–74.7, concluding as follows):
The whole scene was one of joy and self-congratulation, one side
thankful at their escape from such great peril, the other rejoicing at
having, as it seemed, brought so great a conflict to a conclusion without
bloodshed. Everyone recognized that Caesar was reaping the benefits of
his original clemency, and his decision met with universal approval.
Yet such joy was premature. Petreius returned, restored discipline, and executed
some of Caesar’s soldiers who were caught in his camp, while Caesar treated the
Pompeians in his own camp with singular generosity (75–77). A few days later,
exhausted and starving, the Pompeian army capitulated (78–84.2). In hearing dis-
tance of both armies, Afranius begged for mercy, “in the most humble and abject
manner possible” (84.3–5). Caesar responded, again making sure that both armies
heard him (85).
First, he said, all but the enemy commanders had met their obligation (offi-
cium): he by refusing to seek an easy victory at great loss of life; his army by refusing
to react violently to the other’s outrage and protecting those they had in their
power; the opposing army by taking the initiative in seeking a peaceful solution in
order to save all their lives. Hence all ranks had engaged in compassion; only the
leaders, brutal, stubborn, and arrogant to the last, had abhorred from peace and
disregarded the conventions of truce and negotiation (85.1–4).
Second, Caesar said, despite all this, all he wanted was that the armies that his
enemies had built up against him over all those years be disbanded. For it was against
him (contra se) that such a large military force with such experienced commanders
had been assembled in Spain—in a province that was pacified and did not need such
protection (85.5–7). Against him (in se) a new type of command had been created
that allowed its holder to stay near Rome while playing the absentee governor of two
most warlike provinces (85.8). Against him (in se) the traditional rules concerning
provincial commands had been changed so that governorships were determined not
by election to high office, but through selection by a few. Against him (in se) the
excuse of age was invalidated so that commanders proven in earlier wars were again
mobilized to lead armies (85.9). In his case alone (in se uno) the right of successful
creating a grand coalition of true roman citizens 161
commanders to return home and to discharge their army with some honor or at
least without disgrace had been disregarded (85.10). All this, Caesar concluded, he
had borne with patience. He did not want to increase his own power by absorbing
the defeated army; he only wanted the enemy not to be able to use this army any
more against him. Its discharge from Spain was the only condition for peace (85.11–
12). Needless to say, this decision made Caesar a very popular man.
While we may admire Caesar’s patience, clemency, and wisdom, we should not
overlook that some of his claims in this speech are in fact quite outrageous. First, no
official truce had been concluded. Whatever the officium of the victorious general,
it most certainly was not the officium of either army to fraternize and seek a peace
accord. On the other hand, in preventing his army from changing sides, Petreius
had done nothing but his duty. Second, most of the military measures that Caesar
criticizes had in fact been realized with his approval. Pompey’s Spanish command,
like that of Crassus in Syria, was the result of the accord of Luca in 56, which restored
Caesar’s alliance with Pompey and Crassus and assigned to them the consulships of
55 as well as provincial commands that were endowed with the same number of
legions and legates as he, Caesar, had in Gaul. Pompey’s command in absentia was
part of the same deal and served the interests of all three allies.2 Pompey’s sole con-
sulship in 52 required Caesar’s approval and was balanced by concessions to him
(including the right to run for his second consulship in absentia). We have no
reason to think that their alliance, increasingly strained over the subsequent two
years, was already in tatters in early 52. Pompey’s lex de provinciis from the beginning
of that year made it possible to appoint previous magistrates to provincial com-
mands years after their office, thus abolishing the direct link between popular
election, office, and provincial command established by Gaius Gracchus’ law and
placing the senate in charge of these appointments. Even if Caesar was not con-
sulted in advance about this law, it was almost certainly not directed against him—
although later some of his opponents tried to use it against him.3 It is unclear what
Caesar found objectionable about calling military commanders out of retirement,
but since he objected to the legitimacy of the emergency decree of 7 January 49, he
also challenged the legitimacy of all the military decisions made on the basis of this
decree: hence his denunciation of the appointment of privati and, presumably, this
particular criticism.4 What remains, therefore, is only the last point: the refusal to
grant Caesar an honorable return and discharge of his army—a point Caesar makes
elsewhere as well.5
What, then, should we think of this speech? Does it merely reflect exaggerated
propaganda and an effort to pin all the blame for the war on his opponents? This
may be part of it: Caesar certainly does not stand above propaganda and occasional
cheap shots at his opponents. But usually he is more circumspect and purposeful
than that.
162 aftermath
We need to keep in mind what seems obvious but is easily overlooked: to

begin a civil war was no minor matter, even (and especially) in an age that acutely
remembered the civil wars of the 80s and the violence that had intermittently per-
vaded Roman politics since then. To do so, as Caesar claimed, primarily in defense
of his own dignitas (social status and worth), at first sight was even worse. Yet, as
I have shown elsewhere, Caesar had good reasons to focus his self-justification on
this personal motive.6 But this might not have seemed enough, especially in 49–47,
until Caesar returned from the East, after his victory over Pompey and his extended
delay in Alexandria, presumably still intending to publish his commentarii on the
recent events.
I shall argue that Caesar’s Spanish speech is part of a carefully planned political
strategy that pervades the Bellum civile but can be traced to earlier years—namely
to present himself, in contrast generally to the leaders of the optimates in the senate
and specifically to the small clique (factio paucorum) of his determined enemies, as
the leader of a grand coalition of good citizens and true Romans (my formulation)
and as a statesman who cared about the common good and the interests of all: sen-
ate majority, equestrians, people of Rome, Romans in Italy and the provinces, and
citizen soldiers in the armies. I shall support this thesis by connecting the argu-
ments in Caesar’s Spanish speech with other statements in the Bellum civile that
reflect his political strategy in the civil war and with the political strategy he pur-
sued at the beginning of his consulship. I begin with the latter.
2. Coalition-Building in Caesar’s Beginnings
By the mid-60s, Caesar’s political goals clashed with those of the “establishment.”
Even if perhaps exaggerated by the extant sources, his methods were unusual and
aggressive. He demonstratively emphasized his connections with Marius and
endorsed the popularis method and agenda. He attacked the senate’s prerogatives,
not least by challenging the legitimacy of the senatus consultum ultimum (SCU).
His willingness to incur risks and to gamble with all his assets drew attention. His
actions and statements reflected high ambition and goals. In the great senate debate
of December 63 that decided the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators who had been
caught red-handed, Cato and Caesar stood for diametrically opposed opinions and
principles, and they clashed repeatedly thereafter. All this, apparently combined
with strong personal antipathy, helps explain Cato’s enmity and why Caesar was
early on perceived in some quarters as a serious threat to the established order.7
At the beginning of his consulship, this same man turned around and made an
extraordinary proposal concerning an agrarian law. Ten years earlier, after Pompey’s
return from Spain, the senate had approved a lex Plotia that proposed distribution
of land to his veterans; lack of funding prevented its realization.8 The senate had
thus in principle recognized the need of a land settlement for Pompey’s veterans.
In 63, Rullus introduced his famous bill that was defeated largely by Cicero’s bril-
liant, though egregiously misleading, rhetorical fireworks. This bill would have
placed in charge for five years a ten-man committee with extraordinary powers,
financial resources, and a large staff—the main cause of determined opposition
(Flach 1990: 71–76). Three years later, a tribune named Flavius tried it again (76–78).
The booty of Pompey’s wars and the tribute of the new provinces in the East now
provided funding, and the bill does not seem to have contained any of the special
provisions that proved stumbling blocks in Rullus’ case. Cicero called it “a pretty
harmless (levis) affair, much the same as the Plotia.” “There is nothing popularis
about it except the mover. . . . The senate is opposing the whole scheme for land dis-
tribution, suspecting that some new powers for Pompey are in view” (Att. 1.18.6,
19.4). The senate was against the bill because Pompey was for it!
This brings us to January 59. An agrarian settlement for Pompey’s veterans was
still urgently needed. Caesar’s proposal incorporated elements of earlier bills
(concerning the range of recipients, including the plebs urbana, the principle of
purchase, not confiscation, and the means of funding), but the commission in
charge was different: it comprised no fewer than twenty members, the most suitable
for the job (which presumably meant not a partisan assemblage but senators chosen
for status and authority).9 Caesar had obviously learned from the failures of the
Gracchi and Rullus. Broad distribution of the gains to be expected from such an
office was perhaps the only way to make the proposal palatable to the senate.
Moreover, Caesar explicitly excluded himself. And he submitted it to the senate for
consideration and change (D.C. 38.1.6–7). None of the senators who were asked
individually had anything to say. Led by Cato and his allies, the senate simply
refused to discuss and accept the bill. Even without Caesar at the helm, the proposal
may have appeared dangerous because as author of the bill Caesar would still gain
much popularity and because Pompey and Crassus could be expected to be on the
committee and would reap huge benefits in clientage and power. Moreover, appar-
ently within the twenty there was to be a five-man committee with judicial powers.
There may have been other aspects that made people nervous.10 What matters to
me is something else.
Caesar made here an overture to his opponents and the entire senate. Already
in 63, in the debate about the fate of the Catilinarians, if we can trust Sallust, he had
presented himself as a responsible statesman who had the interests of the whole
state in mind (Sal. Cat. 51, esp. 51.25–42). In early 59 too he appealed to the entire
senate to collaborate in resolving an urgent problem. What would have happened if
the senate had allowed the bill to pass in the assembly without violent confronta-
tions? No doubt, Caesar’s consulship would have offered other opportunities for
164 aftermath
conflicts, but after a positive beginning it might have been possible to resolve other
problems reasonably as well. Most importantly, the catastrophic quarrel among the
two consuls, Bibulus’ humiliation, his withdrawal and persistent blocking of all
political measures by obnuntiatio, the intolerable result that most political actions
of an entire year were legally invalid, and, above all, the political and emotional
fallout that poisoned politics for years to come—all this would have been avoided
or at least its impact greatly reduced.11
Moreover, Caesar was popular among the people, Pompey among the veterans,
Crassus among the equites. We are used to judging their private alliance entirely
from the perspective of a self-serving accumulation and control of power by three
individuals aimed at overcoming the resistance of the legitimate authorities. No
doubt, it was that too, and it was seen as such by contemporaries.12 But this was not
all, and many others probably saw it differently: the desperation of the urban and
rural plebs had been starkly revealed just four years earlier in Catiline’s conspiracy;
the equites had claims that kept being ignored due to Cato’s overly principled oppo-
sition (Cicero is eloquent on this); we mentioned the veterans.13 The triple alliance
thus also represented large and important groups of Roman citizens whose needs
and interests were consistently neglected by the ruling circles among the senatorial
elite. Viewed from this perspective, Caesar’s proposal of an exceptionally large and
highly qualified agrarian commission, I suggest, reflected an effort to overcome tra-
ditional patterns of rivalry among opposing groups in the senate and to encourage
the resolution of an especially important issue through collaboration of leading
senators from different camps. Approval by the large majority of lowly senators
would have been automatic; the people, veterans, and equites would have been
happy. In modern terms, what Caesar aimed at was perhaps nothing less than a
“grand coalition,” remotely resembling earlier efforts by Gaius Gracchus and Livius
Drusus and, mutatis mutandis, Cicero’s concordia ordinum.14
The attempt failed precisely because the leading senators were still thinking in
terms of politics as usual. They focused primarily on preserving their own interests
and power and failed to understand that the problems at hand required extraordi-
nary efforts and new approaches. Like their ancestors in the times of the Scipios
they believed that if any one of them grew too tall and threatening he needed to be
cut to size. The principle underlying their strategy, that nothing could be changed,
nothing new could be tried, amounted to a declaration of bankruptcy (D.C. 38.3.1).
The result was disastrous because Caesar had invested too much in this proposal
and, considering his allies, could not back out of it and because here two of his less
impressive character traits became fully visible for the first time: his quick anger
and his determination to do what he thought necessary, alone and against all resis-
tance if necessary. I am far from excusing Caesar and explaining away his responsi-
bility for what followed, but I do claim that by refusing to collaborate and choosing
total resistance the senate leaders contributed decisively to the disaster and missed
a great opportunity.
3. Caesar’s Grand Coalition against the Factio Paucorum
Ten years later, the civil war broke out. It is worth recalling what it was all about.
Caesar wanted to run for a second consulship (which, as Cicero affirms, was unob-
jectionable in principle but feared by his opponents) and to do so in absentia (which
a broadly supported rogatio had granted him in 52). His opponents, claiming that
his command had expired and his privilege to run in absentia had been invalidated
by subsequent legislation, wanted him to step down, hand his provinces over to
successors, and seek new office in the usual ways.15 Whether or not Caesar was
really afraid of conviction in a Milonian style trial if he returned to Rome as a priva-
tus or simply abhorred the humiliation involved even in the threat to bring him to
justice, Caesar insisted on his right to run in absentia and his opponents on his obli-
gation to obey the senate.16 Clearly, more was at stake than legal formalities. In the
first days of January, last-ditch negotiations under Cicero’s mediation proved
acceptable even to Pompey, but they were derailed by Cato’s insistence on princi-
ples.17 Caesar’s opponents then got the senate to pass a senatus consultum ultimum,
upon which Caesar crossed the Rubicon (Civ. 1.5–1.8.1).
In an address to his soldiers (Civ. 1.7), Caesar criticized Pompey for his betrayal
of their friendship, denounced the novum exemplum of breaking a tribunician veto
by threat of armed violence, and insisted on the illegitimacy of an emergency decree
that was not supported by any precedent. He reminded his soldiers of their greatly
successful campaigns in Gaul and their merits for the res publica (a not-so-subtle
hint at promised rewards now threatened by their condemnation as hostes publici)
and appealed to them to defend his dignitas from the attacks of his inimici. The sol-
diers promised to ward off the injuries suffered by the tribunes and their commander.
The tribunes traditionally represented the interests of the plebs. In this speech
Caesar therefore appealed to the support of his soldiers qua soldiers and citizens.18
The first chapters of the Bellum civile (1.1–3, 5–6) abound in bitter accusations
that the small group (factio paucorum) of Caesar’s personal enemies (inimici), aim-
ing to destroy him, had violated laws and customs, used the most despicable
methods to put massive pressure on the senate, and ignored the liberty of senate
and people. Had the senate been able to decide freely, the civil war would have been
avoided.19 Hirtius repeats this at the end of the Bellum Gallicum.20 Further confir-
mation is not lacking, especially in a senate vote in early December 50, invalidated
by consular veto, on a motion by Curio that both Pompey and Caesar should step
down from their commands to make a military confrontation impossible and “to
166 aftermath
make the state free and able to make its own decisions.” Clearly the vast majority of
the senate (370 against 22, if Appian can be trusted) favored policies that helped
preserve peace.21 Caesar’s supporters, Antonius foremost among them, also held
contiones to arouse popular opinion. In their view, Caesar’s opponents blatantly
acted against the will of senate and people. According to Cicero, Caesar also had
important segments of the equites (the publicani and money lenders) solidly on his
side.22 Caesar’s strategy thus seems to have been similar to that pursued in 59.
Supported by senate majority, equestrians, people, and veterans or soldiers, the
state could have been placed on a broader foundation, the solution of urgent prob-
lems tackled from this broader base. Logically, therefore, Caesar demanded even
after his invasion of Italy in a letter to Pompey that free elections be held and public
affairs be handed back to the senate and Roman people23—which obviously implied
not only Pompey’s departure to Spain but also loss of control over politics by the
factio paucorum of Caesar’s enemies.
But there is more. While Caesar marched through central Italy, he reports,
Pompeian recruiting officers and garrison commanders fled, fearing the strong
sympathies (voluntas) of the townspeople (municipia) for Caesar. In one case,
municipal officials said to the Pompeian commander that it was not up to them to
judge this conflict, but they could certainly not allow the imperator Gaius Caesar,
with all his merits for the state and his great accomplishments, to be prohibited
from entering their town (Civ. 1.12, 13.1). All the prefectures of Picenum, tradition-
ally Pompeian territory, received Caesar with overwhelming enthusiasm; even
Cingulum, a town favored by Labienus, who had just defected from Caesar, promised
most eagerly to assist him (Civ. 1.15.1–2: libentissimis animis; cupidissime). Citizens
and soldiers flocked to Caesar. The impression created by his narrative comes close
to a popular plebiscite of the Roman citizens in Italy, and Caesar never fails to
mention how much he was favored by it—so much so that a few months later he
told the leading citizens of Massilia, whose loyalty was split but favored Pompey,
that they should follow the auctoritas of all of Italy rather than humor the wishes of
one man. Communities in Further Spain and in Epirus took precisely that position,
incurring great risks to support Caesar. For example, in early 48 the people of
Apollonia said “they would not close the gates against a consul, nor would they take
it upon themselves to judge differently from the whole of Italy and the Roman
people.”24 We hear all this in Caesar’s own words—no doubt with a good dose of
exaggeration and sarcasm—but the basic elements of the story must be correct and
are amply confirmed by Cicero and others.
Caesar’s grand coalition, I suggest, was thus intended to comprise all those
Roman citizens whose interests were ignored and violated by the factio paucorum,
whether in the senate, among the equestrians, in Rome, Italy, the provinces, or the
army. As an outsider, expelled from the res publica, and confronted with the necessity
of winning a war, he was unable to forge structures in which this coalition could
express itself. His adopted son later went this crucial step further: I feel reminded of
Octavian’s even grander coalition against Antony that was cemented by the great
oath of allegiance sworn to him by all of Italy and the western provinces (RG 25.2).
Caesar, too, as his report makes clear, felt legitimized by such support that, at the
same time, influenced his political strategy.
When Caesar returned to Rome in the spring of 49, after Pompey’s narrow
escape from Brindisi, he convened the remaining senators and urged them “to take
responsibility for the state and administer it together with himself.” But, he added,
“if they were frightened and refused, he would not shirk the task and administer the
state by himself.”25 Caesar’s attitude is the same as in 59, only exacerbated by the
unusual circumstances: an urgent request to the senators to assume and share
responsibility but also the readiness, here expressed explicitly, to do it alone if need
be. Not surprisingly, fear and distrust foiled this effort too.
4. The Officium of True Roman Citizens
This brings me back to Caesar’s Spanish speech. Like all the other testimonia for his
political strategy, it operates along two axes. On the one side, Caesar denounces the
injuries he has suffered on the part of his personal enemies.26 On the other side, he
appeals to all Roman citizens, high and low, in Rome, Italy, and the provinces, civil-
ians and soldiers, to support his efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, to
save the state from harm, to liberate it from the clutches of the factio paucorum, and
to create a broader base to serve the interests of all.
This, I suggest, explains the outrageous claims Caesar makes in the Spanish
speech. If it is the duty of the good citizen and true Roman to avoid civil war in the
interest of the common good and to save citizen lives, this higher officium overrules
loyalty to a commander who acts against this principle. Indeed, all who tried to end
the Spanish campaign without bloodshed did their officium as Roman citizens. If
the civil war is recognized as an evil that was brought about by the machinations of
a self-serving small clique, then indeed all measures that served their purposes,
even if initiated a long time ago and identifiable as such only from hindsight, could
be marked as hostile to the true Romans who tried to avoid war and save citizen
lives. At the memorable occasion of the capitulation of Corfinium, Caesar had for
the first time announced his new principle of lenitas, sparing the lives of the cap-
tured opponents.27 Throughout the war, he insists, his own army collaborated with
him in this noble effort. In Spain, even the citizens on the other side did so. At
Corfinium, the captured cohorts were integrated into Caesar’s army, but the high
officers and elite civilians were sent home and suffered no harm as long as they did
168 aftermath
not resume fighting against him. In Spain, the latter principle was extended to the
entire enemy army. We know from Cicero’s letters the enormous impact this strategy
had on public opinion.28
5. Conclusion
As was said before, even if Cicero and later authors confirm much of it, Caesar’s
own representation is undoubtedly exaggerated and partisan. I do not deny Caesar’s
responsibility for the civil war. Nor do I ignore that the concept of a “grand coali-
tion” popped up when it served Caesar’s interests well. Yet particularly in the first
book of the Bellum civile it is so pervasive that it is difficult not to recognize in it a
crucial component of the political strategy he pursued at least in the beginning of
the civil war.29 Once we do that we can see that its roots go back to much earlier
struggles. Nor should we ignore that it indeed served interests that were much
broader than Caesar’s own propaganda and ambitions. What should command our
attention is Caesar’s ability and readiness to think beyond the narrow limits of
senatorial contention and to recognize the need to create a broader base of collab-
oration in order to resolve the urgent problems of the time.
The realization of such ideas after 47 was tentative and obscured by ongoing ten-
sions, continuing factional strife, and more civil wars.30 Soon—probably too soon—
Caesar despaired of restoration and collaboration and began to think of different
solutions. But this does not mean that his earlier efforts at outreach and coalition
building were not serious. At any rate, in the course of Caesar’s career the senate leaders
had several opportunities to overcome narrow group interests, thereby to reintegrate
Caesar, and to prevent the uncontrollable escalation of power struggles and violence.
True, the obstacles were perhaps unsurmountable: power structures and hierarchies
that were sanctioned by age-old tradition, gigantic egos and ambitions, strong enmities
and hatreds, deeply entrenched interests of individuals and groups, and, not least,
Caesar’s self-centered independence, impatience, and tendency to react to any resistance
with anger and violence. In some ways, he was his own worst enemy. I wonder, however,
whether his adopted son, who both imitated him and tried to distance himself from
him, and who was a hugely superior politician, found here at least one source of inspi-
ration for his own strategies and policies.31
notes
This is a slightly revised and annotated version of the paper presented at the Amherst
conference. I thank the organizers for inviting me and for a stimulating meeting. This
chapter draws on materials that will be published in German in Raaflaub 2010. I thank the
editors of both volumes for their permission to write overlapping chapters.
1. For an overview of the state of scholarship on the work, see Raaflaub 2009.
2. See, for example, Gelzer 1968: 120–25, Ward 1977: 262–77, Seager 1979: ch. 10.
3. For discussion, see Gelzer 1968: 149–54, Raaflaub 1974: 25–33, Gesche 1976: 113–20.
4. If he refers to commands over districts in Italy, such as that held in Campania by
Cicero (as suggested by Kraner, Hofmann, and Meusel 1963 ad loc.), or appointments, such
as those mentioned in 1.12.1, 15.3 (as suggested by Carter 1991 ad loc.), these were necessi-
tated by his own invasion of Italy, and it had always been the senate’s right to reactivate
previous commanders in an emergency. Caesar’s objection should probably be subsumed
under those mentioned in 1.6.3–8. The SCU: 1.5.1–4; lack of legitimacy: 1.7.2–6.
5. Civ. 1.9.2–3, 32.2–6; for discussion, see Raaflaub 1974: 143–47.
6. Raaflaub 1974; for a brief summary, see Raaflaub 2003: 59–61.
7. Gelzer 1968: 27–64, Fehrle 1983: ch. 5, Meier 1995: ch. 8.
8. Cic. Att. 1.18.6, dated to 70 in MRR 2:128 with 130n4. For sources and discussion,
see Flach 1990: 71.
9. MRR 2:187–88, 191–92; Gruen 1974: 397–401; Flach 1990: 78–81 with sources and
bibliography.
10. D.C. 38.2.3. Cf. Gruen 1974: 398: “Opposition was purely a matter of politics: fear of
the consul’s growing prestige and popularity.” See also Meier 1995: 207–13; on the commit-
tees, MRR 2:191–92. I thank David Yates for useful comments on these issues.
11. On Caesar’s consulship, see, e.g., Gelzer 1968: ch. 3; Meier 1966: 280–88 and 1995:
ch. 10; Christ 1984: 291–300.
12. This is suggested by Varro’s Trikaranos and Asinius Pollio’s Historiae that began in
60. On Cato’s view, see Plu. Pomp. 47.4, Caes. 13.5; on Cicero’s, see Gelzer 1969: 119–34.
13. On the misery of the plebs urbana, see Yavetz 1958 and cf. Yavetz 1963 and Kühnert
1991; on that of the plebs rustica, see Brunt 1971: 112–32. Like the proposals of Rullus and
Flavius, the lex Julia agraria emphasized the settlement of urban and rural proletarians:
D.C. 38.1.2–3; Gruen 1974 with sources. On the equestrians (primarily, of course, the
publicani): Cic. Att. 2.1.8; Ward 1977: 210–19. Cicero on Cato: Att. 1.18.7, 2.1.8.
14. On the latter, see Strasburger 1931 and Meier 1966: 314–15.
15. See n. 6.
16. On Caesar’s fears of a trial: Suet. Jul. 30.4–5. The seriousness of such fears has been
contested; see most recently, Morstein-Marx 2007 with bibliography. Contra: Raaflaub
1974: 143–47 and Yates: in preparation.
17. Raaflaub 1974: 64–68 with sources.
18. This explains the extraordinary fact that Caesar uses a contio among his soldiers
to argue in much detail against the legitimacy of the senatus consultum ultimum of
7 January (on which, see Raaflaub 1974: 82–100). Together with him, his soldiers had been
declared hostes publici and thus de facto excluded from the res publica; they now needed
to fight for their reenfranchisement. Hence, the centurion Crastinus’ appeal to his
comrades at Pharsalus to fight for Caesar’s dignitas and their own libertas (Civ. 3.91.2).
Cic. Lig. 6.18 and Luc. 1.277–79 show that libertas is here understood as civitas. Both Sulla
and Cinna had equally appealed to their soldiers in their capacity as citizens: App. BC
1.57, 1.65–66.
19. 1.2.6, 3.5: under massive political and military pressure; terrentur infirmiores, dubii
confirmantur, plerisque vero libere decernendi potestas eripitur.
170 aftermath
20. Hirt. Gal. 8.52.3: despite alarming news from Rome, Caesar does not consider
countermeasures: iudicabat enim liberis sententiis patrum conscriptorum causam suam facile
obtineri.
21. Hirt. Gal. 8.52.4–5: fore eo facto liberam et sui iuris civitatem. Cf. App. BC 2.30.
22. Cic. Att. 7.7.5; Antonius’ contio: 7.8.5.
23. Civ. 1.9.5 libera comitia <habeantur> atque omnis res publica senatui populoque
Romano permittatur (habeantur: H. Fuchs).
24. Massilia: Civ. 1.35.1; Spain: 2.19–20; Epirus: 3.9, 11, 12.2 (Apollonia), 34–36.
25. Civ. 1.32.7; on this speech, see Raaflaub 1974: 125–49.
26. Civ. 1.7, 9, 22, 32, 85; see Raaflaub 1974: 113–52.
27. Corfinium: Civ. 1.22–23. The entire event (1.16–23) is as dramatically and skillfully
narrated as the end of the Spanish campaign, discussed at the beginning of this chapter,
or the battle of Pharsalus (3.82–99). All three episodes highlight Caesar’s responsible
leadership and concern for the lives of his own soldiers and those on the opposing side.
The principle of lenitas: Cic. Att. 9.7C. For discussion, see Raaflaub 1974: 293–316 and 2003:
61–64. On Caesar’s clementia, see Dahlmann 1967, Weinstock 1971: 233–43, Alföldi 1985: ch. 5;
see also Griffin 2003.
28. E.g., Cic. Att. 8.16.2.
29. After 1 January 48, Caesar’s position was legitimized by his second consulship,
which added an important dimension to his self-representation: Boatwright 1988.
30. For an assessment of Caesar’s political plans and his “new state,” see Jehne 1987
and 2005 with a discussion of recent scholarship.
31. On Augustus and Caesar, see, e.g., Meier 1980a, Kienast 2001, and Toher 2003.
10
Spurius Maelius: Dictatorship
and the Homo Sacer
Michèle Lowrie
In Livy’s version of the Spurius Maelius story, a state of emergency pre-

vents sedition: Cincinnatus is appointed dictator, and his master of the
horse, Servilius Ahala, kills Maelius for aspiring to kingship (adfectatio
regni). The addition of the dictatorship tames an earlier version attributed
to Cincius Alimentus and Calpurnius Piso where the senate enjoins
Servilius to slay the tyrant without due process. Theodor Mommsen (1879:
206–7) calls it morally offensive that any citizen can kill outside the forms
of justice any other citizen he holds guilty of aspiring to kingship,1 yet the
earlier version obeys the logic of the homo sacer (sacred/accursed man)
and reveals a dirty secret about sovereignty: the state is at liberty to kill its
own citizens who pose a threat to it. The story’s revision folds state vio-
lence into the rule of law. This essay asks what message Livy’s telling of the
revised version conveys at the beginning of Augustus’ rule after a century
of civil war.
The legitimacy of any constitutional or extraconstitutional mecha-
nism for suspending the rule of law to safeguard the state is of clear interest
today in the United States, where the relative value of citizen rights, the
rule of law, and security has been hotly contested since 9/11. Books 2
through 5 of Livy document a class struggle in which the senatorial party
constantly postpones citizen rights for reasons of security: “The Volsci are
coming!”2 A certain amount of citizen violence at Rome was the price of
republican institutions.3 Although the Romans distinguished carefully
between full-fledged civil war and sedition, similar issues attend each. All
civil disturbances raise the question of the governmental forms structuring
172 aftermath
violence against and between citizens or citizen violence against the state.
Furthermore, ancient historians saw the seeds of civil war in sedition.4 Stories of
thwarted sedition are as exemplary for state violence at Rome as those where it
erupted.
The Maelius story is informative for narrative and for constitutional questions
because of the addition of the dictatorship to justify killing a citizen.5 Although Livy
is probably not this version’s author, it nevertheless, like all stories when retold,
adapts conventional material to contemporary attitudes.6 It particularly reveals a
desire to contain state violence within the purview of the law understood as standing
constitutional structures. Livy had lived through civil war and eventually saw
Augustus radically remake the constitution while preserving its form. Unlike Sulla
and Julius Caesar, who both became dictator when they emerged victorious from
civil war, Augustus signally did not. His predecessors had exhausted this office, and
Mark Antony banished it after Caesar’s assassination. Thinkers in this period under-
standably wanted to regularize the violent relations between citizens and the state
through the law, but the Augustan solution was itself hardly constitutionally regular,
and the extent to which the principate was contained within the law is still fiercely
debated. Stories about the citizenry, state violence, and the rule of law reveal the
cultural attempt to cope with the legacy of the civil wars and the new political real-
ities in their wake.
The exemplum is a central figure of thought in Roman culture, and the Maelius
story helps contemporaries understand the political order. Augustus himself manip-
ulated the exemplum masterfully in his establishment of a new order under old
forms.7 This topic is larger than I can address here, but the claim to restore the old
is a legitimating strategy for both narrative and politics. Since Cicero uses Maelius
to justify violence against Catiline (Catil. 1.3),8 this story is a lens onto Roman
thought about sedition and violence against citizens. Martine Chassignet (2001: 87,
93) argues that this story, together with those of Spurius Cassius and Marcus
Manlius, which Cicero and others joined together, was particularly salient from the
Gracchi to Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus but faded out afterward. This story
was told and readapted precisely during the period of civil war.
The particular ideological node Livy explores with Maelius is how a state can
meet a threat from within without undermining the existing form of government.
One of the problems with the state of emergency is that there needs to be a way
back to the rule of law once the disorder has been quelled. This is one of a number
of stories Livy tells about early Rome where a temporary suspension of the law
passes through a crisis point and the law is reinstated afterward. Maelius is often
discussed in relation to the adfectatio regni (aspiration to kingship) of Spurius
Cassius and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus,9 but other stories also show similar
concerns about the suspension of the rule of law under various constitutional
dictatorship and the homo sacer 173
structures. For instance, the constitution is suspended for the decemvirs to write
the Twelve Tables, and they are subsequently overthrown after they overstay and
overreach their mandate. With Maelius, the dictatorship allows for the suspension
of the regular laws and their successful reinstatement.10 As the dictatorship is a
canonical republican office, it is debatable whether the rule of law is entirely
suspended in this story. Cincinnatus handles the dictatorship well, he justifies the
otherwise unlawful slaying of Maelius as a threat to the state, and he sets the dicta-
torship down once the crisis is controlled. Furthermore, Maelius’ acts can be char-
acterized as posing a particular kind of threat, regnum (kingship or rule), that Livy
has earlier explained results in the suspension of citizen rights. Commentators
identify Maelius as a homo sacer, a man who can be killed without the killer
becoming a parricide.11 By aspiring to regnum, he forfeits his rights to state protec-
tion. This is a model crisis in that both the nature of the threat (adfectatio regni) and
the mechanism for solving it (dictatorship) both entail a legal mechanism for sus-
pending the law. Livy offers a paradigmatic instance when killing a citizen without
due process is perfectly legitimate.
Restoration of the rule of law after a state of emergency may seem self-evident,
but what are the stakes? Two things are clearly relevant to a state emerging from
civil war: who controls sovereignty and the protection of citizen life and liberty.
Giorgio Agamben has theorized these issues together in Homo sacer (1998) and
State of exception (2005). Relevant for Livy’s Maelius—independently classified as
homo sacer—is that Agamben deploys Paulus Festus’ definition of this archaic
Roman figure. Festus’ definition goes back to Verrius Flaccus, the antiquarian tutor
of Augustus’ grandsons, who wrote a lexicon treating “rare and obsolete words”
(OCD under Verrius Flaccus). The homo sacer was as archaic a figure for the Romans
of Augustus’ times as for us; nevertheless, it has proven “good to think with” for
Agamben in analyzing modern structures of sovereignty, and I find it useful for
understanding Augustan Rome (Lowrie 2007). I focus on the intersection of the
homo sacer and the dictator and limit my analysis here to Maelius, but I hope to
return to Spurius Cassius and Marcus Manlius in the future.
This chapter has four sections: a summary of Agamben’s theory of sovereignty
and the homo sacer; a reading of the Maelius story according to this theory; an anal-
ysis of whether the dictatorship is truly a constitutional exception; some questions
about Augustus.
1. The Sovereign and the Homo Sacer
Agamben sees a telling parallel between the sovereign and the homo sacer: both exist
in a zone of indistinction with regard to the law, the former in his ability to suspend
174 aftermath
the law, the latter in his exemption from its protection. The two together help define
the legal sphere negatively through their reciprocal exception from it. They also
reveal the ugly side of sovereignty’s say over the life of citizens.12
Agamben relies on Carl Schmitt’s (1985: 5) idiosyncratic definition of the sov-
ereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.” The state of exception is the
temporary suspension of the rule of law for the purpose of preserving the state
under an exceptional threat not already anticipated within existing legal structures
(Agamben 1998: 15; his emphasis):
The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact that the sovereign is, at
the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is
truly the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaim-
ing a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own
validity, then “the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and,
nevertheless, belongs to it, since it is up to him to decide if the
constitution is to be suspended in toto” (Schmitt, Political Theology, p.
13). The specification that the sovereign is “at the same time outside and
inside the juridical order” (emphasis added) is not insignificant: the
sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law,
legally places himself outside the law.13
The homo sacer similarly exists in a zone of exclusion from the law but from the
other side: he is removed from the law’s protection. Agamben cites Verrius Flaccus’
definition,14 which addresses the killing of citizens.
But the sacred/accursed man (homo sacer) is he, whom the people has
judged (populus iudicavit) because of an evil deed; and it is not right
according to divine law ( fas) for him to be sacrificed (immolari), but he
who kills him is not condemned of murder (parricidi); for in the first
tribunician law legal provision against this is made: “if anyone should kill
a man who is sacred/accursed by that plebiscite, he would not be a
murderer (parricida).” From this every evil and dishonest man is
accustomed to be called sacred/accursed.
Agamben (1998: 74) locates the paradox of the homo sacer in a political structure
“prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical,” and
makes a bold link between the homo sacer and the political sphere of sovereignty,
“which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide”
(83; his emphasis):
The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without

committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred
life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the life that has
been captured in this sphere.
Both citizens and states may pass into a state of exception, which in turn according
to this theory defines the political order.
2. Spurius Maelius, Homo Sacer
Livy’s Maelius narrative dramatizes the conflict between citizen rights and
government security by opposing two laws established and presented in tandem at
the inception of the Roman republic (2.8.2):
ante omnes de provocatione adversus magistratus ad populum

sacrandoque cum bonis capite eius qui regni occupandi consilia inisset
gratae in volgus leges fuere.
Above all, the law of appeal to the people against the magistrates and the
law about cursing the head and property of anyone who plots to seize
kingship were pleasing to the populace.
Maelius as a private equestrian takes popular measures to relieve the grain supply
and plots to seize kingship (4.13.4: de regno agitare) so that he falls under the second
law mentioned at 2.8.2, even though Livy does not explicitly say this action made
him sacer. His plan is reported to the senate, which laments the consuls’ inactivity.
Titus Quinctius makes a speech as consul that identifies the law of appeal as a con-
straint on the consuls (4.13.11–12):
tum Quinctius consules immerito increpari ait, qui constricti legibus de

provocatione ad dissolvendum imperium latis, nequaquam tantum virium
in magistratu ad eam rem pro atrocitate iudicandam quantum animi
haberent. opus esse non forti solum viro sed etiam libero exsolutoque
legum vinclis. itaque se dictatorem L. Quinctium dicturum; ibi animum
parem tantae potestati esse.
Then Quinctius says the consuls are unfairly reproached because they are
hampered by the laws of appeal passed for the purpose of dissolving
supreme command, that they had less strength in the magistracy to
avenge this matter as its atrocity deserved than they had spirit. A man
not only brave was needed, but free and unhampered by the laws’ chains.
Therefore he would name Lucius Quinctius [Cincinnatus] dictator: there
was a spirit equal to such great power.
176 aftermath
Whether or not the dictatorship was actually free from the restraint of law, and this
is disputed,15 Livy’s formulation attributes that belief to a consul. Cincinnatus is
approved as dictator, and the story further dramatizes the extent of the law’s reach.
Cincinnatus appoints Servilius Ahala master of the horse. When Ahala calls Maelius
to answer to the dictator he flees, and Ahala kills him. Cincinnatus as dictator con-
gratulates Ahala for his virtus, “manly courage,” in freeing the republic (4.14.7: Tum
dictator ‘Macte virtute,’ inquit, ‘C. Servili, esto liberata re publica’). A crisis point is
reached: the populace begins revolting. Cincinnatus quells the uprising with a
speech explaining why Maelius was killed iure, according to the law (4.15.1).
Cincinnatus uses two arguments, each corresponding to the laws coupled by
Livy. First, even if Maelius were innocent of aspiring to regnum, he was killed law-
fully because he refused a dictator’s summons. Had he answered the summons,
been tried and found guilty, he would presumably then have had the right to appeal,
but this argument is not made. Cincinnatus assumes that a dictator’s summons
trumps a citizen’s right to appeal. This accords with the consul’s naming a dictator
explicitly to circumvent the law of appeal. Cincinnatus then assumes Maelius was
guilty of aspiring to regnum and therefore had lost his citizen rights: “nor could one
treat him as if he were a citizen, who was born in a free people among rights and
laws” (4.15.3: nec cum eo tamquam cum cive agendum fuisse, qui natus in libero pop-
ulo inter iura legesque). Although he does not say sacer, his language masks the con-
cept (4.15.7–8):
non pro scelere id magis quam pro monstro habendum, nec satis esse
sanguine eius expiatum, nisi tecta parietesque intra quae tantum
amentiae conceptum esset dissiparentur bonaque contacta pretiis regni
mercandi publicarentur.
And this should not be considered so much a crime as a monstrosity, nor

could expiation be made sufficiently with his blood, unless the roof and
walls within which such insanity was conceived were razed and his posses-
sions, which have been contaminated at the price of merchandizing rule,
were put up for public auction.
The combination of death and publication of property reveals that consecratio is at

issue. When Livy defines tribunician sacrosanctity, he specifies that the one who
harms a tribune would “have his life (caput) sacred to Jupiter, his household
( familia) would be sold at the temple of Ceres, Liber, and Libera” (3.55.7: eius caput
Iovi sacrum esset, familia ad aedem Cereris Liberi Liberaeque venum iret). Maelius’
house was duly torn down, and the open space became a monument called the
“Aequimaelium.”
The slippage between the two arguments more than either argument in itself
demonstrates Agamben’s parallel between the sovereign, whose position above the
law becomes evident in a state of emergency, and the homo sacer, who becomes
exempt from its protection. Maelius’ death is overdetermined. The dictatorship
may be above the law only temporarily, and we address below whether this office
works according to Agamben’s conception of sovereignty, but the structure momen-
tarily allows a single person to decide on the life of citizens regardless of the laws
protecting their rights. The suspension of the right to appeal accompanies the
treatment of a threat to the state as a homo sacer. While the two laws originally con-
joined at Livy 2.8.2 both aim to protect the republic, the first in giving citizens
rights, the second in safeguarding against the restoration of kingship, in practice
one comes at the expense of the other. That is the paradox and the price of repub-
lican government.
3. Dictatorship and the State of Exception
Agamben adopts Schmitt’s technical term for state of emergency: state of exception.
This is a situation not foreseen by a state’s constitution and therefore challenges
available legal provisions. For Agamben, the Roman republican dictatorship does
not qualify as a state of exception: it is a preexisting magistracy meant to handle sit-
uations sufficiently volatile that a temporary suspension of legal limitations appears
necessary to the governing bodies.16 Schmitt calls this sort of dictatorship “commis-
sarial” because the constitution remains intact despite its provisional suspension
(Agamben 2005: 33). Forms already exist for establishing a dictator: he is appointed
by a magistrate and approved by the senate. Livy marks senate approval of Cincinnatus
with “with all approving” (4.13.12: adprobantibus cunctis), language that tellingly
matches Augustus’ claim about the universal consensus meeting his own control of
affairs after the civil wars (RG 34: per consensum universorum). I return to Augustus
below. The dictatorship, at least before Sulla’s extended appointment and Caesar’s in
perpetuo, was also short-term—six months maximum. Sulla, dictator from 82–79
bce, at least set the office aside after achieving his mandate, rei publicae constituendae
(“to constitute the state”).17 The dictatorship was originally devised against foreign
threats but was also used against internal disturbance.18 Maelius’ story is Livy’s first
instance of a dictator appointed for an internal disturbance who actually uses vio-
lence against a citizen.19 The dictatorship here keeps from the less regulated frame-
work of the state of exception. Another feature disqualifying Maelius’ story as a
narrative of a state of exception is that consecratio is enshrined in law, as Livy describes
at 2.8.2. Cincinnatus’ argument that Maelius was killed iure, that is, within the law,
underscores the law’s continued operation even under the dictatorship.
178 aftermath
I have two partial critiques, one of Agamben, one of Livy (or his source).
Agamben’s understanding of the Roman dictatorship is excessively formalistic. He
sees the real threat in what Schmitt calls the “sovereign dictatorship,” wherein the
constitution’s form is at risk. The problem is that the one opens the door to the
other. This he recognizes for modern times but overlooks it as a problem at Rome.20
Agamben rightly critiques Schmitt for underplaying the potentially disruptive
power of a magistracy whose premise resides in the law’s suspension, whether tem-
porary, constitutional, formally regular, and so on. Sulla’s and Caesar’s extended
and Caesar’s multiple dictatorships paved the way to Caesar’s eventual sovereign
dictatorship and the Augustan principate. Schmitt’s nice theoretical difference
makes too strong a distinction: once the law is provisionally suspended, it estab-
lishes the potential for staying so. Andreas Kalyvas (2007) argues that the Romans
were blind to the tyrannical potential of the dictatorship because it formed part of
the mos maiorum, “customs of the ancestors,” but that the Greek historians Dionysius
of Halicarnassus and Appian anticipate modern worries and see this Roman office
through the Greek category of the tyrant. The Greek word is certainly useful for
making the distinction, and in fact, as Ingo Gildenhard shows, Cicero takes recourse
to the Greek words “tyrant” and “tyranny” in discussing Caesar.21
A weakness of the republican constitution is that the Romans based their
understanding of sovereignty on kingship.22 The power of the king is imperium,
and the various republican mechanisms for assigning or distributing imperium
could always revert to a surrogate king. Despite the Romans’ hatred of the word rex,
“king,” consular imperium was understood as kingly power checked by collegiality
and term limits. Livy remarks that “you could count the origin of liberty, however,
more from consular imperium being made annual than because anything was
reduced from kingly power (potestas)” (2.1.7: libertatis autem originem inde magis
quia annuum imperium consulare factum est quam quod deminutum quicquam sit ex
regia potestate numeres). Further limitations were the right of appeal, the tribuni-
cian veto, and their sacrosanctity. The dictatorship normally had a shorter term
limit (six months), but no limitations through collegiality, and furthermore over-
rode, at least in Livy’s Maelius story, the right of appeal.23
Agamben’s larger concern is with the “regularized state of exception”—a par-
adox whereby exceptional arrangements, by definition temporary, become the reg-
ular constitution, although the fiction is that the old constitution still operates. This
contradiction usefully describes a state of limbo such as the extension of a dictator’s
imperium beyond constitutional time limits and can also clarify how Augustus
eventually changed the Roman constitution, although there is no space for detailed
analysis here. Rome repeatedly reverted to monarchy; with Augustus, permanently.
Perhaps only from a republican perspective does the Augustan principate look like
a regularized state of exception. Although we might think of the republic as revert-
ing to kingly imperium, Agamben’s formulation comes closer to how the Romans
understood their own imperial system.
Livy’s version of the Maelius story cleans things up considerably.24 Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, after telling a version consonant with Livy’s, preserves an older
version of the story told by Cincius Alimentus, and Calpurnius Piso he thinks less
likely. This alternative version adheres better to the homo sacer pattern than does
Livy’s.25 When the senators heard the report about Maelius, one of them made a
motion to kill him without trial (12.4.3). This was accepted, and they entrusted the
task to Servilius. He stabbed Maelius to death without a charge, with no explana-
tion, no meaningful verbal exchange. Servilius ran back to the senate, pursued by
men bent on stoning him. Servilius announced he had destroyed the tyrant (12.4.4:
s qammom) by order of the senate. Here, as in Cicero’s version of the killing of
Tiberius Gracchus, the murderer was privatus. Anyone can kill the homo sacer.26
I argue elsewhere that Verrius Flaccus’ specified need for adjudication by the people
is an Augustan age regularization of an older and legally hazier notion (Lowrie
2007: 37–38). In Cincius, the senate makes the sovereign decision.
By contrast, Livy sets up a complex political apparatus that contains the state
killing within the law. Magistrates killed a citizen without due process, but they had
the majesty of the dictatorship (4.14.2: dictatoriam maiestatem) to justify them. I see
two symptoms of forcing interpretation:27 Cincinnatus’ overdetermined argument
about the killing’s legality28—one argument should be enough—and his obfusca-
tion in calling Maelius a monstrum. This word heightens the religious awe sur-
rounding the homo sacer. Verrius Flaccus’ definition (quoted above) is dry and legal.
He records several layers of lawmaking that set the category in place: a plebiscite,
the tribunician law, a judgment of the people (Lowrie 2007: 36). The correspondence
of these layers to historical reality is dubious, but he represents a category sup-
ported by law. Although Livy could have recourse to his earlier account of the law
about the consecratio of anyone who aspires to regnum, he chooses a mystifying
route with monstrum, which magnifies Maelius’ sins. The result is a story about a
perfectly legal and well-managed state of emergency against a religious threat. The
homo sacer as defined by Flaccus cannot be sacrificed, but the monstrum needs and
gets expiation (4.15.7: expiatum). Livy’s narrative stacks the cards against Maelius by
minimizing the danger of the suspension of the rule of law. Like Schmitt, he tries to
keep the commissarial dictatorship under wraps.
Andrew Lintott argues that the revision of the Maelius story came shortly after
the death of Tiberius Gracchus because some had questioned its legality.29 The
opponents of Gracchus argued by Maelius’ exemplum that anyone could kill the
threat to the state as a privatus, while his supporters countered that Maelius was
killed under dictatorial imperium, which did not supply a justificatory parallel. The
changes to the Maelius story make it less an exemplum for Tiberius’ treatment by
180 aftermath
removing the parallel that both were killed by a privatus and by containing Maelius’
death within the law. This is a nice reconstruction, but there were any number of
moments in the period between the Gracchi and Actium when some would have
wanted to regularize archaic history. The dictatorship was not used against either
Gracchus, and since Jerzy Linderski (2002) argues that Tiberius’ death was a conse-
cratio, the parallel between Tiberius and the earlier version of the Maelius story is
especially strong. The dictatorship may have been inserted into the story with Sulla
or Caesar.30 Since the attempt to regularize Gaius Gracchus’ killing was the senatus
consultum ultimum and Cicero used Maelius and the Gracchi as exempla during
and after the Catilinarian conspiracy (more below), the central question is whether
there were constitutional means to check sedition rather than the particular nature
of the means.31 Chassignet (2001: 91–92) shows that the three stories about adfecta-
tio regni by Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Marcus Manlius reveal processes
of regularization legitimating tyrannicide. Caesar incidentally occupied both posi-
tions: he was dictator but also was assassinated for aspiring to regnum. If Livy did
not himself revise Maelius’ story—something we cannot know—he was among
those who favored the rule of law.
4. Some Augustan Questions
The Maelius story is disturbing on its own, but it was also exemplary.32 Roman
stories had life-or-death consequences for citizens: the exemplum carried pragmatic
force. Cicero mentions Maelius in praeteritio at the beginning of the first Catilinarian
as one example among others justifying violence to protect the state. He emphasizes
the exempla supporting his use of the senatus consultum ultimum (Gaius Gracchus
and Saturninus) more than Maelius, who was too archaic. But if we lay aside the
particular mechanism for suspending the rule of law—to whatever degree and for
however long—these situations occupy a similar mental space in that all entail pro-
tecting the state against a perceived internal threat by suspending citizen rights
(trial before the people, appeal).33 Cincinnatus hails Gaius Servilius as a liberator of
the republic and justifies Maelius’ loss of citizen rights on the basis of his aspiring
to rule despite having been born “in a free people among rights and law” (4.15.2).
The violence at issue in these situations is what Walter Benjamin, in his “Critique of
Violence,” calls law-preserving violence.34 It is paradoxical that the state of exception
must break the law in order to preserve it. I would maintain that frequently repeated
instances of law-preserving violence eventually undermine the law it means to
preserve. This is why even a commissarial dictatorship is more dangerous than
might appear theoretically. But what are the Augustan consequences of revising the
Spurius Maelius story as Livy tells it?
Depending on how we think Livy viewed Augustus, specifically, whether Livy

saw Augustus as upholding or destroying the rule of law, his version of the Maelius
story either supports or critiques an Augustan mystification. Either way, the story
reinforces the value of the rule of law and to that extent supports Augustan ide-
ology once his rule was established.35 We generally say that Augustus came to power
after a century of civil war, but not all instances of civil disturbance between the
Gracchi and Actium belong to the same kind, either in the violence entailed or in
their constitutional consequences. Still, the Gracchi, Gaius more than Tiberius,
Sulla, Caesar, perhaps even Catiline, were all interested in constitutional restoration
or reform. The violence they perpetrated or received was either lawmaking or law-
preserving. They all came to or brought grief through states of emergency. While
Sulla and Caesar used the dictatorship to put pressure on the constitution, the sen-
ate fought back against the Gracchi, Catiline, and Caesar with the senatus consultum
ultimum. The challenge facing Augustus was to establish stability—to quell the
eruption not merely of violence, but of states of exception, during which violence
against citizens was the ugly price to pay for constitutional continuity.
This is not the place for a Schmittian analysis of Augustan sovereignty. I think
this perspective is useful, if not sufficient, for analyzing the relation between auc-
toritas and potestas that Augustus presents as central to his own power in the Res
gestae. Magisterial power resides in potestas, which lies within constitutional con-
fines, but auctoritas has a more complex relation to the constitution understood
as the conventional way of doing things. The senate’s authority is institutional-
ized and that of individuals conventional, but the auctoritas of a powerful man
exceeds his potestas as a magistrate. The two kinds of power in combination cor-
respond well to Schmitt’s understanding of the sovereign position as lying both
inside and outside the law. Given that the Roman constitution was not based on
the law, but on convention enshrined in institutions, to revise this thought for
Rome would mean saying that the sovereign position lies both inside and outside
the uncodified constitution. Agamben makes a start toward analyzing Augustus
in the final section of State of exception (2005: 74–88). His analysis, however, does
not account for Augustus’ imperium, the basis of power Augustus fails to mention
in the Res gestae. Furthermore, he omits the people’s role in the new
constitution.
Useful to Augustan ideology in Livy’s Maelius story is the notion of liberating
the republic through a state of exception, where all moves by the state can be char-
acterized as legal, while the opponent is transferred outside legal protection. The
Augustan principate and many of the stories told during this period show that the
Romans were thinking about the relationship between sovereignty and citizen
rights in terms of the law, regardless of where any particular solution might come
down. Further useful for Augustan ideology is the opponent’s coloration with the
182 aftermath
aura of divine transgression. He is a monstrum, and the site of his destroyed house
becomes a monument called the Aequimaelium.36 Presumably, it is a flat place, but
the name also suggests justice was done.37 Augustus’ very name is conversely col-
ored with the aura of divine sanction.
What Augustus did that was so clever from the point of view of sovereignty as
outlined by Agamben was not only to avoid dictatorship but also to harness sacro-
sanctity. His return of the res publica to the SPQR (senatus populusque Romanus)
(RG 34.1) meant that he could not be accused of aspiring to regnum and would con-
sequently not become himself vulnerable to assassination as a homo sacer. He learned
from Caesar’s exemplum. Furthermore, by acquiring tribunician sacrosanctity, he
was himself protected from a potential assassin, who would risk becoming sacer.
Structurally, consecratio against those aspiring to regnum protected the senatorial
elite’s ability to share governance among themselves, while the consecratio of those
harassing the tribunes protected the plebs. The two kinds balance each other out in a
specifically republican form of sovereignty. Augustus managed to institute a new
form of permanent state of exception that circumvented the republican weaknesses
while co-opting its protections. He put himself in a position where he could be
aligned neither with Cincinnatus as dictator nor with Maelius as homo sacer, though
he managed to acquire many of the former’s powers without the latter’s vulnera-
bility. Livy’s Maelius story reveals Augustan sovereignty through negation.
notes
I thank R. J. Tarrant for his response at the conference and Harriet Flower, Kurt
Raaflaub, and T. P. Wiseman for helpful discussion.
1. Wiseman 2009: 177–210 addresses this issue directly.
2. Some argue the plebs sought not power, but security and protection from
oppression: Pettit 1997: 27; Millar 2002: 146.
3. Lintott 1999b. This idea has a long history. Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy 1. 4
(1996: 16–17) judges the violent tumult of the Republic as ultimately beneficial to “public
freedom.” James Harrington (1977: 155) sees Romulus’ institution of the patrician order as
resulting in “two commonwealths, the one oligarchical in the nobility, and the other a mere
anarchy of the people, which thenceforth caused a perpetual feud and enmity between the
senate and the people, even to death.” Daniel Webster (1851: 41) attributes conflict in the
Roman republic to a failure of balancing liberty: “Her constitution, originally framed for a
monarchy, never seemed to be adjusted in its several parts after the expulsion of the kings.
Liberty there was, but it was a disputatious, an uncertain, an ill-secured liberty. The
patrician and plebeian orders, instead of being matched and joined, each in its just place
and proportion, to sustain the fabric of the state, were rather like hostile powers, in
perpetual conflict.” Philip Pettit (1997: 63) considers contestation the hallmark of liberty.
How to keep contestation from devolving into violence?
4. Vell. 2.3.3–4, App. BC 1.55, 1.60: “Thus the seditions (rsrei|) progressed from
strife and competition to murder and from murder to out and out warfare (pokålot|
émsekeπ|)”; Ungern-Sternberg 2004: 92.
5. Mommsen 1879: 218–19 distinguishes this story from those about Spurius Cassius
and Marcus Manlius as having less historical basis and a different genealogy. Discussion
below, nn. 25–26, 28–32.
6. Albrecht Koschorke (2007: 52) calls Livy’s history “Retrofiktion,” but Lintott 1970:
12–13 argues that the tradition is old and therefore revelatory of early republican violence.
7. See Lowrie 2009: ch. 12.
8. See Smith 2006a: 60–61 for exemplarity as “a profound motivation in the Roman
mentalité.”
9. Mommsen 1879; Ogilvie 1965: 551; Lintott 1970; Martin 1990 charts similarities
(51–52); Chassignet 2001; Smith 2006a; Wiseman 2009: 185.
10. Gary Forsythe (1994: 309–10) is basic on the insertion of the dictatorship.
T. J. Cornell (1986: 58) describes Roman historiography as a “process of continuous
transformation as each generation reconstructed the past in its own image.”
11. Ogilvie 1965: 550; Fiori 1996: 396. P. M. Martin (1990: 67–68) groups the stories
about adfectatio regni under the rubric of sacertas or consecratio capitis (consecration of
citizen rights).
12. This section is reduced from Lowrie 2007: 34–36, where I critique Agamben more
systematically. Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, outlined below, goes against conventional
definitions of sovereignty, which locate it rather in the legislature. Still, his and Agamben’s
exceptionalism can help understand the collapse of the Roman republic. William Connolly
(2007) also critiques Agamben for excessive formalism; his emphasis on “institutions,”
“traditions,” and “ethos” (32–33, 35) over against legalism suits Rome. Koschorke 2007:
26–32 sees tribunician sacrosanctity as countering patrician sovereignty, but consecratio as a
result of aspiring to regnum needs to be accounted for as well.
13. Roman law supports Agamben. Gaius shows the emperor as outside the law in his ability
to create it but also subject to the law since his power derives from it: “A constitution of the prince is
that which the emperor lays down in a decree, or edict, or letter. Nor has there ever been any doubt,
but that this has the force of law, since the emperor himself receives his power by law.” Inst. 1.5. The
emperor’s lawmaking power was to establish “exempla publicly valid in perpetuity,” (Fronto ad M.
Caes. 1.6.2–3). For discussion see Peachin 1996: 19, which offers numerous sources for the ambiguity
of the emperor’s position as lawgiver subject to the law (24–25).
14. Pompeius Festus under sacer mons (“holy mountain”), abridged from Verrius
Flaccus’ lexicon. Agamben cites only Festus because he is not interested in these ideas’
historical development—they are timeless to him. He treats Augustus in State of Exception
(2005: ch. 6) but never realizes the definition of the homo sacer is Augustan.
15. Dionysius of Halicarnassus calls the dictator an aÃsojqsxq (5.73.1) and states
that the dictatorship was equal to a tyranny and was intended “to hold all the laws beneath
it” (5.70.3), but A. N. Sherwin-White and Lintott (OCD “dictator”) remark that contrary to
the antiquarian tradition, the dictator was not exempt from the tribunes’ veto or from
appeal nor immune to prosecution after leaving office. See Lintott 1999a: 18.
16. Agamben 2005: 47–48. Lintott 1999a: 109–13 provides a basic description of the
office.
184 aftermath
17. Perhaps earlier than traditionally thought: Badian 1979.

18. Livy 2.18 treats the first dictatorship, which was mired in obscurity. Livy says there
was no right of appeal against a dictator here and elsewhere (2.18.8, 2.29.11, 3.20.8), though
at 8.33.8, a dictator is opposed by an appeal to tribunes and people (tribunos plebis appello
et provoco ad populum).
19. Dictators against external threats: 2.18.8, 2.19.3, 3.26.6. The first dictator appointed
to handle internal disturbance did not act against the people. Appius Claudius calls for a
dictator to handle sedition (2.29.1: seditio). Although the plebs recognizes the dictator was
appointed against them (2.30.5), Manlius Valerius attacks the Aequi instead and resigns
when the senators undermine his attempted conciliation of the plebs. They then secede to
the Mons Sacer (2.32.2) and win the tribunate, which is made sacrosanct (2.33.1). Elsewhere,
Cincinnatus retains his dictatorship after an external victory for internal reasons (3.29.6).
20. Agamben 2005: 15 argues against Schmitt on the basis of the Weimar Republic:
“a ‘protected democracy’ is not a democracy at all” and “the paradigm of constitutional
dictatorship functions instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the
establishment of a totalitarian regime,” but sees dictatorship at Rome as constitutional.
Augustus’ regime, while not totalitarian, shares characteristics of the Fascist and
Nazi regimes, where “they placed beside the legal constitution a second structure,
often not legally formalized, that could exist alongside the other because of the state of
exception” (48).
21. Gildenhard 2006; Wiseman 2009: 193–95, 205–7. Also Hinard 1988: 89, which traces
Cicero’s similar comments about Sulla (90) and anticipates some of Kalyvas’s ideas about
Dionysius and Appian (91).
22. Brennan 2004: 35. Fay Glinister (2006: 24) argues the Romans resisted tyranny
rather than kingship per se; the aristocracy “feared not so much kingly, as popular and anti-
aristocratic, rule, which would have cut into their jealously guarded powers and privileges.”
23. Brennan 2004: 36–50. Hinard 1988: 90 analyzes Sulla’s dictatorship as a return of
kingly imperium without republican limitations.
24. On the sources and a range of critical and more accepting views: Ogilvie 1965 ad
loc.; Lintott 1970: 13–18; Cornell 1986: 58–62; Forsythe 1994: 301–10; Fiori 1996: 378–79 with
synopsis; Lintott 1999b: 56–58; Forsythe 2005: 193; Raaflaub 2006: 132; Smith 2006a: 53–54
and generally 56–62.
25. Roberto Fiori (1996: 393–96) finds the version where Servilius Ahala is privatus
more reliable.
26. Linderski 2002 suggests consecratio in the death of Tiberius Gracchus. Wiseman
2009: 185–87 argues against, but Lowrie 2007: 45–50 sees consecratio less literally as a
cultural citation. Cicero characterizes Scipio Nasica, who authorized Tiberius’ killing, as a
privatus, even while calling him pontifex maximus (Catil. 1.3). The point is he was not a
magistrate.
27. Mommsen 1879: 207–9 finds others: a lictor should have arrested Maelius; Ahala
should not be hiding a dagger in his armpit and if not, how to justify the cognomen?
28. Fiori 1996: 395 takes Cincinnatus’ justification of Maelius’ killing as indicative that
the original version did not include dictatorship.
29. Lintott 1970: 13–18, 1999b: 57; cf. Ogilvie 1965: 551: “Gracchan touches.” Raaflaub
2006: 132–33 accepts this interpretation; Fiori 1996: 395 thinks it unnecessary.
30. Chassignet 2001: 92 finds the events between 63 and 44 bce even more relevant
than the period immediately after the Gracchi for the regularization of the adfectatio regni
stories.
31. Forsythe 1994: 302 accepts the post-Gracchan interpretation but does not account
for the institutional disparity. Cornell 1986: 59 steps back from institutional issues to
address the legality of the Maelius episode broadly in a post-Gracchan context. Chassignet
2001: 92 tentatively suggests Aelius Tubero as a source.
32. Livy calls Maelius’ private grain distribution “a useful matter of the worst
example” (4.13.1: rem utilem pessimo exemplo).
33. For the Catilinarian conspiracy, see Lowrie 2007: 39–44.
34. Lowrie 2005 analyzes Virgil’s Aeneid according to Benjaminian violence.
35. For legal systematization in this period, see Frier 1985, and generally in the first
century bce, see Moatti 1997.
36. Liv. 4.16.1: domum deinde, ut monumento area esset oppressae nefariae spei, dirui
extemplo iussit. id Aequimaelium appellatum est; “Thereupon he ordered his house
immediately to be destroyed, in order that the space be a monument of the suppression of
evil hopes. It was called the ‘Aequimaelium.’ ”
37. Forsythe 1994: 305–7 reconstructs the Aequimaelium as a sheep or pig yard.
11
Representations and
Re-presentations of the
Battle of Actium
Barbara Kellum
In the words of Ronald Syme (1939: 297):
Actium was a shabby affair. . . . But the young Caesar required a

victory that would surpass the greatest in all history, Roman or
Hellenic. In the official version of the victor, Actium took on
august dimensions and an intense emotional colouring, being
transformed into a great naval battle, with lavish wealth of
convincing and artistic detail. More than that, Actium became
the contest of East and West personified, the birth-legend in the
mythology of the Principate.
Since the publication of The Roman Revolution in 1939, most historians

and art historians have tended to follow Syme’s lead in viewing Octavian/
Augustus’ victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the naval battle of Actium
in 31 bce as a sham, a civil conflict masquerading as a foreign one, a
“shabby affair” pumped up in “the official version.”1 Without a doubt, this
victory led ultimately to the demise of both the Ptolemaic queen and her
Roman consort and left Octavian in sole control of the Roman world. In
27 bce he transferred the res publica to the Senate and Roman people and
was himself given by senatorial decree the name Augustus, simultaneously
the princeps (the first citizen) and the emperor who ruled through his auc-
toritas for the next forty years.2 According to Paul Zanker (1988: 82), the
battle of Actium, which marked this transition from republic to empire,
presented a particular conundrum for artists attempting to commemorate
it, since “one easily forgets how tricky it must have been to celebrate a
188 aftermath
victory without being allowed ever to refer to the defeated enemy. Antony had been
a great figure . . . and many of the fallen ‘enemy’ were Roman citizens, [so] artists
had to employ more nonspecific and abstract symbols of victory.” In their varying
ways, both Syme and Zanker echo the Roman historian Tacitus in mourning the
lost Republic and in marking Actium as the lamentable turning point from the old
order to the new.3
And yet, tucked away in the elaborate painted decoration of one of the dining
rooms of the house of two Roman freedmen in Pompeii, Aulus Vettius Restitutus
and Aulus Vettius Conviva, Augustalis, are four small naval battle pinakes that may
tell a different story (figures 11.1–11.2).4 These vignettes have occasioned little com-
ment, perhaps because they are embedded within what have remained for us the
visually bewildering constructions of late Pompeian wall painting.5 The naval battle
vignettes occur in one of the sumptuous dining rooms (triclinia) that open off the
peristyle, named for the large mythological painting on the rear (east) wall that
depicts the punishment of Ixion.6 On the north and south walls of the room a pair
of these naval battle paintings appear, flanking the central mythological pictures on
both walls and serving as windowsills, as it were, into grand architectural vistas.
Each is framed in red, like a miniature panel picture (pinax), and each depicts a
confrontation between many-oared Roman warships filled with soldiers armed
with round shields and lances.7 In all four, a large rock establishes the foreground
plane; those on the north wall have sketchy harborworks in the background, while
those on the south wall have other warships. The compositions are recognizably
similar, and yet no two panels are exactly alike (Archer 1981: 229–30). In one of the
pictures on the south wall, two out of the four ships depicted have swan’s neck pro-
tomes, while in another panel on the north wall, one of the ships has a double
swans’ neck stern ornament (figure 11.2).8 The significance of these seemingly
anomalous details will, I hope, soon be apparent.
These naval battle pinakes are certainly not unique, and a comparison of them
with others will make their association with the battle of Actium clearer. Eight
examples of naval battle vignettes were found in one of the most famous of
Pompeii’s late buildings, the little Temple of Isis, rebuilt after the devastating earth-
quake of 62 ce by Numerius Popidius N.f. Celsinus, the freeborn son of proud and
wealthy freedmen parents.9 As the inscription above the entrance indicates, the
members of the decuriones were so delighted with the restored temple that they
immediately elected Popidius to their ranks even though he was only six years old
at the time.10 The entire complex celebrated the family who dedicated it and the
Romanized Egyptian goddess they worshipped.
Here, the naval battle vignettes were in the porticoes of the temple, interspersed
with individualized images of Isis priests and devotees. It is possible that one of the
officiants, the richly clad boy celebrant, carrying a silver situla, is little Numerius
representations and re-presentations of the battle of actium 189
figure 11.1. Northeast corner, room p, House of the Vettii (VI 15,1), Pompeii
(photo B. Kellum).
Popidius himself.11 One of the few theories ever put forward to account for these
small naval battle paintings in this context emphasizes that Isis was a goddess who
presided over navigation, a thought that has also been extended to the House of the
Vettii where Fortuna, another navigation deity, played a prominent role.12 But this
is to overlook the fact that the ships depicted are not merchant vessels, but warships
190 aftermath
figure 11.2. Naval battle pinax from north wall, room p, House of the Vettii
(photo B. Kellum).
filled with armed men. What, then, are they doing in these monuments of freedmen
in Pompeii?
The Temple of Isis paintings have been recently restored, and it is now easy to
see how visually arresting these little paintings once were. The early engravings
after the paintings as well as the detailed eighteenth-century description of the
excavation also allow us to recapture crucial elements that would otherwise be lost.
It is one of these engravings that reveals that the ships sometimes had projecting
prow ornaments: a swan’s neck on one vessel and a wooly legged satyr on the other
(figure 11.3, top). An additional Temple of Isis panel, now largely obscured, once
showed a ship with a centaur prow insignia, as specified in the report from the day
it was excavated (12 October 1765).13
The warship with centaur protome has a direct counterpart in a first-century-
ce terracotta lamp fragment, acquired in the Fayoum in Egypt and now in the
British Museum, which shows a figurehead in the form of a centaur with left hand
on hip and a raised right hand holding a rock (figure 11.4).14 In his hymn to the
Actian Apollo, the god who supposedly aided Octavian/Augustus at the battle, the
Augustan poet Propertius evoked precisely this image (4.6.19–20, 47–50):
figure 11.3. Engravings of naval battle vignettes from the portico of the Temple of Isis
(VIII 7,28), Pompeii (after O. Elia, Monumenti della pittura antica scoperti in Italia, sez. 3,
Pompei, fasc. 3–4, Pitture del Tempio di Iside [Rome 1941], tav. 4).
huc mundi coiere manus; stetit aequore moles

pinea; nec remis aequa favebat avis. . . .
“nec te quod classis centenis remiget alis
terreat: invito labitur illa mari;
quodque vehunt prorae Centauros saxa minantis,
tigna cava et pictos experiere metus.”
Here met the hosts of all the world: motionless on the deep stood the
huge ships of pine, yet smiled not fortune alike on all their oars. [Apollo
swoops down and enjoins Octavian:] “Be not afraid that their fleet is
winged, each ship a hundred oars: it glides upon reluctant waters:
192 aftermath
figure 11.4. Roman terracotta lamp fragment, warship with centaur prow, British
Museum 1926–9–30 54 (by kind permission of the British Museum).
Though their bows bear figures of Centaurs that menace with rocks, they
prove but hollow planks and painted fears.”
The lamp fragment is one of a large group of similarly ornamented lamps produced
in both Italy and Egypt from the Augustan period through the first century, so this
would have been a readily recognizable motif (Williams 1981: 24). The nearest
extant relative to the terracotta lamps is a relief sculpture purchased in Rome in the
late seventeenth or early eighteenth century by the duke of Alcala and brought back
to his garden of antiquities in Seville. It remains in a private Spanish collection but
is known from the magnificent plate of it in Montfaucon’s 1719 L’Antiquité expli-
quée.15 As on the lamp, it is Antony’s centaur versus Octavian/Augustus’ swan, a
metonymic signifier for the battle of Actium, where the ships’ prows bespeak the
opponents themselves. Just as centaurs and satyrs were inextricably linked with
Antony’s god Dionysus, so the swan was quintessentially the bird of Octavian/
Augustus’ god Apollo and is everywhere to be seen in Augustan art from the Ara
Pacis to first-century-ce cinerary urns.16
I believe that the swan’s neck prow and stern ornaments on the ships in the
House of the Vettii paintings and the centaur and swan prow insignias seen at the
Temple of Isis function in just the same way: the prow ornaments of the ships make
it clear that it is Actium that is being alluded to; Augustus/Apollo’s swan predomi-
nates over Antony’s centaur. The allusion, however, is an artful one: there in some
of the images and not in others, so viewers can construe the puzzle as they will.
But why would prominent Pompeian freedmen in the first century ce wish to
feature Actium, a battle essentially without a suitably heroic or noble legacy, one
that was better forgotten as the “republic,” according to Augustus, had been restored
(Avilia and Jacobelli 1989: 133; Zanker 1988: 82–85)? I will argue that this is no mere
passive “internalization” of standardized imperial imagery (Zanker 1988: 265–74,
337–39), but a strategic appropriation of it for purposes of self-definition in the
municipal context of Pompeii. Two Actium-related reliefs from towns that equally
prospered in the early imperial era furnish useful parallels.
The most securely dated of these is the public funerary monument of Gaius
Cartilius Poplicola that stands just outside the Porta Marina of Rome’s port city,
Ostia. Poplicola, who received both his cognomen (“friend of the people”) and his
tomb from a grateful populace, held the chief magistrate’s office eight times during
the tumultuous period of transition from the civil wars of the Late Republic to the
peace of the early imperial period.17 Although Poplicola may never have seen mili-
tary service—all of his offices were municipal—he is honored on his tomb as a loyal
local partisan of Octavian/Augustus, with a representation that suggests the naval
victory at Actium. The tomb façade features a row of colossal fasces, symbolizing
Poplicola’s civic authority, that support a frieze focusing on a warship with a hero
onboard (figure 11.5). By the time Poplicola’s tomb was built, probably in the teens
bce, Actium was already codified in its epic formulation in Virgil’s description of
Aeneas’ shield (A. 8.675–713). On Poplicola’s tomb, the warships contain nude and
seminude heroes, and the ships are decorated with images of the gods on Octavian’s
side, Minerva and Mars.18 At the front of the first ship is a heroically nude hero
poised to throw a spear (figure 11.6). Although the figure is generalized, there is a
certain resemblance between it and the nude portrait statue of Poplicola dedicated
during his lifetime that stood on the front steps of Ostia’s Temple of Hercules. By
the magic of representation, Poplicola, the local hero, becomes on his tomb the
stand-in for the emperor himself, as it were.
Other Italian municipalities that prospered in the early imperial era provide
comparable examples. Perhaps the best known is this warship with armed men
relief from Praeneste, a town that also featured altars celebrating Pax Augusta and
Securitas Augusta and was a favorite retreat of both the emperors Augustus and
Tiberius (figure 11.7).19 The warship relief has a crocodile on its base, the signifi-
cance of which Walther Amelung recognized long ago. The crocodile was synony-
mous with Egypt and the victory over Antony and Cleopatra, as Augustan coinage
advertised to a worldwide population early in the first emperor’s reign.20
194 aftermath
figure 11.5. Tomb of Gaius Cartilius Poplicola, Ostia, late first century bce (by kind
permission of Scott Gilchrist and Archivision).
figure 11.6. Frieze detail, tomb of Gaius Cartilius Poplicola, Ostia, late first century bce
(by kind permission of Scott Gilchrist and Archivision).
figure 11.7. Warship with armed men relief from Praeneste, late first century bce,
Vatican Museums (after R. Heidenreich, MDAI(R) 51 [1936]: abb.1).
196 aftermath
In many respects, Actium became the cornerstone of the new order. Viewed in
relation to the inscriptional and monumental record, it becomes apparent that
Augustan social legislation, while affirming class hierarchy, at the same time laid a
firm foundation for social change.21 Freed persons were favored consistently.
Augustus chose a freedman to educate his children, viewed the games in the Circus
from the upper rooms of the adjacent houses of wealthy freedmen, and wrote his
will with two of his freedmen, one of whom, Polybius, read it before the senate on
the emperor’s death in 14 ce.22 When, in 5 ce, none of the noblest families put their
daughters forward as candidates for the Vestal Virgins, Augustus opened the compe-
tition to the daughters of freedmen. And, of course, it was primarily freedmen who
became imperial attendants (apparitores), captains in the neighborhoods of Augustan
Rome (magistri vici), and, first in Italy and then throughout the empire, representa-
tives of the imperial order or Augustales.23 As the explosion of inscriptions from the
early imperial period on attests, paths to local status and ritual participation in the
state were open to a far wider spectrum of the population than ever before.24
For these newly privileged people, Actium marked a beginning, not an end.
Evidence of its celebration was everywhere to be found in the first century ce. Dates
were recorded in relation to the Actian victory; actors took the name Actius.25
Augustus built a magnificent temple to his victorious god, Apollo Actius, at Rome
on the Palatine and decorated it with repeated terracotta plaques that just as art-
fully, and just as insistently, as the naval battle vignettes, depicted Actium as a single
combat between Octavian/Augustus and Antony. On the plaques the opponents are
represented by their divine progenitors—Apollo and Hercules, respectively—
locked in a struggle over the Delphic tripod (figure 11.8). This mythological
transmutation is a brilliant one since quick-tempered Hercules is attempting to
steal the tripod that is rightfully Apollo’s and will remain his, replete with its winged
victory.26 The Greek site of the victory was renamed Nicopolis, and there the
emperor both expanded the temple of Apollo and built a campsite memorial fea-
turing a display of the bronze prows from Antony and Cleopatra’s captured ships.27
Every four years at Nicopolis the Actian games, ludi Actiaci, took place, which unlike
earlier Greek game cycles included a boat race, recalling the Actian naval victory, as
did coins minted there (Lämmer 1986–87). This is certainly the source of Virgil’s
boat race at the beginning of the funerary games in Aeneid 5, where, as Andrew
Feldherr (1995) has demonstrated, civic identities are formulated and observers
become participants as the poet restages his text as spectacle. In Virgil, the losing
ship, with its centaur prow, crashes its oars on the turning-post rock but is able to
limp back to port, where its hot-headed commander, though laughed at, nonethe-
less receives a consolation prize.28 In exactly the same way, Augustus rendered his-
tory spectacle when in 2 bce, in dedicating the Temple of Mars Ultor in the forum
of Augustus, he had the Stagnum or Naumachia Augusti, an artificial lake, built
across the Tiber in gardens that had once belonged to Cassius, one of the assassins
of Augustus’ adoptive father Julius Caesar, and then to Antony. On the lake he
staged a naval spectacle (naumachia) of the fifth-century-bce battle of Salamis, the
“Persians” versus the “Athenians.”29 In this contest of East versus West, Salamis for
all intents and purposes became Actium, as the thirty-six crocodiles slaughtered at
the conclusion of the naumachia must have underscored. In represented form,
figure 11.8. Apollo versus Hercules, terracotta Campana plaque from the Temple of
Apollo Actius, Palatine, Rome, 28 bce, Palatine Antiquarium (photo B. Kellum).
198 aftermath
Actium was all the more assimilable, all the more mythic, in every sense the
foundation on which the new social order was built (Hölscher 1984).
Taking their cue from Augustus, who decorated the speakers’ platforms in the
Roman forum with the ships’ prows (rostra) of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s ships at
Actium, as well as from Octavia, who ornamented her porticus with representa-
tions of rostra,30 ships’ prows began to appear everywhere: from the cornerstone of
the funerary altar of two freed persons, Annius Eros and Ofillia Romana, to a
bronze boss from the house of Pompeian notable Obellius Firmus.31 In a culture
in which naval heroes once displayed rostra at their front doors, Petronius only
had to exaggerate slightly to create the dining room (triclinium) entry for his fic-
tional freedman Trimalchio: “rods and axes [were] fixed on the door posts of the
dining room, and one part of them finished off with a kind of ship’s brazen beak,
inscribed: ‘Presented . . . to Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, sevir Augustalis’. ”32 It was
also in their dining room that the actual freedmen Aulus Vettius Restitutus and
Aulus Vettius Conviva, Augustalis, broadcast their affiliation with the imperial
system through the repeated naval battle vignettes representing its founding
moment as spectacle.33
It was not just in Augustan Rome, but also in the public porticoes of Pompeii
itself that the Vettii, and the Popidii at the Temple of Isis, found their most
immediate inspirations for the naval battle pinakes. As renderings by Morelli indi-
cate, the portico of the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii, refurbished in the Augustan
period, was decorated with large-scale paintings from the Iliad as well as with
small-scale Nilotic landscapes and naval battle vignettes.34 Celebrating Actium
and the victory over Egypt in the temple of the god who oversaw it of course
makes sense, but even more a part of the everyday enactment of the imperial era
of peace and prosperity and still extant, at least in part, are the naumachia repre-
sentations at Pompeii’s Macellum, the market where, as the archaeological evi-
dence indicates, everything from fish to bread, olives, cheese, and livestock on the
hoof could be purchased. We do not know the name of the dedicant of the
Macellum, but as the Julio-Claudian look-alike portrait statues in the building’s
central shrine make clear, it was probably, like the building of Eumachia down the
forum, a mother and son. The woman’s headdress is that of a public priestess,
another of those newly privileged in the imperial social order. Here the nauma-
chiae serve as a part of the foundation for a complex, fourth-style painted wall
orchestration that culminates in an upper frieze of large-scale paintings of meat,
bread, carving knife, wine, fish, fruit, and the like (figure 11.9). Far more closely
juxtaposed with the naumachiae, however, are a series of mythological panels.
Mythology often seems to us a serious subject suited only for high-culture con-
sumption. But, as the graffiti of Pompeii indicate, some stories had wide currency,
and the viewer’s relationship to them was often a casual, even a punning one.35
figure 11.9. Naval battle vignettes, mythological pictures, and upper register of food
still lifes, fourth-style paintings in the northwest corner of the portico of the Macellum
(VII 9,4), Pompeii (photo B. Kellum).
Here, in this environment punctuated by naumachiae, the system of meaning is

self-referential, and in this case the common denominator is food: the captive Io,
with the heroine disguised as a heifer, would certainly have sufficed for the pur-
veyor of the tenderest veal in town that was on sale here.36 By the same token,
Penelope’s recognition of Odysseus hinges on his unique knowledge of their bed
that he built long ago from a live olive tree, making this the perfect device for the
olive sellers (figure 11.10).37 Mythology, like history, is reconfigured in context, and
its meaning shifts to accommodate the function of the space it occupies.
Moreover, viewership, at all social levels, seems to have been equally self-
referential. For example, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, when the noble
Porcia and Brutus were about to part for the last time, Plutarch Brut. 23 reports
that Porcia saw a picture of Andromache bidding farewell to Hector and, recog-
nizing “the image of her own sorrow presented by it,” burst into tears. And so too,
after losing his boy lover Giton to a rival, that fictional rogue Encolpius finds him-
self in a picture gallery surrounded by images of the abduction of pretty boys—
Ganymede and the eagle, Hylas and the nymphs—and once again his own situation
is the instant common denominator: “All these divinities enjoyed love’s embraces
without a rival. But I have taken for my comrade a friend more cruel than Lycurgus
himself ” (Petr. 83).
It is the same kind of self-referential system that I believe informs the Room of
Ixion at the House of the Vettii and all the naumachiae-informed spaces created by
those newly privileged in the imperial period.38 They owned Augustus’ victory at
Actium not because they were anxious “social climbers” (Zanker 1988: 316–23), but
because his victory had indeed been theirs.
200 aftermath
figure 11.10. Detail, Penelope and Odysseus painting, Macellum (VII 9,4), Pompeii
(photo B. Kellum).
In the analysis of the hierarchy-bound Roman world, we have carefully com-

partmentalized the fortunes of the state and the emperor from those of everyone
else in the social system and failed to recognize how local municipal patrons made
the imperial story their own, transforming history and myth for their own individual
purposes. In order to discuss the implications of this model of interpretation in
fuller terms, I would like to conclude by focusing on one final monument. Like the
naumachiae panels, it is Actium-related, although it occupies a different space,
figure 11.11. Ass and lion shop sign for a gambling establishment/brothel in Pompeii
(VII 6,34/35), Naples, Museo Nazionale Archeologico inv. 27683 (after P. Mingazzini,
MDAI(R) 60 [1953]: taf. 60).
performs a different function, and takes a different form. It is a shop sign from a
gambling establishment and brothel in Pompeii (VII 6,34/35; figure 11.11).39 The
image is a representation of an ithyphallic ass mounting a male lion, in which the
ass is crowned by a winged victory. Legend had it that, as Octavian was going down
to begin the battle of Actium (Suet. Aug. 96.2; cf. Plu. Ant. 65),
he met an ass with his driver, the man having the name Eutychus
[Fortunate] and the beast Nicon [Victor]; and after the victory he set up
bronze images of the two in the sacred enclosure into which he converted
the site of his camp.
202 aftermath
Equally, the lion was synonymous with Antony’s ancestor Hercules, with whom
Antony identified (Plu. Ant. 4.1–2). Just like the warship with centaur protome, this
grouping of ass and lion is to be found on first-century-ce terracotta lamps, sug-
gesting that this parody of the battle of Actium enjoyed wide currency. The poten-
tial for multiple meanings is great. Although this particular configuration does not
have a parallel in ancient fable, the lion was the king of beasts and the ass was the
beast of burden, closely identified with the slave, in contemporary folklore.
Therefore, in context, just as the mythological panels in the Macellum could play
suggestively on the foodstuffs for sale, so too the ass and lion parody of the emper-
or’s victory over Antony could serve simultaneously as a paradigm for the definitive
reversal of fortune hoped for by every dice player and for the crowning glory hoped
for by every would-be lover who entered the establishment, whatever his place in
the social hierarchy.40 The ass mounting a lion and crowned by victory is neither
imperial propaganda nor a subversion of it; instead, it is an artful commandeering
of a humorous rendering of imperial history for blatantly commercial purposes
and one perfectly suited to a business catering to both contest and copulation.
Like the small naval battle vignettes in their varying visual contexts and the myth-
ological paintings in the Macellum, the ass and lion shop sign suggests a world in which
spectators were active participants and mythology, legend, and history were not staid set
pieces, but fields of protean referential possibility. Just how different a world this was is
suggested, I think, by a 1999 New York Times Macy’s advertisement selling autographs of
the famous and the infamous that proclaimed: “You can’t change history, but you can
own it!” I would submit that in the first century ce, freed persons and other newly
privileged members of the imperial dispensation both owned history and changed it.
It should not be overlooked that the patrons here—the freedmen Vettii, the
Popidii, and the public priestess at the Macellum—are precisely those whom Syme
(1939) found most dubious: “ignoble names and never known before” (129). Or, in
one of his most revealing formulations, in summarizing what he called “the New
State”: “Influences more secret and more sinister were quietly at work all the time—
women and freedmen” (384). It is time that we questioned the presuppositions of
that formulation and recognize that in the early imperial period freedmen and
women were not necessarily either “non-political,” in Syme’s terms, or, in a more
recent variation on the theme, “non-elite.”41 Taking the material culture record into
consideration, it becomes apparent that the principate established paths to local
status and ritual participation in the state to a far wider spectrum of the population
than ever before. For the newly privileged, especially freed persons, Actium was a
crucial part of their foundation stories. In a very tangible way, they made Augustus’
victory theirs and, in doing so, affirmed a fundamental shift in social aspiration and
representation in the imperial period.
notes
I dedicate this to Elisabeth Pearsall Lubin, my friend and former student (Smith, 1989).
I would like to thank Mimi Hellman, Bettina Bergmann, and Dana Leibsohn for all their
help on this project over the long haul and also to Brian W. Breed and the other editors of
this volume.
1. For an excellent overview, see Gurval 1995, esp. 1–13.
2. RG 34. On auctoritas, see especially Galinsky 1996: 10–41.
3. Cf. Tac. Ann. 1.3.7, Hist. 1.1. Cf. Syme 1939: 518–19 on the sterilization of politics in
the imperial period with Zanker 1988: 335–36 on the standardized visual language of Roman
Imperial art. Witness as well the title of the exhibition and catalog featuring the work of
Paul Zanker, Tonio Hölscher, and many other European scholars: Kaiser Augustus und die
verlorene Republik (Berlin 1988) = “Caesar Augustus and the Lost Republic.”
4. The names of the owners of the House of the Vettii (VI 15,1) are derived from
their inscribed signet rings found in the atrium of the house (Mau 1896: 3–4) and
election notices on the house exterior (CIL 4. 3522, 3509). The house construction dates
after the earthquake of 62 ce (Richardson 1988: 324–29). See also Sogliano 1898; Maiuri
1942: 109–12; Archer 1981; Clarke 1991: 208–35. For Conviva’s status as an Augustalis:
Ostrow 1985.
5. Avilia and Jacobelli 1989 catalogs the examples. My thanks to Bettina Bergmann
for sending me this article. For recent work on late Pompeian painting, see Cerulli Irelli
1991 and Barbet 1985: 185–88, 204–5, 212–14.
6. Although the rest of the decorations in this and other rooms of the house will not
be discussed in this essay, a full discussion of them as a self-referential visual universe will
be found in my The House of the Vettii: Freedmen and Fortune in Roman Pompeii, currently
in preparation.
7. For details of these as Roman men-of-war ships, see Casson 1991: 190.
8. Avilia and Jacobelli 1989: 136–37, no. 6 and no. 5, both on the south wall.
9. Temple of Isis (VIII 7,28). De Caro 1992 nos. 1.20, 1.23, 1.25, 1.29, 1.39, 1.41, 1.44, 1.47.
See also Zevi 1994. For the freedmen parents, see Franklin 2001: 169. For the political careers
of freedmen’s sons: Gordon 1931.
10. CIL 10.846: N[umerius] Popidius N[umerii] f[ilius] Celsinus / aedem Isidis terrae
motu conlapsam / a fundamento p[ecunia] s[ua] restituit. Hunc decuriones ob liberalitatem /
cum esset annorum sexs ordini suo gratis adlegerunt; “Numerius Popidius, son of Numerius,
Celsinus restored from its foundation at his own expense the temple of Isis that had been
destroyed in the earthquake. On account of this benefaction, although he was six years old,
the board of governors accepted him into their order at no cost.”
11. De Caro 1992 no. 1.26. However, it is my suggestion that this distinctively
featured and richly clad little figure is a portrait of Popidius. The emphasis on
Harpocrates, the child member of the Isaic triad, whose shrine is directly across from the
temple in the Pompeian sanctuary also seems to reflect on its dedicator. For the Isis cult,
see Tran 1964: 30–61.
12. Tran 1964: 99–100; Clarke 1991: 223.
13. De Caro 1992 no. 1.47.
204 aftermath
14. Williams 1981.

15. Montfaucon 1976, 2:155 and plate 45. The relief is in the Medina Coeli collection in
Seville (Williams 1981: 26).
16. Antony and Dionysus: Plu. Ant. 75.3–4. On the swan, Apollo, and Augustus:
Kellum 1994: 33–34, plates 18 and 19.
17. Floriani Squarciapino 1958: 195–207; Meiggs 1973: 39–40, 131–32, 475–78.
18. Floriani Squarciapino 1958: 203.
19. Zevi 1976. For Praeneste as a favorite retreat of Augustus and Tiberius: Suet. Aug.
72, 82; Gel. 16.13.
20. The “Aegypta capta” with crocodile type of 28 bce is key here; see W. Trillmich,
“Münzpropaganda” (Hofter 1988: 506, no. 322). On crocodiles and Egypt: Plin. Nat. 35.142;
Amelung 1908: 65–72, taf. 5. See also Heidenreich 1936 and Felletti Maj 1977: 226–29.
Hölscher, “Historische Reliefs” (Hofter 1988: 363) and 1979: 342–48, argues for a late
republican date and stresses Praeneste’s ties to Antony’s party at that time, but this ignores
the Poplicola parallel and the fact that Praeneste prospered in the early imperial period.
Compare also an example from the via Salaria: Pietrangeli 1939. The presence of cavalry on
the Praeneste relief (as well as the horse from the largely destroyed left side of the Poplicola
relief) in no way contradicts an association of both the Praeneste and Poplicola reliefs with
Actium. Although they saw no action on the day of the battle (2 September 31 bce), there
were land troops on both sides. Titus Statilius Taurus, himself from an Italian municipality,
commanded Octavian/Augustus’ land forces and had just prior to the battle led a sudden
cavalry charge defeating Antony’s horsemen (Vell. 2.85.3; D.C. 50.13.5–6).
21. For the inscriptions: MacMullen 1982, Meyer 1990.
22. Education of his children: Suet. Gram. 17; viewing the games: Suet. Aug. 45; his
will: Suet. Aug. 101, D.C. 56.32.1. At the same time, he paid careful attention to rank at
formal dinner parties, only in very exceptional cases inviting freedmen: Suet. Aug. 74,
cf. 72.2.
23. Vestal Virgins: D.C. 55.22.5. For the apparitores, see Purcell 1983; for magistri vici,
see Lott 2004; for the Augustales, Ostrow 1990 and D’Arms 2000.
24. See sources in n. 21.
25. Dating by Actium: Josephus AJ 18.26, BJ 1.398; actors with the name “Actius”:
Franklin 1987, Suet. Tib. 47. See also Parsons 1981 for hexameter verses on the victory of
Octavian/Augustus at Actium found in the library of the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum,
destroyed in the 79 ce eruption of Vesuvius.
26. For the Palatine temple: G. Carettoni, “Der Tempel des Apollo” (Hofter 1988:
265–67). On the Apollo versus Hercules terracotta Campana plaques from the temple:
Kellum 1993.
27. For the refurbished Temple of Apollo near the battle site: Suet. Aug. 18.2; see also
Paar 1985. For the campsite memorial: Murray and Petsas 1989.
28. Hardie 1987: 166–67 for ship with centaur prow and its relation to Antony’s in
Prop. 4.6.49. Brian Breed also notes that the ship called Centaur in Aen. 10 is captained by
Cupavo, son of Cycnus. Cycnus’ metamorphosis into a swan is recounted by Virgil in
accounting for Cupavo’s head that is crested with swan feathers, olorinae pennae (A.
10.185–97). Breed proposes that here “a manifestation of the civil war threat (wild and
uncanny Centaurs) has been brought under the control of a suitably Augustan/Apolline
captain” (e-mail communication 15 September 2008), and I agree.
29. D.C. 55.10.7–8. See Coarelli 1992: 46–51; Coleman 1993: 51–54.
30. Speakers’ platform in Forum Romanum: D.C. 51.19, cf. 56.34. Also in the forum
stood the restored columna rostrata (a column decorated with ships’ prows) for the
third-century-bce naval hero Gaius Duilius (CIL i2.25). Compare the now excavated rostral
monument at Nicopolis: Murray and Petsas 1989. Although other explanations have been
put forward (Coarelli 1968) for the frieze with priestly implements and rostra, the fact that
a portion of the frieze was excavated in the Porticus of Octavia (Colini 1940) makes it seem
the logical site for its display. This is not out of keeping with the other exhibits in the
Porticus focusing on Octavia’s role as sister and virtuous wife and mother.
31. Annius Eros and Ofillia Romana altar: Von Bothmer 1990: 230–31; bronze ship’s
prow boss from tablinum door, House of Marcus Obellius Firmus (IX 14,4): Spinazzola
1953: 346 and fig. 390. For more monumental examples, Caputo 1984.
32. Rostra at front doors: Cic. Phil. 2.28; Plin. Nat. 35.6. Trimalchio’s dining room
entry: Petr. 30.
33. Richardson 1988: 327. I thank my colleague John Davis for suggesting a telling
twentieth-century parallel: the use of a reproduction of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the
Delaware as the background for Grant Wood’s 1932 painting Daughters of Revolution. Other
appropriations of Leutze’s painting include Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver
Crossing the Delaware (1975) (Art in America, June 1989, 150); see also Ferguson 1986.
34. VII 7,32. Avilia and Jacobelli 1989: 138 for naumachiae. See also Pugliesi Caratelli
1990–2003, 7:296 no. 15, and 10:113–14 nos. 56–57. For Augustan date: Dobbins et al. 1998,
Carroll and Gidden 2000.
35. On graffiti: Tanzer 1939, esp. 84–92. For patterns of popular speech: Boyce 1991. For
both a visual and a verbal pun on the legendary hero Aeneas: Kellum 1996. The assorted
mythological comparanda that Propertius uses for “Cynthia” and her admirers are good
indicators of the ways these could be used (2.22A, 3.19).
36. For a listing of the paintings: Schefold 1957: 195–97. For the types: Penelope and
Odysseus (Hausmann LIMC 7.1: 291–95, esp. 294 no. 36 = Odysseus 218); Phrixos (Bruneau
LIMC 7.1: 398–404, esp. 400 no. 8); Io (Yalouris LIMC 5.1 661–76, esp. 668 no. 47). For a
different reading of the paintings: Barringer 1994. For the Macellum and evidence for the
foodstuffs sold there: Mau 1902: 94–101 (96: sheep skeletons found here indicate sale of live
animals), Ruyt 1983: 137–49.
37. Hom. Od. 23.183–206. For the initial observation of this connection, I thank
Elisabeth Pearsall Lubin.
38. See my forthcoming House of the Vettii.
39. For earlier interpretations compare Della Corte 1951: 25–30 and Mingazzini 1953.
40. For a very different interpretation that does not take into consideration the
ubiquity of Actium imagery in the first century ce, see Clarke 2008.
41. For the “non-political” classes see Syme 1939: 513–24.
12
Discordia Fratrum: Aspects of
Lucan’s Conception of Civil War
Elaine Fantham
My topic is Lucan’s association of civil war with discordia at every level,

from the family to the community to the cosmos. Although I will avoid the
hybris of trying to cover the cosmos itself, I shall try to do justice to Lucan’s
own ambitious and universalizing approach. As modern readers of Lucan,
we tend to give most of our attention to the dominant personalities: a
ruthless Caesar, a fading Pompey, a stern and morally rigid Cato. These
historical figures have been familiar to us since our schooldays, and Lucan
re-creates them in bold and memorable terms; but their context too is
important, and in this essay I want to shift the focus away from the protag-
onists and toward the civic and cosmic background of this conflict. After
all, over a century after Caesar’s wars Lucan was tackling a theme grown
too familiar1 and in his poem reached out for new means to convey the
shock and awe that his fellow citizens had once felt at the equal impieties
of Caesar’s invasion and Pompey’s desertion of Italy itself.
1. Innards
We begin with Lucan’s first sentence, where two words of extreme moral
condemnation, sceleri (1.2) and nefas (1.6),2 frame two evocations of armed
violence designed to shock: the physical self-wounding of the Roman peo-
ple (2–3: populum . . . potentem in sua victrici conversum viscera dextra) and
the battle lines of opposing kinsmen (cognatas acies). The graphic vis-
cera, either flesh or entrails, is more vivid and violent than sanguis, and
208 aftermath
Lucan opposes a surprisingly high incidence of viscera to the regular recurrence of

phrases like civilis sanguis.3 The next instance of the term is clearly designed to
recall this first case. It comes from Laelius’ speech in book 1 (366–78): “Is it,” he asks,
“so dreadful to triumph in a civil war?” His answer betrays an hysterical loyalty to
Caesar, “Any man against whom your bugles sound in battle is not my fellow
citizen. . . . If you bid me bury my sword in my brother’s breast and father’s throat,
and the flesh (viscera) of my pregnant wife, I shall perform all of these deeds, though
with a reluctant right hand.”
We will return later to our main theme of fratricide and parenticide; for the
moment note the extreme brutality of killing one’s own child in the pregnant womb.
Laelius is a Caesarean, and the phrase is again Caesarian when Lucan represents
Caesar’s strange boast before Pharsalus (7.308–10): “a safe and self-inflicted destiny
awaits me: any of my men who looks back before the enemy is conquered, will see me
piercing my own flesh (fodientem viscera).” The poet in person at the height of his
denunciations declares that only the sword will satisfy civil hatred and draw hands
against Roman flesh (7.490–91: odiis solus civilibus ensis / sufficit et dextras Romana in
viscera ducit).4 Even when the battle is ended by Pompey’s flight, Caesar still continues
to wreak murderous violence on his slaughtered fatherland: “Caesar, in this still
mounting pile of slaughter, you wade through your country’s flesh” (7.721–22: tu,
Caesar in alto / caedis adhuc cumulo patriae per viscera vadis). This has been the image
of Caesarian aggression and will only be reversed just before the poet breaks off his
narrative in book 10. Pompey’s death will not be avenged “until his country’s swords
enter Caesar’s flesh” (10.528: dum patrii veniant in viscera Caesaris enses). The mutila-
tion theme of the proem stretches to the epic’s last surviving lines.
2. Outward
Beyond the proem, once past the controversial praise of Nero, Lucan launches a
second beginning and a new level of imagery to which too little attention is usually
paid: he goes to the other extreme, no longer personifying the war of the maddened
Roman people (1.68–69: quid in arma furentem / impulerit populum) but deperson-
alizing it as both political and cosmic discord—and one of the themes of this essay
will be his use of this latter, macrocosmic figure. Lucan was not just a political poet:
he also aspired to be a scientific poet, a student of natural philosophy like Lucretius
and Manilius. As Michael Lapidge (1979: 370) demonstrated in his definitive article
“Lucan’s Imagery of Cosmic Dissolution,”5 Lucan had been shaped by a Stoic educa-
tion, and despite his own antiprovidential reading of history he inherited “a rich
tradition of Stoic cosmological vocabulary stretching back to Chrysippus . . . and dis-
played striking originality in applying this vocabulary.” But Lapidge’s proper concern
aspects of lucan’s conception of civil war 209
with Stoic thinking does not consider how far the poet’s language and conception of
world destruction also matched that of the Epicurean Lucretius or how this language
of destruction in Lucan (and in his Latin predecessors in general) was grounded in
the pragmatic world of Roman warfare and military engineering.
For example, the compages of the universe6 held together by Stoic syntonia in
Lucan 1.72–73 is also the natural word for the framework of ships and siege engines:
Lucretius spoke of machina mundi, Manilius of both machina and compages,7 as
does Seneca in his Natural Questions. Lucretius uses the image moles et machina
mundi only once in his entire poem. Lucan too uses the same cosmic image only
once (1.79–80, to quote Duff ’s fine translation): “the whole distracted image of the
shattered firmament will overthrow its laws” (totaque discors / machina divulsi turb-
abit foedera mundi). Elsewhere Lucan limits machina to the standard machina belli
(used three times). But our poet, more than his predecessors, is obsessed by disin-
tegration. When he mentions compages it is always under threat: the Delphic priest-
ess’s human frame (5.119), the unstable Libyan terrain (9.467), and even the vault of
heaven itself strains and falters in the sea storm (5.633 motaque poli / compage labo-
rant). In Lucan’s introductory analogy of disintegrating state and universe, too, the
compages mundi breaks down with the clashing and collapse of constellations, gen-
erating reversals of nature’s laws as the earth repels the sea and the moon rebels
against her brother sun.
To these physical foedera correspond the contract of triumviral tyranny (foed-
era regni) at Rome, which, in turn, is thrown into confusion as the world’s masters
at first collaborate to ill effect (1.87: male concordes) and then have their jarring
cooperation (1.98: concordia discors) break down in reluctant peace. That is, their
cooperation lasted only a brief time because it was always already jarring. The
breaking of the laws and contract of the world will also mark, at the beginning of
the second book, the outbreak of war (2.1–3): “The universe emitted open signs of
the war, and Nature forewarned overthrew the laws and contract of the world (lege-
sque et foedera rerum) with an uprising full of portents.” For Lucan, the force that
shatters the universe, throwing the laws or contract of nature (foedera mundi) into
confusion, is nothing other than discors (1.79).
3. Discordia
That discord is used as a symbol of civil war is not surprising. Discord does not put
the blame on either party: it is an inherent systemic clash or collapse. This is why
Virgil, to mark the outbreak of war in Aeneid 7, an impious if not explicitly civil
war, uses Discord, a symbol that goes back beyond Virgil to Ennius and beyond
Ennius to the cosmic neikos of Empedocles. Eduard Norden (1915: 10) demonstrated
210 aftermath
nearly a century ago how Virgil had responded to Ennius’ Discord (Ann. 225–26;
Skutsch 1985), the elemental paluda virago (Ann. 220–21 Sk.) who forced open the
gates of war to offer resistance to Hannibal in book 7.8 True, in Aeneid 7 Allecto
usurps Discord’s role in starting hostilities (note in 7.335 her record of fomenting
battle between loving brothers9), and Juno takes over Discord’s act of opening the
Gates of War, but Virgil nonetheless recalls his Ennian model in Allecto’s boast of
Discord achieved at the moment of first bloodshed (7.545: en perfecta tibi bello dis-
cordia tristi). Also, at a further remove from the action, Discord personified is found
among the evils and affliction at the entry to Hades and fights with the other spirits
of belligerence hovering over the battle of Actium (A. 8.700–702):
saevit medio in certamine Mavors

caelatus ferro, tristesque ex aethere Dirae
et scissa gaudens vadit Discordia palla.
Mars rages in the heart of the conflict, engraved in steel, and the grim
Dirae <come> from the heaven, and Discord marches exultant with torn
robe.10
Yet, apart from Virgil, the role of impersonal discordia and discors played an impor-
tant role both in the political allusions to civic discord of historians and, at a cosmic
level, in scientific poetry, and its wide use in previous literary traditions, too, must
have played a role in Lucan’s adoption of the symbol.
Sallust constructs the introduction to his Bellum Catilinae around concord
and discord: Catiline’s upbringing amid discordia civilis (Cat. 5) is almost immedi-
ately opposed by the civic concordia that led to Rome’s early growth (6.2, repeated
at 9.1) and the anomalous plural usage in 9.2, where the early Romans kept their
quarrels for the enemy (discordias . . . cum hoste exercebant). If the word discordia
does not itself occur in the political excursus of 37–38, it is still the underlying
theme, from the aliena mens of the people to the detailed account of the opposing
parties in 38.1–2.
Similarly, while Sallust avoids the word in the Jugurtha, he reflects the concept
first in the family strife, dissensio, among Micipsa’s natural and adoptive sons (12.1),
then in the schism among the Numidians (13.1: in duas partes discedunt Numidae)
and later the Roman dissensio of 37.2. Adherbal’s speech is full of fraternal discord
(14, esp. 13–15; see below) that is repeated at Rome (41, esp. 41.5: omnia in duas partes
abstracta sunt: res publica quae media fuerat dilacerata); as Thomas Wiedemann
(1993: 48–57) has shown, discord is characteristic alike of Numidians and Romans.
Lucretius as well as the Stoics stressed the role of concordia in the constructive
power of the atomic swirls, and when Horace alluded to rerum concordia discors
(Ep. 1.12.19) he seems to have been thinking as much in terms of Epicurean as of Stoic
cosmology. Ovid drew the cosmology of his Metamorphoses eclectically, taking from
Empedocles the quarrelsome or ill-assorted particles (discordia semina) of Met. 1.8–9,
which eventually are reconciled when his divine demiurge assembles and binds them
together in cooperative peace (1.25: concordi pace ligavit, in which we note the political
concept pax). Manilius in turn presents this discordant world of opposite first parti-
cles as discordia made fertile (1.142: discordia concors / quae . . . omnis partus elementa
capacia reddit). Again, as Lapidge has shown, Manilius stresses the consequences
when the compages or machina mundi is dissolved. Just so Lucan’s Brutus invokes cos-
mology, hoping to persuade Cato from joining the coming war: he contrasts the peace
maintained by great bodies with the surrender of lesser beings to discord (2.272–73:
lege deum minimas rerum discordia turbat / pacem magna tenent).
In Lucan’s vision, however, discors and discordia become ubiquitous, as impor-
tant in his presentation of subhuman and supernatural conflict as of human
political strife, and inevitably he also applies discors and discordia to strife within
the opposing armies, marking the mutinies quelled by Caesar (5.299) and Cato
(9.217). The adjective discors, too, signals the monstrous or abnormal: portents are
described in 1.589–90 as “what Nature in conflict (discors . . . Natura) begat from no
seed,” and the magical utterances of Erichtho are discordant (6.686–87: mur-
mura . . . discordia). There is even conflict in heaven on the morning of Pharsalus;
Lucan’s prophet observes the upper atmosphere blocking the sky, in fact apparently
obstructing itself (7.198–99): “or if he perceived the whole heaven obstructing the
opposing sky (discordi obsistere caelo) and saw through it the poles.” This is more
than conflicting weather fronts, for Lucan continues, “if men’s universal intelligence
had only marked the new signs of the sky seen by the expert augur, Pharsalus would
have been observed all over the world.” And the discord that has infected the heavens
has already infected the underworld, taking hold of Rome’s dead heroes and radical
villains (6.780–81): “Savage Discord (effera . . . Discordia) harries the Roman shades,
and impious battle broke into the calm of the underworld.”11 Both di superi and di
inferi are roused by the impia arma of civil war.
In the same fashion, the opposite concept concordia is given cosmic signifi-
cance as salvation of the confused world, although, as we may imagine, concordia in
this poem is short-lived. It only marks the momentary reconciliation of Caesarian
and Pompeian forces in Spain (4.190–91 and 197–99).
4. Winds
Now I would like to extend my study and trace Lucan’s association of the
destructive force of civil war not only with internal discord but also with the
external destructive forces in the cosmos: as Caesar is compared in his first great
212 aftermath
simile to a thunderbolt, a product of the winds (1.151–57: expressum ventis . . . ful-

men; cf. Alexander at 10.30–34: terrarum fatale malum fulmenque), so he is com-
pared to a wind or fire needing material for its destructive force. But unlike the
thunderbolt, winds are mostly invoked in the plural, as quarreling brothers,
whose discord is singled out in Ovid’s cosmogony. As Ovid remarks, winds would
annihilate the cosmos if they were unleashed; “even now they can hardly be
resisted, as each one directs his gusts in opposing regions, from tearing the uni-
verse apart; so great is the conflict of these brothers (tanta est discordia fratrum)”
(Met. 1.58–60). Although Lucan’s description comes from Ovid’s cosmogony, the
conception can be traced back to Virgil and Lucretius and, beyond both, to
imagery in Homer. Philip Hardie has brought out in Cosmos and Imperium (1986)
the affinity between the escaped winds of Aeolus that disrupt Aeneas’ voyage to
destiny and the evil forces of Titans and Giants in the Hesiodic tradition of assault
on Olympus and gigantomachy.12
But the winds are not just the ruin of Odysseus and Aeneas and their sailors.
(They are united in Virgil’s description). The clash of the winds with each other is
the farmer’s nemesis, as they destroy crops. Virgil introduces the disastrous summer
storm in Georgics 1 with the clashing battles of opposing winds (1.318: omnia vento-
rum concurrere proelia vidi) and warns repeatedly of their rising (1.351, 356, 365, 431,
455). Winds fighting with each other provide similes for the heat of battle at
A. 2.416–17, “as when a hurricane has broken out, opposing winds clash (adversi . . . venti
/ confligunt),” and at 10.356–59 (recalling Homer’s unique verb eridaineton denoting
the strife of East and South winds in the simile at Iliad 16.765):
magno discordes aethere venti

proelia ceu tollunt animis et viribus aequis
non ipsi inter se, non nubila, non mare cedit,
anceps pugna diu.
Just as clashing winds in the great heaven raise up battles with matching
spirit and strength; neither do they or the clouds or the sea give way, and
the fight is long indecisive.
It is of course easier to demonstrate the physical havoc wreaked by the winds

or their association with battling armies in Roman poetry than their role as symbol
of civil strife, but this too may be a very old theme. Quintilian (8.6.44) identifies
Horace’s Ode 1.14 (o navis referent te) as a political allegory based on Alcaeus’
fragment 326 asunnetêmi tôn anemôn stasin: “I cannot take in the stasis of the
winds.” Now the Liddell and Scott lexicon allows for two interpretations of stasis: in
the first, neutral, it is simply the setting or direction of the winds. The alternative
that I would adopt reads it as their conflict. This matches their record in Roman
poetry, starting with Lucretius, who stresses the invisible force of wind (1.270) and
describes it thus (1.277–79):
sunt igitur venti nimirum corpora caeca

quae mare, quae terras, quae denique nubila caeli
verrunt ac subito vexanti turbine raptant
Thus indeed winds are unseen bodies that sweep over the sea, the earth
and even the clouds of the sky and suddenly carry everything away in a
harrying whirlwind.
Lucretius notes the power of winds to lay waste all three regna of earth, sky, and
sea. In the extended first simile of his account of Nature (1.280–97) he singles out
winds as creating sweeping destruction (strages13) like a mountain torrent in
spate or a powerful river, although unlike the river they cannot be seen (1.295:
corpora caeca goes back to 277 above). Winds are, again, the driving force of
Lucretius’ weather descriptions in book 6 as their battles (6.98 pugnantibus ven-
tis) generate thunderclouds (cf. 6.124: validi venti collecta procella; 127, 137: “a
squall gathered of stormy wind”) and seem to attack the shattered temples /
regions of heaven itself (1.285–86). Vis venti is almost a fixed phrase here, repeated
at 281, 295, 300.
Most relevant to Lucan’s image of dissolution is, however, Lucretius’ account of
the time of destruction, exitiale tempus, and the exitium of the cosmos at 6.557–60,
where the flattening force of subterranean winds disrupts earth’s crust in an earth-
quake (incumbit tellus quo venti prona premit vis) and men fear to believe in the
coming annihilation (6.565–69):
metuunt magni naturam credere mundi

exitiale aliquod tempus clademque manere
cum videant tantam terrarum incumbere molem!
quod nisi respirent venti, vis nulla refrenet
res neque ab exitio possit reprehendere euntes.
Men fear to believe that some time of destruction and disaster awaits the
nature of the mighty universe, when they see so great a mass of lands
weighing down. And if the winds did not take breath, no force would
rein them in, nor could it pull them back from the destruction on which
they are bent.
Now I hesitate to claim that Lucan actually presents the winds as counterparts or
symbols of civil discord. Influenced as much by Ovid’s cosmogony as by Virgil or
Lucretius, he does not draw a direct analogy between the physical discord of the
214 aftermath
winds and the civic discord of Rome.14 It may seem also too bold to recall here the
Stoic principle of sympatheia in which Nature and her elements are affected by and
reflect human evil; certainly Lucan does not spell out any claim that the violence of
nature is provoked by the violence of man—not in the way that sympatheia gener-
ated by human evil permeates Senecan tragedy, especially and explicitly in the solar
eclipse of the Thyestes. What we may say is that Lucan uses winds chiefly in their
own right as the discordant forces of Nature, most extensively in 4.50–78, where he
borrows Ovidian language to describe in terms of dry and wet winds the onset of
the spring floods in Caesar’s Spanish campaign.
Each of the winds is assigned its role and vectors, recalling their first appearance
in Ov. Met. 1.60–61 and their return in Ovid’s flood narrative. Lucan signals his
model by imprisoning the dry Aquilo (4.50: siccisque Aquilonibus = Met. 1.262) and
by echoing Ovid’s allusion to Nabataean kingdoms traversed by Eurus and the far
shores warmed by the setting sun (Met. 1.61, 63) at 4.63: torsit in occiduum Nabataeis
flatibus orbem. Lucan’s expansive vision, however, embraces the cosmos, as he invokes
all four elements—aer, aether, terra, and aequor—in portraying the flood (4.74–75:
aeris atri . . . quod separat aethere terram, 4.82 caelo defusum reddidit aequor).
Naturally Lucan brings on winds and storms also as fuel for epic grandeur in
books or sections that lack a major battle: so four times in the lull before the
Massilian sea battle in book 3 winds enter as parallels, most significantly when
Caesar compares himself to a fierce wind (3.362–65): “as wind loses force, unless
thick woods confront it with their timber, being scattered over empty space . . . so it
is harmful to me to lack enemies.”
Less dramatically, winds are imagined blowing beneath the earth at 3.460 and
recur in the simile of 3.469–71, where the winds fanning the burning Roman siege
tower in 501 are “like a rock that sheer age, aided by the force of the winds (impulsu
ventorum), has hacked off from the summit of a mountain.” Again, when there is no
immediate human conflict the poet compensates by developing Caesar’s Adriatic
storm in book 5 (500–677) and Cato’s Libyan sandstorm in book 9 (445–73) to cosmic
levels of destruction. The winds in Caesar’s sea storm assail sea and sky (5.568–72
and 597–611), but Caesar’s Fortune is to survive, and so paradoxically the sea’s discor-
dia is made to help the humans in travail (5.646: discordia ponti / succurrit miseris).
5. Fratres and Fratricide
No discussion of discordia in Lucan can omit discordia fratrum. Lucan’s civil wars
are, as the author states at the opening of his poem, plus quam civilis, “more than
civil,” for they retell the story not only of the slaughter of fellow citizens but also of
kin murder.
There seem to be two traditions of kin murder that can be applied in Roman
epic. The older one is the tradition originating in Hesiod’s Works and Days in which
the degenerating ages reach the last worst age of iron and the violation of all bonds:
between friends, guests, and hosts, husband and wife, father and son, brother and
brother, master and slave (WD 182–83, to which Romans added the bond of patron
and client). This “evil modern age” can be traced in Latin poetry from the song of
the Parcae in Catullus 64 and Ovid’s sequence of ages in Met. 1 but is independent
of a newer Latin tradition on civil war that seems to make its first appearance in a
unique passage in Lucretius. The fear of death, says the poet in book 3, threatens us
along with the fear of contempt and poverty, and men turn to civil bloodshed for
material profit (3.70–73):
sanguine civili rem conflant divitiasque

conduplicant avidi, caedem caede accumulantes;
crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris
et consanguineum mensas odere timentque.
They build their property from citizen blood and in their greed double
their wealth, heaping slaughter on slaughter. Cruel men exult in the grim
death of a brother and fear and loathe the tables of their kinsmen.
This Lucretian passage vividly suggests the context of Sulla’s proscriptions, which
offered a reward to those who denounced or killed political offenders. (It is a minor
interpretive issue, but should we read the murder of a brother as a crime committed
by the rejoicing heir or simply one exploited as an opportunity for his greed?) Only
the last line is unambiguous: men fear their kinsman’s hospitality because they are
likely to be poisoned (or like Thyestes be served a cannibal banquet). In Catullus
and in Virgil’s Tartarus15 the offenses against the family are not part of civil strife,
but the product of personal greed and malice. Of course sibling hatred existed
before the Sullan proscriptions, but Sullan proscriptions enabled rival brothers to
victimize each other with impunity and even profit. We may compare Lucan’s ret-
rospective account of the proscriptions in book 2 with his first emphatic recall of
Rome’s other tradition, the founding fratricide of Remus (1.95–97):
fraterno primi maduerunt sanguine muri

nec pretium tanti tellus pontusque furoris
tunc erat: exiguum dominos commisit asylum.
The first walls were soaked in a brother’s blood, and yet the prize for such
violent passion in those days was not earth and sea: the scant enclosure
of the Asylum engaged its masters in battle.
216 aftermath
Note the verbal echo of the death of Remus in Lucan’s description of Sulla’s pro-
scriptions at 2.149–51:
nati maduere paterno

sanguine, certatum est cui cervix caesa parentis
cederet, in fratrum ceciderunt praemia fratres
Sons were soaked in their fathers’ blood and competed to be the one who
obtained the severed neck of their father, while brothers fell to provide
rewards for brothers.
Lucan’s audience were all too familiar with the blood of innocent Remus spilled on
the ground, Rome’s original sin, the scelus fraternae necis deplored by Horace in the
civil war context of Epode 7. The brother’s quarrel, provoked when Remus mocked
and leaped over Romulus’ raw new walls, was avoided in Cicero’s edifying history of
Rome in De republica and was quickly countered by Livy and Ovid’s palliative
explanations of Remus’ death, not of course killed by his brother, but by the
too hasty action of a subordinate, Celer, who misinterpreted Romulus’ command.
T. P. Wiseman’s Remus has demonstrated the mythical and late origin of Remus,
the twin who was the loser, but the actual anecdote has a wider and longer history
in the murderous disputes of brothers and can be traced back to the first brothers,
Cain and Abel.16 Sallust devotes the first fifteen sections of his Jugurtha to the family
conflict between Micipsa’s sons and the talented usurper Jugurtha, lingering in
both Micipsa’s death speech (10.3–7) and Adherbal’s pathetic protest to the senate
(14.13–15) over the wickedness of a brother attacking and killing a brother as
Jugurtha had killed Micipsa.
And there may be a special subsidiary motif in Lucan’s allusion to the blood-
soaked walls (1.95). This is a boundary conflict: in the better known version (Liv.
1.7.2–3), Remus offends by leaping over the new walls (novos transsiluisse muros).
While recent scholarship has explored metaphorical boundaries to explain Lucan’s
emphasis on the penetration and invasion of bodies by wounds, I note that
boundary walls are prominent in the beginning and end of the epic.17 Scaeva, who
fights to prevent the Pompeians from entering through a breach of Caesar’s walls at
Dyrrachium (6.180–81, 201–2: “as the heap increased the corpses made the wall level
with the ground . . . he stands, . . . no brittle wall on Caesar’s side (non fragilis pro
Caesare murus), and holds back Pompey”), is found in the last line of the text as we
have it on the same wall, “when the walls were opened up and he alone beset Pompey
trampling the fortifications” (10.545–46: ubi solus apertis / obsedit muris calcantem
moenia Magnum). Pompey as the intrusive Remus daring to trespass on Caesar’s
possessions?
Inevitably the motif of brother murder persisted, for example, in the anony-
mous epigram on Maevius’ fratricide: “alas, the impious lot of war and savage fates
order brothers to clash with brothers, and sons with fathers” (Anth. Lat. 462.9–10:
fratribus heu fratres, patribus concurrere natos / impia sors belli fataque saeva iubent).
And it persists after Lucan with stories of brother murder, inadvertent in Silius
(9.66) and deliberate in Tacitus (Hist. 3.51, where the greed and shamelessness of a
recent fratricide is contrasted with the earlier suicide of a soldier who accidentally
killed his brother).
But we may wonder whether Lucan, writing under an emperor known to have
poisoned his stepbrother, might not have wanted to dilute or disguise his charges of
fratricide with other forms of kin murder: and in fact the poet seldom mentions the
slaughter of a brother without adding the murder of a father, though this would
have been less frequent in any battle context.
Mythology also offered two paradigms for mutual brother murder: the ulti-
mate civil war between Eteocles and Polynices of Thebes and the original conflict of
the dragon’s teeth warriors, Cadmus’ Spartoi and their Colchian counterparts. Ovid
bypasses the house of Oedipus, and no Latin saga of Eteocles and Polynices survives
before Seneca’s Phoenissae, but Ovid twice treated the battles of the Sown Men as
civil war. When Cadmus tries to break up the fighting of the Spartoi, he is told “not
to meddle with civil wars” (Met. 3.117: ne te civilibus insere bellis). Later, in Jason’s
Colchian ordeal at Met. 7.141–42, the Sown Men again kill each other and fall in civil
conflict (terrigenae pereunt per mutua vulnera fratres / civilique cadunt acie).
Lucan inherited this murderous Theban mythology, although his uncle’s
tragedy stopped short of the actual fraternal combat. Yet he resorts to the image of
the Spartoi only for the loving mutual killing of the defeated Volteius and his men,
a glorious suicide pact to escape the shame of defeat and captivity (4.549–53):
sic semine Cadmi

emicuit Dircaea cohors, ceciditque suorum
vulneribus dirum Thebanis fratribus agmen
Phasidos et campis . . . terrigenae . . .
Just so from Cadmus’ sowing the Dircaean squadron flashed forth, and
the dread force of Theban brothers fell by wounds inflicted by its kin,
while on the fields of the Phasis . . . the earth-begotten . . .
Clearly Ovid’s Sown men are recalled by this simile.

Even here in the Volteius episode Lucan groups mutual suicide pacts between
brothers with father-and-son suicide pacts, and this pairing will be his constant
practice, as we have also noted above. Thus also, when the Massilians protest
218 aftermath
against Caesar’s demand for their support, they declare themselves ready, if he and
Pompey want war (3.312–13), to offer sympathy and shelter from civil conflict. But
they presume that there are limits to civil hatred, that kinsmen will not face off
(3.326–27): surely “the sword hands [of Caesar’s and Pompey’s men] will falter at
the sight of a father (conspecto . . . parente), and brothers in the opposing ranks
(diversi . . . fratres) will stay them from hurling a shower of spears?” We may further
note that in these lines Lucan has also a separate agenda that goes beyond repre-
senting normal decent values through impartial foreign spokesmen. For the
phrases conspecto . . . parente and diversi . . . fratres anticipate the crisis of Pharsalus,
when the whole nexus of kin slaughter reaches its climax. So let us turn to book 7
to see just how Lucan keeps shifting into ever higher gears, exploiting the situation
for maximum shock value.
Even before converging on the battlefield the future combatants are afflicted by
nightmares in which the shades of their dead fathers and kinsmen loom out of the
darkness—admittedly their dead ancestors, not those they are going to kill—but
the cause is their guilty intent, hoping to pierce their fathers’ throats and brothers’
breasts (7.179–83). These sudden attacks of hallucination (Furor) are omens of their
impending crime.
Once battle is joined, Lucan concentrates his focus on family in the enemy
ranks (7.464–65): “They saw their fathers (parentum) facing them and brothers’
weapons at a distance (fraterna . . . arma).” And when the fighting reaches Pompey’s
robur, the aristocratic elite, where brothers and fathers are to be found, furor and
rabies break out (7.550–51). Lucan elaborates this motif with still more vicious acts
and motivation at 7.625–30, as men compete to strike a brother and send his sev-
ered head rolling far away so that they can strip the corpse undetected, or they
disfigure a father’s features to prove to onlookers by their excess of rage that this
victim cannot be their father. It is not enough to kill; they mutilate to hide their
greed and hatred.
Once Pompey has fled, Caesar calls off his men and lets them plunder Pompey’s
camp. Here Lucan begins to mix the motif of family violation with class warfare
(impia plebes, etc.) but pulls away from this rather anticlimactic source of indigna-
tion to describe guilty men reclining on the couches of (dead) brothers and fathers
and suffering well-earned nightmares (7.762–64). Now the ghosts of slain citizens,
young and old, shades of brother and father, harry and possess the guilty in dreams
that fulfill the ominous visions before the battle (7.775–76: hunc agitant totis fra-
terna cadavera somnis / pectore in hoc pater est, recalling 177–80). As Hardie notes in
Epic Successors (1993b: 42), this is an extreme case of “the epic law of impersonation
and embodiment.” Each man suffers his own guilt, but Caesar suffers all the (aveng-
ing) shades—omnes in Caesare manes—like a guilty Orestes before he was purified
or Pentheus (who surely killed no one) and Agave.
6. Conclusion
Although Caesar will reappear in Egypt in normal mental health, Lucan foreshadows
here the final resolution of Caesar’s guilt in his assassination, when the nation’s
swords—or is it the swords of the senatorial patres, Rome’s conscript fathers?18—
plunge into Caesar’s flesh (10.528: dum patrii veniant in viscera Caesaris enses). Human
impiety and depravity infect the whole region of Thessaly, as they will Egypt in the
poet’s final condemnation of this treacherous kingdom in book 8, contrasted in the
Libyan excursus of book 9 with the natural void of an accursed and polluted land on
which men have wickedly intruded. This is Lucan’s purpose as much as the glorifica-
tion of Cato, which is by no means unambiguous. For ultimately civil war goes beyond
individual impiety to create a ruined oikoumene and an empire enslaved.
notes
1. I regard Eumolpus’ Bellum civile as the best evidence for the familiarity of poetic
treatments of this theme in Lucan’s day. We cannot prove that Lucan had read Petronius’
work (which he certainly did not imitate), but Petronius must have composed the Satyricon
during Lucan’s lifetime, since the two men met their deaths in the same spate of Neronian
executions. We also have evidence for poems fifty years earlier dealing with later phases of
the civil wars from Cornelius Severus and the anonymous Bellum Actiacum.
2. These generic words for crime and evil are preferred to specific impiety (even
positive pietas is rare; cf. 1.353). Lucan concentrates on scelus and nefas: cf. 1.37: scelera ipsa
nefasque and 1.667: scelerique nefando; also, the adjectives nefandus (1.21, 325) and sceleratus
(not scelestus) in, e.g., 2.251: scelerata . . . proelia.
3. As is well known, the stimulus for Lucan’s imagery is Anchises’ rebuke to Caesar
and Pompey at Virg. A. 6.833: neu patriae validas in viscera vertite vires.
4. Cf. 7.579: scit cruor imperii qui sit, quae viscera rerum; “he knows what constitutes
the life-blood of empire and the nation’s flesh.”
5. See also his “Stoic Cosmology” (Lapidge 1978).
6. The whole conception is Manilian: cf. 1.719: raraque labent compagine rimae; “with
the slackening of the framework cracks are opening” (tr. Goold) and 1.727, 840.
7. Machina mundi: cf. Lucr. 5.95–96: multosque per annos / sustentata ruet moles et
machina mundi, echoed at Man. 2.803–5, 807, aeternis veluti compagibus orbis / quae nisi
perpetuis alterna sorte volantem cursibus excipiant . . . dissociata fluat resoluto machina
mundo, 3.357: quem (sc. caelum) gelidus rigidis fulcit compagibus axis, and 4.828: tellus validis
compagibus haerens. For compages of the hollow framework of earth containing the winds,
cf. Sen. Nat. 6.18.3.
8. Cf. also Buchheit 1963: 82, Fraenkel 1964:, Horsfall 2000: at 7.335, 540–640, and 545.
9. See Horsfall ad loc. and note that Virgil has several examples of such loyal brothers
ready to avenge each other in battle.
220 aftermath
10. Virgil never speaks of bellum civile, the normal usage in both late Cicero and
Sallust, using civilis only once to denote the civilis quercus for saving a citizen in battle
(A. 6.772). Nor does he distinguish civil wars from external conflicts as impia bella, though
the neuter plural is one form of impius that fits comfortably into the hexameter. Indeed his
only use of impius precedes his earliest reference to the discord of civil war in Ecl. 1.70–72:
“an impious soldier (impius . . . miles) shall possess these well-tilled ploughlands, a bar-
barian these crops: see to what point discord has driven our unhappy fellow-citizens?” And
we might add the honest countryman who lives “far from quarrelling warfare” (G. 2.459
procul discordibus armis), “unswayed by political ambition or wealth or Discord that
harasses faithless brothers (infidos agitans Discordia fratres)” (2.495–96). Given that Ecl. 1.70
is one of Virgil’s rare uses of impius, we might argue that the adjective designates the soldier
as not just fighting his own fellow citizens, but fighting on the wrong (i.e., aggressive) side.
But impius at, e.g., G. 1.468 clearly makes no distinction between sides. Lucan uses it only
once, and outside the context of civil war, addressed by Appius to the cheating priestess of
Delphi in 5.158, whose impiety is toward Apollo himself.
11. An echo of Virgil’s civil war allusion in G. 1.468: impiaque aeternam timuerunt
saecula noctem.
12. Hardie 1986: 90–97, esp. 92–93 and n. 23 on A. 1.58–59 (the provident intervention
of Jupiter and in this case of Neptune). So also Hardie 1993b: 60–61. Note that Seneca
recalls the Aeolus episode in his discussion of wind-generated earthquakes at Nat. 6.18.3.
13. Strages is Caesar’s word; cf. 1.156–57: magnamque revertens / dat stragem late.
14. Cf. Loupiac 1998. His discussion (47ff.) of winds as “l’air en mouvement” pays
little attention to Lucan’s windstorms but rightly singles out 3.362–65 as “le vent César.”
However, he is not interested in the potential for political allegory in Lucan’s treatment of
elements. He comes closest to the significance of Lucan’s winds in his comment on the
sandstorm (148): “comme une force qui bouscule l’ordre établi, une force . . . anarchique et
déstabilisant.”
15. A. 6.608–9: “those who hated their brothers while still in life, or beat their father or
defrauded a client.”
16. For a full discussion of the myth of Remus and translations of all the ancient
evidence, see Wiseman 1995: 10–12, 15–16, 141, and 144: “certainly the fratricide story was a
myth with a meaning for the Rome of the civil wars.” Wiseman suggests that an earlier
version (like Liv. 1.7.1) spoke only of general conflict over the brothers’ competing claims
rather than individual jealousy and anger. See also Bremmer and Horsfall 1987: 25–48.
17. I am thinking of Shadi Bartsch’s admirable analysis (1997: 42), wherein she makes
the transition from legal boundaries to the violated bounds of the human body. On this
theme the classic study is Most 1992.
18. Although a survey of Lucan’s use of patrius finds two instances where it means
specifically “belonging to the father” as opposed to ancestral or national but finds no
parallels for interpreting it as belonging to the [conscript] fathers, the gain in specificity
supports the possibility.
part iv
Afterlife
13
“Dionysiac Poetics” and
the Memory of Civil War
in Horace’s Cleopatra Ode
Andrew Feldherr
Horace begins the Cleopatra ode (Carm. 1.37) by making the end of the
civil wars a precondition for his lyric, a body of poetry that takes both
context and subject matter from the convivium. Now is the time for
drinking, for “comradeship,” sodalitas, for the religious rituals enacted in
hymns like 1.2 and 1.12. Before (antehac) religious propriety forbade one to
“draw the Caecuban” from ancestral vaults. Within the first book of Odes,
this penultimate poem echoes the “paian” of 1.2,1 its mirror image within
the structure of the collection, and announces the fulfillment of its prayer.
Iam satis (“enough already”) becomes nunc (“now”), and the present ter-
rors sent by the father against the city—threatening a return to the pri-
mordial chaos when “Pyrrha complained of new monsters” (1.2.6: nova
monstra; cf. 1.37.21: fatale monstrum, “monstrosity of fate”)—have shifted
both gender and tense. “Now,” in 1.37, the city threatened by a “queen,”
regina, rather than a pater has been released from fear. The symmetry bet-
ween the two poems continues in their conclusion: the longed for salva-
tion in 1.2 depends on Octavian preferring to remain on earth to celebrate
his triumphs; 1.37 ends with the queen choosing not to live to be triumphed
over. Within 1.2, at the very center of the poem, the terrifying mythical and
natural “prodigies,” prodigia, reveal themselves as the signifiers of a civil
war that has displaced a foreign war: “The few young will hear that citizens
sharpened swords by which it was better that oppressive Persians had per-
ished” (1.2.21–24). But 1.37 assures that posterity will hear precisely the
opposite: civil war has been completely masked by foreign war and by the
language of prodigy. We were fighting an eastern “other” after all, a fatale
224 afterlife
monstrum, not fellow citizens, cives, and indeed Cleopatra’s explicitly self-willed
death eliminates the need for revenge that is such an important theme in 1.2.
This comparison of the two poems suggests a strong and positive claim on
Horace’s part about the relationship between his work and civil wars: its existence
as lyric, as the poetry of “now,”2 emerges as the final point of a narrative that disap-
pears at the moment of its telling. 1.37 transforms the story of civil war to one of
foreign war, a war ending not in the killing of citizens, but in a foreigner’s suicide
that leaves Roman hands completely pure. Of course many available readings of the
poem simultaneously challenge such a model of lyric: no story can ever completely
unwrite its beginning, and the much-studied shifts in the representation of
Cleopatra compel distance from, or at least reflection on, the ode’s celebratory
opening.
Such ambiguity makes clear the inevitable slippage among the various cate-
gories under which this volume approaches the literature of civil war. Beyond the
question of whether we decide to term an insistence on Cleopatra’s foreignness
“dissimulation” or mere “representation,” the whole notion that the poem happens
after the fact,3 that it looks back on a process, traceable in the organization of the
book of poems, that has now attained closure, itself confirms and depends on the
interpretation of the war the narrative voice at first seems to insist on: a foreign war
can end with the triumph over a defeated enemy who alone bears sole culpability
for the conflict. Civil wars are prone to recur; they pollute the victor as well as the
victim, and the very act of representing them can lead to their breaking out anew.
Thus to read Horace’s ode not as the univocal sentiment of a reunited community
that has decided the war was directed at a foreign monstrum, but rather as an asser-
tion, a claim that must be made because it can be refuted, manifests a community
within which the potential for civil schism still exists, where indeed representing
civil war melts back into waging it in the present and even projecting it into the
future—another reason the first stanza must insist so strongly on the difference
between nunc and antehac.
My aim in this chapter will be to trace how the ode itself explores the politics
of representation through the image it gives of Cleopatra. It will thus concern, in
ways that cannot be disentangled, the violent “content” of the poem’s representa-
tion and the poem’s own status as representation. How the poem’s readers recog-
nize Cleopatra will at once determine how they understand the war and how they
understand the aim and position of Horatian lyric. To explain the second thread of
this argument, I must also invoke the issue of translation, mentioned elsewhere by
the editors of this volume as one process by which Rome’s civil wars have remained
relevant over the centuries. In translating, and in reading a translation, the lines
between foreign and native, present and past, are re-drawn, and “civil” war makes
clear the stakes of these distinctions. Among other issues, how can we be sure that
“dionysiac poetics” and the memory of civil war 225
we are really simply translating a text about other people’s civil war rather than
writing /reading about ourselves and our own society? As Cleopatra is a foreigner
brought (1.37.31: deduci) to Rome in triumph—as she is translated into the Roman
ideological language that makes a regina a monstrum—so Horace presents his
poetic accomplishment as “leading down” (3.30.14: deduxisse) a foreign song into
Italos modos (“Italian limits”? “ends”?). Hearing the “original,” I will argue, rather
than the “translation,” calls into question the completeness of both triumphs, the
military and the poetic. Cleopatra, then, beyond providing a touchstone for under-
standing the political agency of Horatian poetry, becomes herself a figure for that
poetry.
Let me start by returning again to the first word of the poem, nunc. Now though
I want to play it off not against an earlier stage in Rome’s civil war evoked by the
iam of 1.2, but rather against the Greek intertext it literally echoes, the famous
Alcaeus ode beginning m‹m vqg~ leh rhgm ja¨ sima pçq bäm / p›mgm, épe≠ dó
jshame M qriko| “now one must get drunk and drink beyond his might, since
Myrsilos has died” (fr. 332). Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 411 comments on this cita-
tion that “the educated reader, who knows the Greek original, will understand that
the tyrant is dead.” Yet the same reader might equally note that Horace has deliber-
ately varied his model by failing to specify the death of the opponent that provides
the occasion for the celebration.4 Indeed the avoidance of actually describing
Cleopatra’s death, like the avoidance of her name, continues to the very end of the
poem, where Cleopatra remains alive for all that her death has been decided upon.5
I will later have more to say about the significance of Cleopatra’s uncanny survival,
but for now I want to point out that this marked transformation of Horace’s
“original” already raises a momentary question about how poetry follows after vic-
tory, suggesting that unlike its model, this poem will not straightforwardly define
itself as a celebration of a political rival’s defeat. At the same time, the “absent
presence” of Myrsilos, who was after all the leader of a faction of Mytileneans,
recalls again the poem’s avoidance of representing civil war.
But why should we not celebrate the death of Cleopatra? This question has
been answered in many ways by scholars who have traced the queen’s progression
from rabid regina to non humilis mulier (32: “a not humble woman”), yet the
argument that I want to draw on is the one advanced by Gregson Davis (1991:
233–42), who reads Cleopatra’s reformation against the background of other
Horatian sympotic lyric. Cleopatra starts out in the poem as a bad symposiast. Her
companions are an appalling contaminatus grex (9: “diseased flock”) contrasting to
the “comrades,” sodales, of the first stanza. She is drunk, and moreover she is drunk
on fortune (11–12: fortuna . . . ebria), a delusion that leads her to incontinent hopes
and grandiose plots of “mad ruin.” As the phrase fortuna ebria suggests, though,
there is a strongly moral tinge to her drunkenness, connecting it with the “long
226 afterlife
hope,” spes longa, Horace earlier instructs another Greek female to prune back. The
poem in this light describes the sympotic education of Cleopatra, showing how she
learns the fundamental lessons of mortality and temporality and so moves from a
paradoxically powerless presumption of unnatural power to the ultimately liber-
ating ability to face her own end with fortitude, celebrated in a symposium of death
in a fallen palace with rough snakes for garlands and poison for wine. This in turn,
again as the model of sympotic education makes clear, requires dissolving the sense
of difference between self and other. Death is common to us all. Horace teaches
Leuconoe by emphatically pairing her destiny with his, both of which are subject to
the same uncertainty. So importantly here Cleopatra moves from projecting
destruction against the Romans to the contemplation of her own fallen palace. But
this model of learning through the mirror of the other does not end with Cleopatra.
In 1.11, Horace’s address to Leuconoe is surely exemplary for the other sodales at the
banquet as well. And if we read Cleopatra’s disavowal of aggressive ambition as a
sign that she has seen what she had wanted to inflict on the Romans visited on her,
then she too must function as a cautionary figure keeping within limits the drinking
endorsed in line one precisely with the reminder to Horace’s Roman sodales that
they are as mortal as she.6
Such a depiction of sympotic purification, of a progression from one kind of
banquet to another as a way of telling the story of civil war and its aftermath, has an
important parallel in a poem that simultaneously elides and reveals Horace’s civil
war past. In the Pompeius ode (Carm. 2.7), participation in civil war takes the form
of “extreme banqueting”: “Pompeius first of my sodales, with whom I often broke
the lingering day with unmixed wine, glistening hair crowned with Syrian mala-
bathrum” (5–9), a scene that recalls Cleopatra’s revels in 1.37 in its reference to
drunkenness, its explicitly eastern equipment, and the hint of royalty perhaps
implied in “crowned” coronatus. But that was then. Now this sodalis appears at a
banquet marked above all by Italian Massic wine—compare the Caecuban of 1.37—
and a clear subordination of the human to the divine. For this convivium will offer
thanksgiving to Jupiter for salvation. The wine too has a particular quality; it is the
wine of forgetfulness, but a forgetfulness that cuts two ways, implying a forgetting
of the troubles of civil wars in the context of the joyous, lyric present but also a for-
getting to forget, as the banquet comes closer and closer to those of the past, with
its unguents, crowns, and eastern cups, only to end in a kind of madness with the
poet himself taking on a Cleopatra-like role, raging as a bacchant. This curious
ending allows for many different readings. Once again, telling the story of forget-
ting always opens the door to memory. We might also stress the controlling context
of the peaceful banquet of thanksgiving that makes such madness acceptable or,
indeed, the very troping of civil war violence as sympotic drunkenness with its
powerfully diminishing effect: better a raging bacchant than a warrior. What I want
to emphasize here though, as in 1.37, is the erasure of difference and indeed distance
implied by this celebration of the friend’s return. The civil war imposed a striking
divergence in the destiny of the two friends: the one saved by “Mercury” ended up
on the winning side; the other stayed with the losers. But the convivium, with its
general emphasis on “comradeship,” sodalitas, and equality, erases and undoes what
history has established: the luck of the dice makes one the master of drinking, as
destiny could spell the end for me or for you. Horace’s own reassumption of the
qualities of the loser, drunkenness, a virtus fracta, “valor broken,” literally by effem-
inacy, and even the geographical return to the scene of the crime implied by the
description of the bacchant as Thracian, all reestablish the two symposiasts on an
even plane. If forgetting civil wars undoes the consequences of rebellion and civic
violence, this re-remembering undoes the consequences of victory, the differences
imposed by winning.
With this model of bacchanalian remembering in mind, I want to return to
and develop another intriguing characteristic of 1.37, its manifold representations
of Dionysus on the levels of wordplay, literary form, and myth. Though, like
Cleopatra, the god is never explicitly named, verbal markers of his divine presence
appropriately begin and end the poem. The “free foot,” pede libero, of line one will
be echoed in the final stanza with Cleopatra’s “deliberate death,” deliberata morte,
and Caesar’s “savage Liburnians,” saevis Liburnis.7 Alex Hardie (1976: 132–33)
observed another even more significant masked naming of the god in the ode’s final
word, triumpho. For all that references to the triumph seem to impose a Roman
frame on the poem, returning us geographically to the city from Egypt and contex-
tually to the sphere of distinctly Roman rituals of victory, learned Romans like
Varro (L. 6.68) saw the word as a Latinization of thriambos, a cult title of the god as
well as a name for hymns performed in his honor. Hardie makes this analogy bet-
ween triumph and thriambos one of the bases for his argument that the entire poem
evokes another form of specifically Dionysiac lyric, the dithyramb, a fundamental
subject of which was the power and mystery of der kommende Gott.8
The dithyrambic elements of the poem suggest reading its narrative against the
background of Dionysiac myth. Hardie 1976 and Lowrie 1997: 162–63 in particular
pursued this strategy, but I want to take their conclusions a little further with the
aim of stressing three especially significant qualities of Dionysus legends, which
have a direct bearing on the issue of remembering Cleopatra: problems of recogni-
tion,9 the transformation of the god’s victims into exempla,10 and the mystery
element that unites death and rebirth.
The first of these mythic emphases connects hermeneutic “reception” with the
recognition of a god as powerful, immortal, and native precisely when he appears
at his most powerless, vulnerable, and foreign and conversely reveals a foreign
presence in the heart of civic order. The classic example is the Bacchae, where
228 afterlife
Pentheus’ difficulty in recognizing Dionysus overlaps with the challenge faced by

the audience in connecting an actor playing Dionysus with the god himself. The
motif of the god’s deceptive foreignness would have obvious significance for a work
that, in telling a contemporary Roman story, in Latin, at once invokes Greek literary
parallels and myths. Indeed between the Alcaeus quotation with which it begins
and the final triumpho, this Latin poem quite literally begins and ends in Greek, as
unproblematically Latin words—nunc, triumpho—not only translate but actually
re-echo Greek. Correspondingly, those same first and last lines also literally name
Dionysus in the pede Libero of the incipit and the play on triumpho/thriambos of
the conclusion.
The second important Dionysiac motif I want to stress is the resemblance bet-
ween the god and his worshippers and the way that disbelievers become agents of
revelation as their own stories come to signify the transforming power of the god.
Indeed the figures of the god and the mortals who witness and then bear witness to
Dionysiac truth blur and overlap. The most obviously Dionysiac aspect of the story
the poem has to tell involves the enlightenment of Cleopatra, who is turned from
drunkenness to sanity by the pursuit of the young hero Caesar. Hardie (1976: 135)
has compared this specifically to what he sees as the Dionysiac role of Heracles tam-
ing and overawing the bestial Cerberus in Pindar’s Dithyramb 2. This analogy would
set up a fairly stable pro-Caesarean reading of the poem buttressing the monstrosity
of Cleopatra later in the work. But the simple analogy between the victorious Caesar
and Dionysus the enlightener gets a lot of interference from other possible Dionysiac
myths that cast the roles rather differently. For example, the motif of nautical pur-
suit and imprisonment recalls the god’s escape from the pirates, recounted in the
Homeric hymn, where Dionysus frees himself from the bonds of those who had
mistaken him for merely an effeminate eastern youth. Here, rather than having
Cleopatra as the one who is enlightened by the pursuit of the hero, it is the pursuer
who has mistaken his seemingly weak and effeminate prey and learns the true
nature of his captive only after that captive escapes him.
This alternation between Caesar and Cleopatra as the figure who brings clarity
of vision corresponds to an overlapping of the roles of warner and victim in another
sampling of Dionysiac myth later in the ode. The queen who stares impassively (26:
voltu sereno) on the ruins of her palace (regia) has already been seen by Hardie 1976:
131 as replaying the Pentheus myth, a reference bolstered by the maenadic imagery
that describes the queen’s death in terms of snake handling and drunkenness. At first
an analogy between the destruction of Cleopatra’s regia and the Theban palace
miracle again puts the queen in the role of the victim to be punished and “enlight-
ened.” But the reference to Cleopatra’s voltu sereno gives her for an instant the
characteristic Dionysiac smile, and the Bacchantic aspects of her death transform
the drunkenness, which initially appears in the poem only as an index of hubristic
overreaching, to the mark of those whose apparent madness is really a form of

Dionysiac enlightenment. And a central point about Pentheus and Dionysus is their
physical indistinguishability.11 Such a bacchic analogy affects how we read the “real”
destruction of the palace at Alexandria in stanza six in relation to the corresponding
threat to Rome’s own Capitol in stanza two.12 At first again the transformation from
delusion to reality confirms Cleopatra in a Pentheus-like role, as her own impotent
threats are visited upon her. But perhaps her own subtle evasion of the role of victim
destabilizes both instances of threatened destruction. There is no telling victim from
victors, and in taking the violence wrought against a monstrous foreign opponent as
a final demonstration of one’s own divine authority, one runs the risk of a delusion
similar to the one the queen herself has been cured of; the destruction of the Capitol
may well not be forever prevented by the destruction of the palace; rather, the
destruction of the palace may require a Roman “us” to read this as an image of what
our own experience may hold. And to beware of the too rigorous distinction bet-
ween powerless foreigner and native tradition that led to Pentheus’ downfall.
I will now conclude by sketching the significance of this expanded Dionysiac
presence within the poem for the act of remembering and representing civil war.
Let me start by developing the “panegyric” function of dithyramb suggested by
Hardie in which the Roman Caesar assumes the Dionysiac role of dispensing
vengeance and enlightenment. From this perspective, a new Roman “other” recalls
the sympotic celebrations of an intemperate Greek queen from madness to sobriety,
making it possible for her of all people to die the death of a Roman Cato. Dionysus
himself has been Romanized by this schema, connoting a particular form of Roman
sobriety in place of an emphatically foreign drunkenness. The trajectory of the new
Dionysus now moves from West to East, not East to West. The Roman perspective
here usurps and appropriates the functions of the god even as, in a more limited
political sense, Caesar has replaced Antony as his avatar. But as many others, espe-
cially Michèle Lowrie, have seen, the Dionysiac blurring of the distinction between
“us” and “them” also has a role to play because it so specifically undoes the device
for “transforming” civil war with which we began: the displacement of victimhood
from citizens to foreigners. For the misfortunes that befall Cleopatra all too readily
recall other events from the civil wars in which the protagonists were Roman men,
not foreign women. I have just now made the obvious connection between her
suicide and Cato’s, and one might add Brutus’ as well. Cleopatra’s naval flight from
Caesar makes her another Pompey, or indeed two other Pompeys, father and son.
In light of these veiled scenes of civic violence, whose own repeated quality itself
hints at the possibility of recurrence, Romans celebrating Cleopatra’s suicide
without restraint resemble such mythical figures as the mad Lycurgus, who delighted
in the deaths of his sons, convinced they were vine stocks. Rather than a Roman
Dionysus redirecting his energies against a mad and polluted Greek world, Dionysus
230 afterlife
remains emphatically himself and in manifesting his presence through these foreign
myths and foreign poetic forms acts to reform and transform Roman society.
This last consideration brings me to an important possible objection to my
interpretation of the ode: poetic representations of civil war repeatedly stress the
indistinguishability of victor and victim even without the interventions of Dionysiac
symbolism; what precisely does the absent presence of Dionysus add to such a dia-
lectic?13 To this I have three interrelated responses. First, I would not argue that
Dionysus’ value in the poem is simply to enhance a pattern of symbolism expli-
cating the civil war experience, and this for two reasons. For one, to reduce Dionysus
to a symbol of anything seems inevitably to sell him short. Dionysus does not sym-
bolize the covert presence of a recognizable self in a seemingly foreign entity; rather,
he instantiates that phenomenon, and for that reason the implications of a Dionysiac
presence, as in the case of tragedy, do not only operate within the literary represen-
tation but also figure the potential effects of that representation. For another, as
I have argued above, the decision to subordinate Dionysus’ role in the poem to
explicating recent Roman experience is one that his very presence challenges by
raising the alternative possibility of viewing those events within a larger, foreign
pattern of interpretative codes: ultimately we may decide that the poem uses civil
war to teach about Dionysiac experience rather than vice versa. My second larger
response to the question of the distinctive significance of Dionysus in the text
involves precisely the role of these larger codes. For, as I suggested at the beginning
of this essay, the poem’s transformation of its civil war subject matter mirrors a
much broader argument about problems of reception and cultural translation.
Recognition of a Dionysiac presence in the poem not only affects one’s response to
the poem’s protagonists; it also determines a willingness to explore the relationship
between foreign, Greek voices that frame the poem and the Latin syntactic and his-
torical contexts that compete to fix their meaning. And finally, as an example of this
process, Dionysus’ presence may help us to recover a subjective presence of Cleopatra
herself. For Dionysus undoubtedly figured largely in the self-representations of
Antony and Cleopatra, from the former’s infamous Dionysiac entry into Ephesus
(Plu. Ant. 24) to the debated evidence of the epigram glossing a ring of Cleopatra’s
as symbolizing the Dionysiac theme of “drunkenness in sobriety” (Anth. Pal. 9.752)
to Walter Burkert’s suggestion that the fatal serpent hidden in a basket of figs recalls
the symbols of the Bacchic mysteries.14 In this way too, the presence of a foreign
Dionysus marks the survival of an inassimilable perspective countering the Roman
portrayal of Cleopatra as a dangerously unrestrained symposiast.
With this idea of the survival of a Cleopatran utterance in mind, I return to that
climactic triumpho that, I will argue, links these alternative Dionysiac interpretative
schemata—the one subsuming Dionysus within the rhetoric of Roman victory, the
other leaving him pointedly outside such rhetoric—with rival constructions of the
voice of Horatian lyric itself. I have so far not mentioned that third element of
Dionysiac dualism I promised to develop: the conjunction of life and death that
made Dionysus, who dies at the instant of his birth, such an important figure in
mystery cults.15 I propose that Cleopatra, who has sometimes been claimed as an
initiate of the mysteries of Dionysus and whose death always remains just deferred
in the narrative, potentially experiences a Dionysiac resurrection at the poem’s
conclusion. This resurrection, if we are prepared to hear it, again comes through the
awareness of a Greek voice speaking through Roman words, even as elsewhere
Cleopatra’s story offers a means of perceiving Dionysus in the narrative of Roman
victory. Obviously, triumpho must be construed as an ablative noun—the unat-
tached adjective superbo has been awaiting its grammatical fulfillment—but what
if, just for an instant, we hear it as a first-person verb, “I triumph”? The metrical unit
of the final line becomes a simple declarative sentence with a nominative subject:
“I triumph, a not humble woman.” If we hear triumpho as a noun, which a moment’s
reflection makes clear it obviously is, then we know that the triumph is Augustus’,
and syntactic necessity draws us back to the panegyric reading of the ode. If we hear
it as a verb, not negated, it forms an affirmation of victory that literally fulfils the
personal ambitions expressed by Cleopatra herself to avoid disgrace. A verbal trium-
pho read in this sense would also create an echo of what was thought to be the
repeated final assertion of the historical Cleopatra (Porph. ad loc. citing Livy:
oÃ hqialbe rolai; “I will not be triumphed over”), here taken to mean “I am tri-
umphing now.” Of course, the ambiguities of how to interpret the line’s initial non
further refract this reading, turning it potentially into an emphatic denial that the
queen is triumphing.16
These twinned ways of hearing triumpho, the one ending with the focus on the
celebration of imperial victory, the other with the poet’s voice literally taking over as
the means for Cleopatra to survive as a lyric subject, have their own afterlife in the
Horatian corpus. Is the poet, as in 4.2, the one who cries Io triumphe or, as in 3.30, the
one who himself avoids death and, despite his own “humbleness,” humilitas, and
origins in a distant kingdom, becomes a princeps leading a triumph of song? The first
option presents lyric as subject to event, occasion, and circumstance, the poetry of
Rome’s triumph, but forever courting Dionysiac correction as human history takes
its course. The other, rather than subordinating Greek lyric to Roman history, makes
it a vehicle for subjectivities no longer defined by the particularities of time, circum-
stance, gender, even individual identity, an echo of similarity in difference that tran-
scends any historical occasion, restores an equilibrium between victor and defeated,
and makes the poet’s lyric voice transform rather than merely respond to Roman
victory. Perhaps after all this lyric/Dionysiac checking of a Roman triumph, working
through the recognition rather than the erasure of the self within the other becomes
the force that truly promises to end Rome’s civil war.
232 afterlife
notes
For advice on revising my paper, I thank the editors, the anonymous referees for the
press, and R. J. Tarrant. I dedicate this essay to my friend, teacher, and colleague, Froma
Zeitlin, who will always be an inspiration.
1. Cairns 1971a. For other readings of the two poems in conjunction with one
another, see Pöschl 1991: 74 and Lowrie 1997: 142–44.
2. The view of Horatian lyric developed by Lowrie 1997, esp. 19–48, and applied to
the Cleopatra ode at 146–49.
3. Fundamental for my understanding of this problem is Kennedy 1992.
4. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1913: 309 and emphasized in Syndikus 2001, 1:324.
5. So also, albeit in the context of a different argument, Lowrie 1997: 148: “We see her
dying, but not dead.”
6. Davis 1991: 242: “her demise also gives depth and meaning to the convivium,
which, after all, has its metaphysical justification in the very notion of ineluctable death.”
7. Hardie 1976: 124 sees the poem’s “free foot” as a reference to the traditional
metrical laxity of the dithyramb. If we read this poem in conjunction with the “Cleopatra”
epode we may notice that liber here picks up the notion of freedom from care in the final
line of that poem (Pöschl 1991: 75), there though the release was provided by “the sweet
Releaser” dulci Lyaeo (Epod. 9.37), another Bacchic allusion. On the relationship between
the two poems, see Macleod 1982.
8. On the Dionysiac associations of the dithyramb, see most conveniently Pickard-
Cambridge 1927: 5–13.
9. On the epiphanic nature of Dionysus, see most conveniently Henrichs 1993: 17,
which notes that Horace in Carm. 2.19 shows a particular awareness of the god as
something to see (Bacchum . . . vidi; “I saw Bacchus”). The structural position of this poem,
as the penultimate in its book, further underlines the importance of Dionysus in Horace’s
collection, a point also emphasized to me by R. J. Tarrant.
10. Cf., e.g., Detienne 1989: 13: “when [his torturers] become victims themselves, they
stand as striking witnesses to his parousia as an omnipotent god.”
11. Cf., e.g., Segal 1997: 28–29.
12. “Real” because the royal palace at Alexandria was not destroyed; see, e.g., Pöschl
1991: 97; Hardie 1976: 139n65; and Lowrie 1997: 144.
13. Thus R. J. Tarrant in his comments on an earlier version of this essay: “But I think
that some of [his] central points do not require a Dionysiac reading of the poem for their
validity. Cleopatra’s suicide, for example, her nobile letum, is sufficient to make her
resemble a Cato and so to blur the distinction, which seemed so stark at the poem’s
opening, between Roman and foreign.”
14. For the ring see Tarn and Charlesworth 1934: 76, with Nisbet and Hubbard 1970:
414–15, which regards Tarn’s interpretation as “very speculative.” For the symbolism of the
serpent, see Burkert 1993: 264. The significance of Cleopatra’s ring and Tarn’s interpretation
of it were first noted to me by Florence Verducci in a seminar I took at Berkeley in 1989.
I am happy to acknowledge the influence of her ideas on my thinking about the poem.
15. See the admittedly impressionistic formulation of Otto 1981: 200–201, and for
more details about the doctrine, as revealed by inscriptional evidence, see Graf 1993.
16. See Lowrie 1997: 141n3.
14
Propertius on Not Writing
about Civil Wars
Brian W. Breed
Propertius’ second book of elegies opens with a little devious misdirection:

“You ask why I keep writing amores so often” (2.1.1: Quaeritis unde mihi
totiens scribantur amores). For a reader who comes to this straight from
Propertius’ first book, the more pressing question might be why the poet had
stopped writing amores in order to commemorate the Perusine war with the
two unexpected epigrams that appear at the end of the Monobiblos. On the
very threshold of the second book we are asked to forget about Rome’s recent
history of civil wars. That is a theme the introductory poem goes on to define
as incompatible with elegy. Yet throughout the book the civil wars remain
very much in play, impinging on some of elegy’s defining features, including
its invocations of myth and its explorations of the poet’s social relationships.
The subject of the present essay is how, despite the proclaimed intention not
to write about civil war, we can see Propertius in his second book both
drawing on the language of fraternal rivalry to characterize his elegiac strug-
gles and framing Rome’s experience of civil wars in elegy’s own terms as part
of his ongoing project of measuring elegy against epic.
After Actium, after Augustus had made the settlement with the senate
that he would later associate with the end of the civil wars,1 we are no
longer in the proto-Augustan world inhabited by Propertius’ first book of
elegies. The environment of the 20s provided poets opportunities both to
mark the end of the civil wars and to react to some official statements
from the regime of what transpired in the now finished era of conflict. The
triple triumph of August 29 bc quickly generated poetic responses.2
The description in Propertius 2.31 of the mythologically distanced
234 afterlife
commemorations on the temple of Apollo Palatinus is our earliest glimpse into the
representation and perception of Augustus’ victories on that monument.3 At the
same time, the keynote poem of Propertius 2 nevertheless casts Augustus’ civil wars
as an untellable story, subject to deferral, despite the availability of a five-act narra-
tive beginning at Mutina and ending with the celebration of the conquest of Egypt.
That is exactly the story Propertius says he will not tell. In the epic the poet imag-
ines Caesar’s accomplishments and his wars, Mutina, Philippi, Naulochus, Perugia,
Actium and Egypt, would provide the setting for a story that is also about Maecenas’
heroic faithfulness to the commander (2.1.25–36).4 But Propertius’ civil war-era
Augustiad is a no-go. The reasons for not following through are standard-issue. The
Fates have not endowed the poet to “lead heroic bands to arms” (17–18), and
Callimachus would not approve anyway (39–42).
The desirability of working out ways of talking about civil war in elegy is, never-
theless, strongly felt in Propertius 2. Actium is not just assumed background, but gets
directly engaged in several poems.5 Beyond that, civil war keeps cropping up in, for
instance, the acknowledgment of fears of renascent civil unrest: “and we weep that
our heads are again exposed to unrest, when Mars mixes uncertain bands on either
side” (2.27.7–8: rursus et obiectum flemus caput esse tumultu, / cum Mavors dubias
miscet utrimque manus).6 A rhetorical flourish decrying a girlfriend’s devotion to Isis
draws on recent experience: “Tiber forever ill-disposed to the Nile” (2.33.20: cum
Tiberi Nilo gratia nulla fuit). The language of Roman civil war seems to color even an
oddly phrased reference to, of all things, a Parthian expedition: “are you preparing to
cross the Phrygian sea and to spatter with mutual slaughter the Penates they share
with us, and to bring back to your ancestral Lares abominable prizes?” (2.30.19–22:
paras Phrygias nunc ire per undas . . . spargere et alterna communes caede Penates / et
ferre ad patrios praemia dira Lares?).7 There are also, as we will see, multiple interre-
lated references in the book to Thebes as the mythical home of fraternal conflict.
I will not weigh in explicitly on the unity or disunity of our Propertius book 2,
other than to say that, as things stand, there are grounds to sustain a discussion of
civil war as a point of reference in the book, even perhaps sufficient basis to see it as
an organizing idea characteristic of this Propertian book and not the others.8
Whether designed as collection-framing bookends or not, the beginning and ending
poems of our book 2 both cast Rome’s civil wars as an elevated theme suited to
genres other than elegy, especially epic. In 2.1, the refusal to write about Augustus’
civil wars takes two forms. There is the epic on the events themselves that the poet
says he would write if he could. The catalog of Augustus’ civil wars (25–36) follows
the rejection of a list of maximal narratives, including titanomachy and gigan-
tomachy, Thebaid, Iliad, and historical epics on Greek and Roman themes, all of
which display degrees of resonance with recent conflicts at Rome through mytho-
logical analogy or historical parallelism (17–24).9 In this group, the Thebaid
propertius on not writing about civil wars 235
(21: veteres Thebas) stands out both for its associations with fratricide and civil war
and because of its history in Propertius’ generic self-definition. In poems 7 and 9 of
book 1, Thebes had been the topic of the misconceived epic by Propertius’ generic
foil Ponticus (1.7.1–5):
Dum tibi Cadmeae dicuntur, Pontice, Thebae

armaque fraternae tristia militiae,
atque, ita sim felix, primo contendis Homero
(sint modo fata tuis mollia carminibus),
nos, ut consuemus, nostros agitamus amores.
Ponticus, while you sing about Cadmus’ Thebes and the awful combat of
brother against brother and—bless me—struggle against the supremacy
of Homer (may the fates just be kind to your verses), I, in my usual way,
deal with my love affairs.
The poet advises Ponticus not to disparage love poetry because if he should find
himself in love he will be unable to write his lofty epics and will learn to admire the
elegist. The prediction proves true in 1.9, in which Ponticus’ Thebaid has become
useless now that he finds himself at the mercy of a beloved.10
The scenario of Propertius 1.7 and 9 is echoed in poem 2.34, in which the poet
addresses Lynceus, a friend and fellow poet turned rival for his girlfriend’s affec-
tions.11 Lynceus too is contemplating poetry on Theban themes, among others, in
an appropriately high-flying idiom (31–46):
You’d be better off imitating with your poetry mindful Philetas and the
dreams of Callimachus who is not bloated. For while you might tell of
the course of Aetolian Achelous, how the stream flows broken by its great
love, and also how the tricky water of the Meander wanders on the
Phrygian plain and deceives its own routes, and how the talking Arion,
the victorious horse of Adrastus, was at the grim funeral of Archemorus,
the fate of Amphiareus’ chariot or Capaneus’ destruction, which pleased
great Jove, would do you no good. Stop fashioning words for Aeschylean
performances, stop and relax your limbs for gentle dances. Start now to
confine your verses to a narrow lathe and come into your passion, harsh
poet; otherwise you will not be safer than Antimachus, no safer than
Homer: a proper girl scorns even great gods.
This advice is prompted because Lynceus himself is now in love (25: Lynceus ipse
meus seros insanit amores; “Lynceus my friend is mad with a belated love”). From
the elegist’s perspective, the experience of love sorts poetic subjects into the
acceptable and the unacceptable. Lynceus in Philetean/Callimachean mode can
236 afterlife
find elegy-appropriate elements from the story of Thebes, like the aetion for the
Nemean games, but the really stern stuff of the hypothetical Thebaid, the disap-
pearance of Amphiareus and the death of Capaneus, will do him no good.12 The
predicament, in which love exposes the futility of a Thebaid, is the same one
Propertius diagnoses in Ponticus in poem 1.9.9–10:
quid tibi nunc misero prodest grave dicere carmen

aut Amphioniae moenia flere lyrae?
Now what good is it for you, you wretch, to sing a heavy song or to
bewail the walls built by Amphion’s lyre?
Each of these poems, 1.7, 1.9, and 2.34, contributes in the usual terms to the defini-
tion of elegy over against higher genres and epic in particular. Elegy is soft (1.7.19:
mollem versum; cf. 2.34.42: molles choros), gentle (1.9.12: carmina lenia), concerned
with love (1.7.5: agitamus amores), narrow and “Callimachean” (2.34.43: angusto
torno); it takes Mimnermus, not Homer, as its patron saint (1.9.11) and a girl as the
ideal audience whose tastes must be accommodated (1.7.11, 1.9.14, 2.34.51–58).
Ponticus’ and Lynceus’ poetry is, by contrast, serious (1.9.9: grave carmen), grim
(1.9.13: tristes libellos, 1.7.2: armaque fraternae tristia militiae; cf. 2.34.44: dure poeta);
it is audacious, and potentially overblown, whether in a specifically Homeric vein
(1.9.11, 1.7.3, 2.34.45) or in other modes (inspiration from “Socratic books” and
“songs of an Erecthean strain” in 2.34.27–30,13 styled for the Aeschyleo cothurno in
2.34.41, propounding natural philosophy in 2.34.51–54). In each case, the process of
differentiation from elegy associates epic with Rome’s civil wars or their mytholog-
ical analogues.14
Even when Propertius forecasts his own progress from elegy toward heroic epic
on the seemingly more comfortable topic of Augustus’ future foreign conquests, we
still catch echoes of civil conflict (2.10.1–8):
But it is time to circle Helicon with other dances, and now it is time to
give the field to a Haemonian horse. Now I am pleased to memorialize
troops brave for battle and to sing of my leader’s Roman camp. But if
I lack the power, there will at least be praise for my daring: in matters
great it is enough to have been willing. Let the first part of life sing of the
work of Venus, the last part of unrest. I will sing of wars, since my girl
has been written.
~
That “Haemonian horse” (2) is a good steed for the blood and guts (aØ la) of epic
warfare,15 but it would be that much more appropriate for an epic that described
Roman bloodshed at Pharsalus and Philippi, conveniently imagined as lying in the
shadow of Mt. Haemus.16 W. A. Camps (1967) says that tumultus in line 7 is “a strong
word used here as a variant for ‘wars’. ” It is strong precisely because it names civil
unrest.17 Not only does civil war appear to require epic as its appropriate medium,
epic itself is nearly identified with, even liable to be consumed by, the subject of civil
war. With civil war approaching the status of a metonymy for epic, the elegist’s
generic other, it ought to be possible to confine the theme and safely banish it from
elegy. That is what Propertius 2.1 appears to want to accomplish (43–46):
navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator;

enumerat miles vulnera, pastor oves;
nos contra angusto versamus proelia lecto:
qua pote quisque, in ea conterat arte diem.
The sailor talks about the winds, the plowman bulls; the soldier counts
his wounds, the shepherd sheep. I in turn handle the battles of a narrow
bed. Let each man pass the day in the pursuit that is open to him.
This intention to define bedroom battles as the only ones appropriate for elegy,
however, can productively be read in comparison with those gestures toward civil
war in the book that look more like an attempt to examine what elegy itself can do
with the theme.
For one thing, Ponticus and Lynceus are not the only ones pondering the rele-
vance of old Thebes. In a most striking example, Propertius deploys the fatal duel
of Eteocles and Polynices to illustrate a definitively elegiac situation, erotic rivalry
(2.9.49–52):
non ob regna magis diris cecidere sub armis

Thebani media non sine matre duces,
quam, mihi si media liceat pugnare puella,
mortem ego non fugiam morte subire tua.
No more dreadful were the weapons beneath which the Theban

commanders fell fighting for kingship not without their mother between
them, than the death I would not flee to undergo at the price of your
death, if I could fight with the girl between us.
The Theban scenario shows signs of having been adapted both for elegiac appropri-
ateness and for contemporary Roman relevance. “Dreadful weapons,” diris . . . armis,
are weapons suited to a Roman civil war.18 After moving from Thebes to Rome and
to elegy, Jocasta’s desire to interpose herself between the dueling brothers is hard to
map onto the “girl in the middle,” media . . . puella. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (1956: 82)
wonders whether she is prize, umpire, or perhaps just neutral spectator for the rivals’
death match. At the same time, her potential to suggest both Helen as causa belli and
238 afterlife
the mediating Sabine women brings to mind a Julia or Octavia or Cleopatra, those
contemporary examples of the complicated role faced by a woman made politically
visible by her involvement in the affairs of warring rivals.19 The puella is in the end
negotiable because for Propertius the primary thing is the characterization of the
poet and his rival in terms of exaggerated intimacy (Sharrock 2000: 280–81).
Transplanted to Thebes they become fratricidal brothers, even mirror selves, and the
emphasis on their mutual destruction evokes the motif of civil war as suicide.20
This is not an isolated reference. Thebes also appears when the poet is contem-
plating his erotic rivalries at the beginning of poem 8 (1–10):21
The girl long dear to me is being snatched away, and you tell me not to
shed tears, friend? No conflicts are bitter like the conflicts of love. Me,
strangle me, I will be a gentler foe. Can I stand to see her lying on
another man’s shoulder? Will she who was just recently called mine be
not called mine? Everything changes; for certain love affairs change;
either you are conquered or you conquer, this is the wheel in love. Often
great commanders have fallen, great kings have fallen, and Thebes once
stood, and high Troy has passed.
At one level the references to commanders, kings, conquerors, Thebes, and Troy are
about Propertian elegy ascribing to itself some of the status and elevation of epic, a
common move in the book.22 The Iliad is a major point of reference,23 and Thebes
is linked with Troy as representative rubrics for the heroic past.24 At the same time,
Thebes is not Troy. It is even an anti-Troy.25 Thebes in Rome cannot but mean civil
war26 and a distinctly terrible conception of civil war: fratricide, mutually assured
destruction,27 the collective death of a city,28 ineluctability, venal motives, but all of
it endowed with grandeur and even glamour.29
Suggestions of Theban-style discord lurk at the start of poem 2.34 even before
we learn that Lynceus is himself contemplating a Thebaid. Facing the threat to
amicitia posed by Lynceus’ designs on his girl, Propertius describes the actions of
the wicked god Amor in terms that evoke civil strife (1–6):
Cur quisquam faciem dominae iam credat amico?

sic erepta mihi paene puella mea est.
expertus dico: nemo est in amore fidelis;
formosam raro non sibi quisque petit.
polluit ille deus cognatos, solvit amicos,
et bene concordes tristia ad arma vocat.
Why would anyone now entrust the looks of his mistress to a friend?
That is how my girl was nearly snatched from me. I speak from
experience: no one is trustworthy in love; it is rare that a man does not

seek the beautiful girl for himself. That god ruins kinships, parts friends,
and summons to awful combat those living well in harmony.
The usual elegiac frame of militia amoris will not contain the nastiness of this Amor.
Corrupting relationships and sowing strife, he is here playing the role of an Allecto or
Discord.30 The poem is reaching out to claim the language not just of warfare, but
specifically of civil warfare, as fully at home in the experience of the lover. The claim
draws support both from the appearances elsewhere of Thebes and civil war as venues
for reflecting on the experience of the lover and, in the immediate context, from the
fact that the poem’s addressee is himself a poet engaged with Theban themes. Civil
war language at the opening of 2.34 once again brings out the intimacy, even fraternal
closeness, in the relationship between the erotic rivals, as it had in 2.9. The poet goes
on to say that he is willing to share everything with Lynceus, except his bed (13–17):
tu mihi vel ferro pectus vel perde veneno;

a domina tantum te modo tolle mea.
te socium vitae, te corporis esse licebit,
te dominum admitto rebus, amice, meis:
lecto te solum, lecto te deprecor uno.
Go on and destroy my chest with sword or with poison; just remove

yourself from my mistress. You can be companion of my life and of my
body, I welcome you, friend, as master of my affairs, I only beg you off
my bed, from only my bed.
It is this hyperbolic exaggeration of the intimacy between the friends that explains
why a comparison to civil war as the work of Discord can conceptualize the rupture
between them.
The scenarios in which love leads to the perversion of the poet’s relationships
with his male peers, turning amici into enemies, are familiar,31 but they are being
played out on a bigger stage. Through evocations of the fraternal conflicts Romans
knew well in their national experience, a conflict between two friends fighting over
a woman becomes something of broader significance, something capable of analogy
with the highest register paradigms of heroic behavior. Thebaid imagery is, in other
words, potentially as elevating for elegy as Iliad imagery is. In poem 2.8, for in-
stance, love is another of the venues in which the grand cycle of success and failure
is enacted: “everything changes” (7: omnia vertuntur); “this is the wheel in love”
(8: haec in amore rota est); just like Thebes and Troy (9–10). While the element of
hyperbole makes tone difficult to establish, the choice of analogy nevertheless
speaks to the prominence of both cities in book 2 and to their shared status as
240 afterlife
analogues for Rome itself. In both 2.1 and 2.34 Propertius advertises the advantage
he gains from knowing in advance the form that interest in Troy as paradigm was
going to take in Augustan Rome by foisting the need to sing about Caesar, his bat-
tles, and his Trojan ancestors off onto Virgil.32 By adopting the story of Thebes as to
some degree his own while also playing off the lofty generic aspirations of a Ponticus
and a Lynceus, and Virgil, Propertius foregrounds conflict, rivalry, and even civil
strife as an inspiration for elegy, a generic mover, different, but perhaps equal to, the
impulse that would produce the Aeneid. The presence of civil war as a point of ref-
erence so very close to the elegiac identity of certain poems in book 2, not just
bound up and segregated in an identification with epic, creates a pathway for reflec-
tion on elegy’s place in Rome. Elegy too, just as much as higher genres like epic, can
be seen as a product of its times, with the capacity for a characterization, even an
analysis, of civil conflict with regard to motives, legitimacy, degree of awfulness.
Given the difficulty of establishing tone and the elegist’s tendency to give voice
to emotional extremes,33 his hyperbole and inconsistency, context is all-important.
The same metaphors that can elevate the nature of the conflict between the rival
lovers can also dramatically reduce the apparent significance of civil conflict. In 2.7
Caesar himself is cast into the role of the erotic rival, threatening to sunder the
lovers, by means of his decrees: “Yes, Cynthia you were delighted that the law was
withdrawn; both of us once spent a long time bewailing its provisions, for fear it
would part us” (1–3: gavisa es certe sublatam, Cynthia, legem / qua quondam edicta
flemus uterque diu, / ni nos divideret). “Anti-Augustanism” has been credited to such
sentiments,34 but this is not political opposition in any meaningful sense. Rather,
the oppositional stance has been reduced to the harmless and therefore possibly
acceptable terms of an elegiac scenario. Elsewhere the poet asserts the diminish-
ment of his role and his lack of threat: “our drinking parties have injured no gods”
(48: laeserunt nullos pocula nostra deos) is the poet’s claim in 2.15, the poem that
offers the book’s most direct comment on elegy’s relationship to Rome’s recent civil
wars, on which more below. The same sort of deflations can be seen elsewhere, not
just when the political is explicitly engaged, as it is in 2.7 or 2.15, but also, for in-
stance, where the exaggeration of the poet’s indignatio makes his comments on the
awfulness of the life of love easy to dismiss. “There are no conflicts bitter like the
conflicts of love” (2.8.3: nullae sunt inimicitiae nisi amoris acerbae), he says. Poem 17
opens with even greater outrage: “to stand someone up, to tease and lead on a lover,
that is what it means to have hands stained with blood” (1–2: mentiri noctem, prom-
issis ducere amantem, / hoc erit infectas sanguine habere manus). If it is the lover who
knows the true toll of the social perversion of civil war, its bitter inimicitiae and
blood-stained hands, then I think we can all live with it.
To see Rome’s political disagreements that issued in civil conflict in terms of
personal quarrels and sexual rivalries is a mode of analysis that was freely available
before and especially after Actium.35 In the examples we have considered, Propertian
elegy seems happy to frame the recent civil wars in these terms, which are close to
the genre’s core interests. And there are other domestications of the theme of civil
war to elegiac appropriateness. The conceptual vision of Actium as a victory of
order and vengeance over disorder and revolt that is visible in the sculptural
program of Augustus’ Apollo temple gets represented by poem 2.31 within an ele-
giac scenario.36 The speaker offers his description of the temple in response to a
peeved question from his girlfriend, asking why he is late for their date (1: quaeris
cur veniam tibi tardior?). When in lines 12–14 he gives a sympathetically focalized
description of the temple doors’ depictions of Apollo’s vengeance over Gauls and
Niobe, we might look for some generic purpose.37 The doors, he says, “mourn for,”
maerebat, Niobe’s loss. Whatever Augustan purpose the author of the depiction
might have meant it to serve, the description of the door effectively elegizes Apollo’s,
and by extension Augustus’, victory by finding in the scene both sympathy for the
victim and an affinity with elegy as the genre of lament. This is how the scene will
appear to an elegist.
The poet’s distinctive generic perspective is also visible in poem 2.1, in the form
of the elevation of Maecenas next to Augustus as the focus of the civil wars epic that
is refused (35–36):
te mea Musa illis semper contexeret armis,

et sumpta et posita pace fidele caput.
Amidst those conflicts my Muse would always find room for you, and the
faithfulness that defines you in war and in peace.
Augustus’ civil wars provide a venue in which enduring faithfulness is a path to

heroic elevation for Maecenas, despite his never picking up arms himself.38 Of
course this is not a path the poet chooses. The poem turns away from civil war to
sing the elegiac love-until-death of the poet and his mistress (47–58), but at the end
the figure mourning at the poet’s tomb is not Cynthia, but Maecenas (71–78). The
poet imagines himself, within the context of his devotion to his generic calling, as
ideally bound to Maecenas by the same kind of unbroken fidelity that Maecenas has
displayed toward Augustus in war. The elegist’s version of epic heroism is colored
by the terms of elegy’s depiction of friendships between male amici. He extols the
rare faithfulness to be found in a venue, civil war, that, like the life of love, imperils
friendships and raises the likelihood of rupture.39
The impression remains, nevertheless, that Propertius is less interested
in imposing an elegiac perspective on the grand drama of Roman history than
in using the high stakes of recent events for a self-reflexive positioning of himself
and his genre. The congeniality of evocations of civil war to Propertius’ elegiac
242 afterlife
purposes in book 2 is on extended display in a series of closely linked poems

concerned with rivalry, conflict, victory, and defeat. In 2.14, when successful in love,
the poet turns to the analogy of a military victory worth celebrating, a victory over
a foreign foe, from which come exultation, spoils, a triumphal chariot, and a com-
memorative offering with dedicatory inscription (21–28):
In vain others were pounding her door and calling for the lady: my girl
lingered and kept her head placed next to mine. That is a victory for me
worth more than conquered Parthians; that will be my spoils, my royal
captives, my triumphal chariot. Cytherea, I will put up great gifts on your
column, and beneath my offering there will be an inscription like this:
“I, Propertius, dedicate these spoils to you, goddess, at your temple, a
lover who got to stay the whole night.”
The same image of triumph is present in perverted form in the following poem, in
the picture of Roma herself exhausted from mourning because the triumphal pro-
cession has become a siege laid around her by Roman conquerors celebrating vic-
tories over their own people (41–48):
If everyone wanted to live a life like mine and lie around after pounding
their bodies with a lot of wine, there would be no cruel iron and no
warship, nor would the sea at Actium toss around our bones, nor would
Roma herself be exhausted from letting down her hair because she has so
often been besieged by her own triumphing over her own. Future
generations will at least be able to rightly praise me: our drinking parties
have injured no gods.
2.15, is, like 2.14, a celebration of the poet’s success as a lover. The confrontation bet-
ween the poet’s self-proclaimed victories and those of commanders easily comes
out in favor of the lover. His worthy successes are free from the illegitimacy that
civil war gives to Rome’s triumphs.
Poem 2.15 also represents a partial fulfillment of the boast made in poem 1 that
bouts of lovemaking with Cynthia are the poet’s source for maximal narratives,
even “long Iliads” (2.1.13–16):
seu nuda erepto mecum luctatur amictu,

tum vero longas condimus Iliadas;
seu quicquid fecit, sive est quodcumque locuta,
maxima de nihilo nascitur historia.
If she wrestles with me naked when her cloak has been torn away, then
truly we write long Iliads: if she does anything or says anything, from
nothing a huge narrative is born.
Poem 2.15 in some sense is that maximal narrative (2.15.1–6):
O me felicem! nox o mihi candida! et o tu

lectule deliciis facte beate meis!
quam multa apposita narramus verba lucerna,
quantaque sublato lumine rixa fuit!
nam modo nudatis mecum est luctata papillis;
interdum tunica duxit operta moram.
Oh what luck! What a brilliant night! And you, my bed, made blessed by
my pleasures! How many words we spoke when the lamp was beside us,
and what a brawl there was when the light was taken away. For at one
point she wrestled with me bare-breasted; at times she covered up in her
tunic and made me wait.
The exaggeration of elegy’s subject matter, a great brawl of lovemaking

(quanta . . . rixa), a telling of a great many words (quam multa . . . narramus verba),
makes poem 2.15 start to look like a sort of replacement for epic, specifically the civil
wars epic declined in poem 2.1. The hopes the poet expresses in the poem for an
unending, lifelong devotion between himself and his lover equal the elimination of
the threat of civil war, a world with no Actiums (41–48). This golden age conception
of the life of love and the absence of civil war represents a trivialization of the conflict
between Antony and Octavian, of course. At the same time, it is a deal killer for elegy
itself. Elegy cannot persist without conflict and rivalry, can it? Poem 2.15 is caught in
a bind. It frames its condemnation of civil war in terms of the elimination of the very
conditions that makes possible elegy’s connection to and commentary on civil war.
But even if elegy could persist without rivalry, it does not. The idyll of 2.15 is
followed by 2.16, in which the rival returns in the person of the praetor returning
from Illyria: “in my absence now they’re having parties with a full table, now in my
absence her door stands open all night long” (5–6: nunc sine me plena fiunt convivia
mensa; / nunc sine me tota ianua nocte patet). His appearance represents the specific
overturning of the poet’s boast in 2.14 that his lover’s door remained shut to others
while he occupied her bed all night long (21–22, 28). Faced with this threat, the poet
turns away from his comparisons with triumphators, conquering heroes, and exul-
tant heroines.40 He stays, however, with language that carries specific associations
with Rome’s recent experience of civil war (25–28):
barbarus exutis agitat vestigia lumbis,

et subito felix nunc mea regna tenet;
non quia peccarim (testor te), sed quia vulgo
formosis levitas semper amica fuit.
244 afterlife
He’s a barbarian shaking his limbs with his flanks stripped bare, and now
suddenly, fortune-favored, he has possession of my kingdom! Not
because I misbehaved (I swear to you), but because fickleness has always
commonly been dear to pretty girls.
The elegist sees the whims of his lover who is easily seduced by gifts (cf. 15–22) as a
reflex of the fickleness of fortune: his rampant rival is like a slave in the market who
overnight has risen to the level of conqueror. To express this thought Propertius
draws on the words the dispossessed Meliboeus of Eclogue 1 used to refer to the civil
war veteran, the impius miles, called barbarus, who will get possession of his little
farm, his kingdom, mea regna (Ecl. 1.69–71).41 The borrowing depends upon
Meliboeus’ role as spokesman for the bafflement and despair of those overtaken by
the social disruptions of civil war, as the poet perceives in him a kinship with the
defeated lover as fortune’s victim (cf. 2.8.7–8).42 In the same vein, as the sufferer of
a turpis amor, the poet of 2.16 specifically identifies himself with another figure of
defeat, the pathetic Antony forced by his own infamis amor to flee Actium, leaving
empty threats and corpses in his wake (35–42):
The shame! Yes, the shame, unless perhaps as they say a base love usually
has deaf ears. Consider the commander who recently filled the Actian sea
with empty groans and doomed soldiers. A shameful love commanded
him to turn his ships and show his back and to seek an escape at the ends
of the earth. This is the might and this is the glory of Caesar: with the
hand with which he was victorious he has sheathed his sword.
The immediate point of the comparison depends on Antony being oblivious to how
his love for Cleopatra is perceived (turpis amor surdis auribus esse solet), but we also
recognize that the poet and Antony are alike in that their attachment to an unworthy
woman is the source of their defeat by a rival. The presence of Caesar here once again
personalizes the conflict, as if it were a love triangle. The Antony of 2.16 might in fact
be productively contrasted to Maecenas, lauded by poem 2.1 for his fidele caput.
Antony is the one-time amicus, even brother, who has let a woman get between him-
self and Caesar. nemo est in amore fidelis (2.34.3): seen in elegiac terms, the life of love
and civil war might be so closely related that one explains the other.
Over the course of these three poems then, the elegiac life looks capable of
being both the remedy that could rid Rome of civil conflict and a parallel venue
where the same scenarios of rivalry, victory, and defeat get perpetuated, with no
end in sight. The Catullan nostalgia of 2.15 is the less productive path for elegy.43
The elegiac poet is, after all, a lifer, unable, or unwilling, to move on to higher
genres. He needs to be able to imagine a blissful life of simple union with his lover,
but, at the same time, he is happy to claim that she is the equal of Helen, worthy of
fighting over, and who cares about consequences? (2.3.29–46). A world of nothing
but blissed-out lovers would mean no civil war, but it would also mean no elegy.
Instead, of Amor the poet says assiduusque meo sanguine bella gerit: “he continu-
ously wages war in my blood” (2.12.16). The battle with love is the poet’s bellum
intestinum, his irrepressible conflict, a never-ending story. The Thebaid’s status as a
paradigmatically interminable theme perhaps explains some of its appeal to
Propertius in book 2. The elegiac poet has no motivation to embrace the end of the
civil wars as a story worth telling. By staying with rivalry and conflict, Propertian
elegy stakes out a generically appropriate position from which to comment on
Rome’s civil strife. At the same time, to not write about the civil wars, at least not in
the teleological terms of epic, means not having to face the end of elegy.
notes
1. RG 34.1.
2. The proem of Georgics 3 refers to the triple triumph (e.g., Wilkinson 1969: 69–70;
Miles 1980: 170–74), possibly in anticipation of the event (Harrison 2007: 154). The same
event is referenced in Prop. 2.1.31–34, and cf. 2.10.23, where the imagined role for the poet as
triumphator (accepting Markland’s currum for carmen; see Heyworth 2007a: 154–55 for
discussion) would owe something to G. 3.22–33. The triple triumph was perhaps the
originally intended telos of Livy’s history as it took shape in the 20s: cf. Per. 133 and Syme
1959: 37–38, although other considerations had their impact on the form the work took in
the end (see Luce 1977: 15n33 and Kraus 1994: 7–8 for further discussion of the dating and
publication of the Augustan books.)
3. The temple was dedicated 9 October 28 bc. On the date of Propertius book 2,
26–24 bc, see conveniently Lyne 2007c: 254–57. The same temple is alluded to in Hor.
Carm. 1.31 and is represented as the backdrop for ceremonies marking the end of the civil
wars on the shield of Aeneas (A. 8.720–28); see Hardie 1986: 355–58. If the thesis of Ernst
Badian 1985 that Prop. 2.7 responds to the repeal in 28 bc of extraordinary triumviral
measures is correct, that poem would function as another commemoration of the end of
the civil wars era.
4. Interesting features of Propertius’ résumé of the bella Caesaris include the
chronological reversal of Naulochus and Perugia (28–29) and the representation of Actium
through the lens of the triple triumph as seemingly subordinated to the celebration of the
victory over Egypt (30–34). By contrast, in Suetonius’ list of Augustus’ five civil wars (Aug.
9.2), the final position is occupied by the bellum Actiacum adversum Antonium. Appian,
who concludes his civil war narrative with the death of Sextus Pompey in 35 bc, classifies
the Actium conflict as both “the last and greatest action of the civil wars” and the beginning
of the Egyptian war (BC 1.6).
5. Specifically 1, 15, 16, and 34, on which see Gurval 1995: 167–208.
6. I cite the text of Propertius for the most part after S. J. Heyworth’s recent Oxford
Classical Text, although I have chosen not to adopt a number of his often radical changes,
246 afterlife
and I have not always noted where I have followed another text. The emendation Mavors
dubius is unnecessary here.
7. “In Properzio è questo uno dei contesti più oscuri, discussi, controversi,” according
to Paolo Fedeli (2005: 856); he chooses to delete. The explanation of Nils-Ola Nilsson (1947:
38–46), that Propertius conceives a Parthian expedition as a reflex of civil war because
Parthia incorporated the Roman survivors of Crassus’ defeat (he invokes Hor. Carm.
3.5.5–9), is often cited; shared Trojan ancestry seems to me the more likely premise (see, e.g.,
Alfonsi 1948: 62–65). Francis Cairns (1971b: 208) thinks lines 21–22 refer to the writing of a
Thebaid, but it is difficult to see how the passage functions as a recusatio in the way his
argument requires.
8. R. J. Tarrant provided encouragement for this formulation. Regarding the
(undeniably strong) case for division, see Heyworth 1995, Lyne 2007b; for the possibility of
unity: Tarrant 2006: 55–57.
9. For the contemporary relevance of gigantomachy specifically, see Hardie 1986:
85–90 (cf. 87n8 on Prop. 2.1) and Owen 1924: 76, which notes possible allusions to
gigantomachy in Cornelius Severus’ Bellum Siculum and Rabirius’ Bellum Alexandrinum.
Among the specifically Roman topics in 24–25, the pointed reference to regna Remi along
with the Punic wars and Marius’ successes underscores the way that a Roman historical
epic might or might not openly talk about civil war. Among the topics Propertius surveys,
Xerxes’ campaign (22) is the hardest in which to see resonances with civil war, but one
wonders about the influence of Choerilus of Samos’ Persica, which also may have made a
contribution to the proem of G. 3 (see Harrison 2007: 150–52). Analogies were certainly
available by 2 bc, when Augustus’ naumachia restaged Actium as Salamis (on which cf.
Kellum in this volume, p. 196–98).
10. For Ponticus and his epic, cf. also Ov. Tr. 4.10.47–48; his choice of topic c. 30 bc
has made people wonder what he was up to: Hardie 1990: 230n36; Henderson 1998: 222.
11. On the relationship between the poems, see Wimmell 1960: 202–8; Stahl 1985:
174–75; the importance of Antimachus, author of both a Thebaid and the elegiac Lyde, is
discussed in Vessey 1969/70. While I am concerned only with the first part of the poem
(1–58), I do believe 2.34 is a single poem.
12. On this interpretation, according to licet a permissive sense rather than a concessive
sense, see Stroh 1971: 84–85, followed by Heyworth 2007a: 270. McNelis 2007: 17–20 identifies
Propertius’ articulation of a tension between Callimacheanism and poetry on civil war and
Theban themes (both here and in 2.1) as an important predecessor for Statius’ Thebaid.
13. Reading Erecthei . . . carmina plectri in the highly uncertain line 29; the identity of
this old Athenian poet (called vester senex in 30) is unknown; see Heyworth 2007a: 268–69.
14. On civil war as an epic theme, see Jal 1963: 272–84.
15. Michael Hendry (1997) discusses etymological puns using the epithet.
16. Virg. G. 1.491–92; Luc. 1.680, 6.575.
17. For tumultus = civil war, see Fedeli 2005: 771 ad 2.27.7, citing Cic. Phil. 8.2–3. Fedeli
nevertheless wants to exclude this sense from 2.10.7, but at 2.1.39 the word again
contaminates an image for high-register epic with civil wars language (Phlegraeos Iovis
Enceladique tumultus; “Phlegraean unrest between Jupiter and Enceladus”). For examples
of tumultus applied to recent Roman conflicts, cf. G. 1.464–65, Hor. S. 2.2.126.
18. Note Mart. 9.70.3–4: cum gener atque socer diris concurreret armis / maestaque civili
caede maderet humus; “when son-in-law and father-in-law clashed with dreadful weapons
and the mournful earth was soaked with slaughter of citizens”; cf. G. 1.488: diri . . . cometae;
“dreadful comets,” as prodigies of civil war violence (Lyne 2007a: 49–50). Propertius’ use of
the epithet anticipates Lucan’s obsessive characterization and personification of weapons
(on which see Henderson 1998: 193–94), most directly the dirus ensis that chops off
Pompey’s head (8.677); cf. also dira . . . proelia (3.312–13), dira . . . Pharsalia (4.803).
19. Cf. the remarks of Pomeroy 1975: 185–89.
20. 2.9.1: iste quod est, ego saepe fui; “what that man is, I often have been” captures the
mirroring effect of the rival as the poet’s other self. 2.9.49–52 are often treated as a
fragment, but unity with 2.9.1–48 (a.k.a. 2.9A) is not out of the question. There is an
effective discussion in Sharrock 2000: 277–82.
21. Heyworth (2007a: 152) considers transposing 2.9.49–52 to follow 2.8.4, which works
rather nicely. On the relationship between 2.8 and 2.9, see Bobrowski 1994, Greene 2005.
22. See, e.g., Sharrock 2000, Greene 2000. On the use of elevated myth in 2.8
specifically, see Harmon 1975.
23. Cf. Gale 1997 on heroic elevation of the theme militia amoris.
24. The two glorious ruins catch the elegist’s interest together again in 2.28.54: all their
famous women are dead and gone. In 3.9.37–42 Thebes and Troy are epic topics the poet
rejects.
25. Cf. Henderson 1998: 212–54 on Statius’ Thebaid, Hardie 1990 on Ov. Met. 3.
26. See Lucan 1.549–52 (Thebanos imitata rogos), 4.549–51 (sic semine Cadmi / emicuit
Dircaea cohors ceciditque suorum / volneribus, dirum Thebanis fratribus omen); on the
parallels between Thebes and Rome in Lucan, see Narducci 1974. For further literary reflexes
of civil war in Roman versions of Theban myths, cf. Jal 1963: 402–6; McNelis 2007: 2–5.
27. For the quasi-suicidal rivals, cf. again 2.9.49–52. In poem 2.8 the perversity of
Theban violence threatens to destroy even the poet and his lover by murder and suicide, in
a twisted version of the deaths of Antigone and Haemon (17–28).
28. Thebes was by now as much a ruin as Troy (cf. deletas . . . Thebas, 2.6.5), its
post-heroic history at an end after being destroyed by Alexander and again by Sulla. My
thanks to Denis Feeney for mentioning this.
29. With regard to glamour, consider Varius’ Thyestes (more brother-on-brother
conflict), staged to acclaim, with official sanction, in the aftermath of Actium (Quint.
10.1.98, Tac. Dial. 12.6, Mart. 8.18.7–8). The hypothesis of J. P. Boucher (1958) that Varius is
addressed under the cover of the pseudonym Lynceus in Prop. 2.34, cannot be ruled out.
30. We can compare A. 7.325–26: cui tristia bella / iraeque insidiaeque et crimina noxia
cordi; “who delights in grim wars and wrath and plots and wicked accusations”; 335–36:
tu potes unanimos armare in proelia fratres / atque odiis versare domos; “you can arm
harmonious brothers for battle and overturn households with hatred” (Allecto, with
Ennius’ Discord in the background); also Cat. 64.397–406.
31. Cf., e.g., Catullus 30, 73, 77.
32. 2.1.41–42; 2.34.59–66.
33. On which, see Gibson 2007: 43–69.
34. Notably in Stahl 1985: 140–55; cf. now Heyworth 2007b: 109–14.
248 afterlife
35. From the period prior to Actium, we might recall the siege of Perugia, the
hypersexual invective of the sling bullets, and Octavian’s own resort to elegy to put Fulvia
in her sexual place (Mart. 11.20). For post-Actium, cf. Kellum 1997: 163–64 on visual
representations of the conflict that “mak[e] the sexual dynamics of the situation clear.”
36. On the temple and Actium: Kellum 1993; Zanker 1988: 85–89; Kellum 1997: 158–61;
Gurval 1995: 87–136 (arguing unsuccessfully that the temple did not function as an Actium
monument); Galinsky 1996: 213–24; Hekster and Rich 2006 on the circumstances of the
temple’s vowing in 36 and in favor of a perceived connection with Actium by the time of its
dedication.
37. Cf. Barchiesi 2005: 284–85.
38. The real question (posed to me by R. J. Tarrant) whether an epic conceived in the
terms Propertius 2.1 offers is really what Augustus or Maecenas would want is diffused
somewhat by this emphasis I believe. The couplet 37–38 would work with this point (heroic
friendship and faithfulness), but Heyworth 2007a: 108–9 makes a reasonably convincing
case against its authenticity (Fedeli prefers the more usual solution of a lacuna after 38). For
the thought, cf. 3.9.33–34, which A. E. Housman wanted to transpose to follow 2.1.38,
though it is difficult to see how that couplet does not belong where it stands in the
manuscripts.
39. On relationships between men in elegy, see especially Oliensis 1997.
40. Cf. 2.14.1–10.
41. Cf. Wistrand 1977: 55–58.
42. Josiah Osgood (2006) has interesting comments on the play of fortune as a theme
of writing about the period of the second triumvirate and civil war in general (cf. 120–21 on
Tityrus and Meliboeus).
43. On the poem’s relationship to Catullus 5, see Lyne 1980: 127–28, 130–31.
15
“Caesar grabs my pen”: Writing
Civil War under Tiberius
Alain M. Gowing
On a damp, chilly evening in Naples in the late winter of 40 bc, a wet nurse
was tending as quietly as she could to the needs of her charge, the one-
year-old son of aristocratic Roman parents. The situation was difficult, to
say the least, and far from ordinary, for the nurse and the child’s parents
were hastening down to the city docks, preparing to flee the city. The father
was on the proscription list, high on the list, in fact. Having fought on the
side of Lucius Antonius at Perusia earlier in the year, he had removed to
Campania, and Octavian’s minions were coming to Naples in hot pursuit.
The fugitives needed to be quick, so in order to speed things along, their
servants snatched the child from the nurse. But immediately upon being
separated from the nurse, the boy began to wail and cry . . . loudly, so loudly
they were nearly caught. In the end, however, they made good their
escape.
Their destination was Sicily, for the island was under control of Sextus
Pompey, the youngest son of Pompey the Great, who had proven to be a
good friend to the proscribed.1 Here the boy endeared himself to Sextus’
sister Pompeia, so much so that she showered him with expensive gifts.
Over a century later, these gifts were still on public display at Baiae, a
reminder perhaps of the child’s debt to the family of Pompey the Great
(Suet. Tib. 6.3).
But their stay in Sicily was brief. If Sextus liked the boy, he evidently
had little time for the father, so the father moved his family to the
Peloponnesus in the spring of 40 and appealed to Mark Antony, perhaps
hoping to exploit the growing rift between him and Octavian. The father
250 afterlife
did in fact join with the forces of Antony, while the mother and the boy stayed
behind in Sparta. The father’s strategy seems to have worked, for about a year later,
in the early summer of 39, he was pardoned in the wake of the agreement between
Sextus Pompey and the two triumvirs Antony and Octavian at Misenum. The boy,
now nearly three years old, returned to Rome with his parents, his mother coinci-
dentally pregnant with yet another child. In Rome, however, the boy was to experi-
ence a bizarre and momentous twist of fate: shortly after returning to the city, his
mother divorced her husband and on 17 January 38 bc (Ehrenberg and Jones 1955:
46) married Octavian, the man who had hunted them for nearly two years. The
woman was of course none other than Livia; the young boy, the future emperor
Tiberius. A few years later, in 33 bc, the nine-year-old Tiberius made his public
debut, delivering a eulogy for his natural father in the forum; and a few years after
that, at age thirteen, he rode in Augustus’ chariot during the triumphal procession
for the victory at Actium, the start of what would be a distinguished career of ser-
vice under his adoptive father.2
It seems appropriate to begin with Tiberius’ own experience of civil war in
order to set the stage for my subject, the writing of civil war during his reign as
emperor. Indeed, I do not think one can appreciate this subject without taking into
consideration Tiberius, any more than one could discuss the theme of civil war in
the Augustan period without taking into account Augustus. The Augustan period
does tend to distract us, and we are understandably transfixed by Lucan and Tacitus
from later periods, yet under Tiberius the civil wars of the Late Republic were as
potent a topic as they had been under Augustus or any other period.3 I would like
to consider why that was the case, chiefly through an examination of the two most
substantial texts from the period, the Memorable Deeds and Sayings of Valerius
Maximus and the Roman History of Velleius Paterculus. Despite the differing aims
of their respective genres, their perspectives are quite similar, and both supply evi-
dence for what I would describe as a cultural, as well as a political, imperative to
write about these conflicts. In certain respects, these two imperatives often seem at
odds with each another. Yet looming behind the period’s concern with civil war,
and behind those who wrote about them, stands the emperor himself.
1. Tiberian Historians and the Civil Wars
Some may be surprised to discover that in terms of sheer volume, more accounts of
Rome’s civil wars appear to have been produced during the Tiberian period than at
any other.4 It might be helpful to review briefly the highlights of this work. Although
much that was written is fragmentary and known to us only by reputation, it is
quite clear that republican history, especially late republican history, was a favorite
writing civil war under tiberius 251
topic. Of course, we think immediately of one of Tacitus’ most interesting charac-

ters, the outspoken historian Cremutius Cordus. His History encompassed the civil
war of the 40s and extended into the Augustan period, thus documenting the
transition from republic to principate. This work and the sympathetic manner in
which he dealt with the tyrannicides got him hauled into court in ad 25 on a charge
of treason, on the view that he was inciting civil war; ultimately he took his own life,
depriving the emperor of the opportunity to punish him (Tac. Ann. 4.34–35, esp.
34.2). Cordus’ story is important evidence for the anxiety the memory of the civil
wars could produce, and I shall return to it. Less volatile, evidently, but spanning
the same period of time was the History of the Elder Seneca; we should recall, too,
that many of the characters and events alluded to in his Controversiae and Suasoriae
derive from the period of the civil wars (see esp. Suas. 6 and 7). Although his precise
dates are disputed, the historian Fenestella also belongs to the Tiberian period; his
extensive Annales (at least twenty-two books) ranged from the period of the mon-
archy down to the Late Republic (and perhaps into his own day).5 Bruttedius Niger,
a friend of Sejanus and a staunch supporter of the emperor, had composed a History
that included an account of Cicero’s death.6 And it was in the Tiberian period, too,
that Aufidius Bassus was composing a much admired History that extended back at
least as far as the death of Cicero and thus covered the triumviral period. We know
little about the History of Servilius Nonianus, but he was from an illustrious family
very much involved in the rise of both Caesar and Octavian and in high standing
with Tiberius (he was consul in 35): given the family history, it is likely that Servilius’
work also went back as far as the conflict between Caesar and Pompey.7
In short, under Tiberius the civil wars were a very, very hot topic. But there
remains one historian I have yet to mention: the emperor himself. Suetonius
informs us that Tiberius had written an autobiography, a commentarius de vita sua
(Tib. 61): this work was in all likelihood the chief source for the story with which
I began this essay.8 The emperor, too, could be counted an historian of the civil
wars; he certainly took a deep interest in them. Let us return for a moment to the
tale with which I began.
2. Tiberius and “Civil War Anxiety”
Ronald Syme (1986: 199), of course, understood the significance of when Tiberius
was born: referring to the event, he does not mention a numerical date, merely
that the future emperor was born “in the year of Philippi.” Just as importantly,
Tiberius was born to a father who, despite a successful career as one of Caesar’s
generals, rather vigorously opposed the young Octavian, sought rewards for the
tyrannicides, attempted to stir up rebellion in much the same way as Sextus
252 afterlife
Pompey had done, and yet finally yielded, not only politically but personally,
divorcing his wife so that Caesar’s heir could marry her and take the place of father
to his children. Tiberius was not simply born in the midst of civil war at Rome; he
passed his formative years in the company of those most deeply involved in and
responsible for it, on both sides of the political fence. His must have been a remark-
able education indeed.9
I want to resist playing armchair psychologist, but it is fair to say that while
the civil wars were confusing and troubling for many Romans, they must have
been especially so for a young boy who had experienced what Tiberius had expe-
rienced. Then, too, we should not discount his experiences during the four decades
of Augustus’ regime. For despite his many successes, in the course of his reign
Augustus was confronted with several challenges to his rule; the risks of a renewed
civil war never went away.10 Certainly the most interesting, if not the most famous,
examination of the opposition to Augustus comes in the exchange between the
emperor and Livia created by Cassius Dio, in which Augustus asks Livia’s advice
about what to do in the face of plotters and rebels (55.14–21). The gist of the
discussion is that opposition to those in power is a fact of life, that there will always
be those eager to begin civil war, and that it is the emperor’s job to see to it that
such wars do not begin. Fictional though this dialogue may be, it must fairly rep-
resent the sort of thinking to which Tiberius had been exposed as he became edu-
cated in what it meant to be emperor.
Small wonder, then, that Tiberius seems to have been very nervous about civil
war. This is why the case of Cremutius Cordus in ad 25 is so interesting. Since
Tacitus does not provide details about Tiberius’ own thoughts about Cordus, we
must infer them (or infer what Tacitus thought they were) from what Tacitus has
Cordus say. And what the emperor feared was that, through his writing, Cordus was
inciting people to civil war.11 Writing civil war under Tiberius, it turns out, was a
dangerous proposition. But not everyone wrote as Cordus did.
While most of the Tiberian historians I mentioned above are lost to us, we do
in fact have two substantial texts from the Tiberian period in which the civil wars
of the Late Republic figure prominently, the History of Velleius Paterculus and the
Memorable Deeds and Sayings of Valerius Maximus. In distinct contrast to the work
of Cordus, these texts, far from being controversial, are obviously written with an
eye toward securing imperial favor. Indeed, the occasionally fawning and deferen-
tial references to Tiberius, especially in Velleius, strike many as cloying and have
contributed to the generally poor reputation of both authors. As the chief surviving
representatives of Tiberian literary culture, they may be largely responsible for the
fact that scholars have paid comparatively little attention to that culture.12
Nonetheless, they have a good deal to teach us about writing civil war under
Tiberius. I will consider each in turn in general terms.
3. Valerius Maximus
About both authors, one thing is clear: they do not like writing about civil war. On
several occasions Valerius refers in a general way to civil war, always in pejorative
terms: it is “madness,” causes “deep wounds,” its memory is to be “loathed,” and it is
“dangerous.”13 So too does Velleius talk about the “evils” of civil war (2.28). They
also have in common, as we shall see, a reluctance to delve deep into these
conflicts.
One of Valerius’ most extensive remarks about civil war provides some insight
into his views (2.8.7):
Verum quamvis quis praeclaras res maximeque utiles rei publicae civili
bello gessisset, imperator tamen eo nomine appellatus non est, neque
ullae supplicationes decretae sunt, neque aut ovans aut curru
triumphavit, quia, ut necessariae istae, ita lugubres semper existimatae
sunt victoriae utpote non externo, sed domestico partae cruore.
Though someone might have performed deeds that were distinguished

and especially beneficial for our state in the course of civil war, he is
nonetheless not called imperator . . . no supplications are voted, no
ovation, no triumph with a chariot, because while those deeds may have
been necessary, such victories are always considered grievous, on the
grounds that they were won not through the shedding of foreign blood,
but of our own.
It is possible, then, to perform deeds that are “famous” and “especially useful to
the republic” during a civil war, though the usual rewards for such achievements
must not be expected. Such deeds may be “necessary,” but they are nonetheless
“grievous.”
Roughly speaking, this constitutes a prescription for the sort of civil war stories
that will make it into Valerius’ compendium. Most of the tales he tells, that is,
involve honorable people doing honorable things, things that were “distinguished”
and brought some benefit to the state; he pointedly shuns tales involving dishonor-
able people, especially tales from the civil wars. Such negative stories he does tell
revolve around a fairly circumscribed set of individuals and actions: the cruelty of
Antony; the heinousness of the murder of Caesar by Cassius and Brutus; the
unfortunate decision of Pompey, an otherwise very admirable man, to oppose
Caesar. Valerius is absolutely clear about his distaste for the civil wars: having at one
point told several stories of courageous men who served under Caesar in the fight
against Pompey (3.2.22–23), he pulls himself up short (3.3.2):
254 afterlife
ac ne plura huiusce generis exempla domi scrutando saepius ad

civilium bellorum detestandam memoriam progredi cogar, duobus
Romanis exemplis contentus, quae ut clarissimarum familiarum
commendationem, ita nullum publicum maerorem continent,
externa subnectam
I do not want to be forced, by investigating more stories of this type from

Rome, to stir up memories of the loathsome civil wars. And so, content
with two Roman stories, which bring honor to famous families yet entail
no sorrow to our state, I’ll add some foreign stories.
It should further be noted that most of his stories involve men who fought (with
distinction) on the side of Caesar; or, from the triumviral period, those who were
proscribed (and whose behavior in the face of adversity could be regarded as
exemplary).14
What Valerius judges to be “memorable deeds and sayings” is therefore quite
limited, conforming to a rather strict set of guidelines. He is especially reluctant to
relate disturbing stories, particularly those that might perpetuate the memory of
men who did bad things.15 As he puts it, his “pages” are to be “quiet and peaceful”
(6.3.praef.: in placido et quieto paginarum numero), a reflection of the age in which
he lives, an age characterized by tranquillitas, more “blessed” (beatior) than any
before (8.13.praef.). This has been made possible through the agency of an enlight-
ened emperor, Tiberius, a man who represents “the surest security for our country”
(1.praef.: certissima salus patriae; cf. 2.praef.), a ruler, in short, under whom the
atrocities of civil war are not likely to occur again. This is a perspective on the
emperor we shall meet again in Velleius Paterculus. While Valerius’ compendium
may purport to be a record of past deeds, it is in fact a record entirely conditioned
by the circumstances of the present. And this was not a time to be lingering on the
memory of civil war, especially the “bad” memory.
4. Velleius
This same sense of caution and reluctance, if you will, about recalling the civil war
may be observed in Velleius Paterculus. A brief, two-book affair, his History details
Roman history from its beginnings down to and including the first fifteen years of
the reign of Tiberius, ending in the year ad 29. Of the two books, book 2 is the most
substantial and narrates the period from the Gracchi down to 29, about 160 years in
131 chapters. Of those 131 chapters, 7 are devoted to the conflict between Pompey
and Caesar, an additional 30 to that between Antony and Octavian. About a quarter
of the book, in other words, covers essentially a twenty-year stretch. Velleius

obviously cannot not talk about these conflicts—clearly, he does devote substantial
space to them—but he can be selective in what he says. The brevity of his account
in fact demands selectivity, and he uses this quite often as an excuse not to go into
too much detail.16 As he says of the triumviral period, it is a subject incapable of
being adequately lamented or adequately narrated (2.67).17 So he, like Valerius, will
content himself with stories of the proscribed, because these, if horrific, can at least
be inspirational.
This selectivity on the part of both authors is worth stressing, and while this is
not a subject I can discuss at any length here, it is curious to note how often both
Velleius and Valerius picture events as controlling their narrative and how they
must occasionally wrestle with their material as though it had a life of its own.
A striking instance of this, which forms part of my title, is when Velleius arrives at
the first significant entrance of Julius Caesar in his History and, as he says, “Caesar
grabs my pen,” forcing him to write about him (2.41.1); Bibulus does the same thing
in Valerius Maximus (4.1.15), and there are many other examples of instances where
the material exerts control over the authors.18 There is, in short, a real sense that
history—and, I would add, politics—demands that certain stories be told; yet the
demands of the authors, the desires they have for their texts, can come into conflict
with the demands of history and politics. My larger point, however, is that both
Velleius and Valerius are very conscious that some events need to be told while
others may be, and in many cases must be, repressed. The events of the civil wars are
often among the latter.
This principle is operative in what Velleius has to say about Tiberius’ early
career. One of the first references to the emperor in this work occurs in the
midst of his narrative of the conflict between Antony and Octavian, and it
comes, interestingly enough, as Velleius narrates the activities of Tiberius’ father
in the winter of 40 bc that I recounted at the beginning of this chapter. As you
might imagine, this could be a particularly dicey moment, given that it consti-
tutes an act of rebellion against the future Augustus. But watch how Velleius
deals with it (2.75.1):
Per eadem tempora, exarserat in Campania bellum quod, professus

eorum qui perdiderant agros patrocinium, ciebat Ti. Claudius Nero,
praetorius et pontifex, Ti. Caesaris pater, magni vir animi doctissimique
ingenii; id quoque adventu Caesaris sepultum atque discussum est.
At the same time, a war flared up in Campania, which Tiberius Claudius

Nero started: he had taken up the cause of those who had lost control of
their lands. Nero, a former praetor and pontifex, the father of Tiberius
256 afterlife
Caesar, was a man of great character and intellect. This war, too, was
quelled and put down by the arrival of Caesar [i.e., Octavian].
Thus does Velleius deftly deal with a potentially difficult moment: Tiberius Nero’s
act of rebellion is transformed into a magnanimous act of salvation.19 He does not
linger on it, however: he moves rapidly on to the real focus of this little anecdote,
the subsequent bravery of Tiberius’ mother, Livia, and the escape from Naples. And
interestingly enough, Velleius uses that incident as an illustration of the unfathom-
able workings of fortuna (2.75.2–3; cf. D.C. 48.15.3–4).20
Yet why does Velleius need to mention this at all? Why is this not a story he
could safely omit, as he omits so much else? In part, he includes it in the belief
that it tells something about the character of Tiberius’ parents and, thus, about
Tiberius himself. This seemingly insignificant piece of information, like much in
Velleius, is inevitably linked to the historian’s characterization of the emperor. In
this case the information underscores Tiberius’ personal experience of the civil
wars, the fortuna that characterizes him and his family, and the service of that
family in the course of the wars.21 Tiberius continues this tradition, and indeed,
Velleius regularly draws attention to an important aspect of Tiberius’ talent: his
ability to hold in check those forces that would renew civil war at Rome. By shap-
ing the story about the father as he does (as a magnanimous act), Velleius avoids
the uncomfortable paradox of a father who stirred up civil war and a son who
aims to prevent it.
This capacity to avert civil war, it turns out, is an imperial virtue, and Velleius
remarks it at several points, most significantly at the accession of Tiberius and
again at the end of the work. In the first instance, the death of Augustus is shown
to have sparked concerns for renewal of civil war (2.124.1): this was not to be, how-
ever, for Tiberius quickly emerged as the defender of the peace (2.124.2; cf. 2.103.1),
a new ruler who had no need “to take up arms against evil men” (2.124.1: neque
contra malos opus armis foret). In the second, Velleius concludes his History with a
prayer that the gods supply Rome with emperors as good as Tiberius and that they,
like Tiberius, hold at bay the divisive forces that would foment civil war: “encourage
the pious plans of all citizens and suppress the impious” (2.131.2: consilia . . . omnium
civium aut pia fovete aut impia opprimite), impia being an adjective frequently
used with particular reference to civil war.22 This capacity of the emperor to keep
the peace is not merely a Velleian fiction, by the way, but ties in with the notion of
Concordia, a cornerstone of Tiberian ideology. Concordia (in an imperial context
especially) was a prerequisite for keeping civil war in check, and Tiberius could in
fact claim to have averted civil war on more than on occasion.23
Velleius’ civil war narrative is made to serve this purpose, then: far from being
a straightforward historical account, it is selective in nature, designed not so much
to perpetuate memory of the war as to throw into relief the fact that under Tiberius
such conflicts as Rome experienced in the 40s and 30s, and even the potential for
such conflicts that persisted into the Augustan period, are no longer possible.24
5. Conclusion
To return in conclusion to my proposition: both authors, I suggest, provide evidence for

a cultural and political imperative to write about civil war in the Tiberian period. There
was a cultural imperative, in the sense that societies need to work through national
traumas, and the civil wars represented for Rome perhaps the most serious national
trauma it would experience. History writing is an effective means of mitigating such
trauma, and we should remember that the generation born during the civil wars, the
emperor’s own generation, were in their maturity under Tiberius. The memory of the
conflicts of the 40s and 30s, in other words, was still fresh, hence the interest on the part
of historians to talk about them. Part of the process of remembering such conflicts par-
adoxically involves or leads to a gradual forgetting as well: it is worth stressing that, for
all intents and purposes, writing the history of the civil wars ceased after the reign of
Tiberius, as though the subject were now exhausted, or exorcised, at least until Lucan.25
In part, of course, it may be because writing civil war had become too risky; that is the
lesson of Cremutius Cordus. But it may equally be because those memories were simply
unpleasant. This is suggested by the reluctance expressed by both Velleius and Valerius
to linger on certain aspects of the civil wars and in whom, as I have suggested, the urge
to remember often seems to collide with the urge to forget.
But the political influences at work on Velleius and Valerius are just as important.
As Augustus knew well, and as Tiberius had learned well, there was a continuing need
for the emperor to justify his position, especially as guarantor of security. In contrast
to Cordus, evidently, Velleius and Valerius were more than happy to buy into this idea.
Thus Velleius constructs a history in which the civil wars of the Late Republic lead not
to the promise of further war, but to a savior in the form of the new emperor, Valerius,
a world of Roman exempla that offer models for behavior in a society in need of
heroes rather than villains, of men who could quell conflict, not start it. For neither
the historian nor the moralist is civil war the focus of attention; rather, the wars serve
merely to throw into relief an emperor who saved Romans from themselves. In writing
of the Roman civil wars of the past, Velleius and Valerius in effect write them out of
the present. And perhaps the legitimacy of the Tiberian claim to have abolished or at
least repressed the Roman tendency toward civil war was something they actually
believed. Tiberius, at least, could rightly claim that he had never shed Roman blood
in a civil war, the first Roman leader to be able to make that claim in some time.
258 afterlife
notes
1. For sources and discussion, see Gowing 1992, esp. 182–83, 201–2.
2. For the events discussed here see especially Suet. Tib. 4–7; Vell. 2.75; D.C. 48.15.3–4,
44 and 54.72; Tac. Ann. 5.1, 6.51.1. On Tiberius’ father, Tiberius Claudius Nero: Hinard 1985:
451–53; MRR 2.373, 381; Syme 1986: 99–100; Levick 1976, esp. 13–15.
3. While we distinguish between various conflicts of the last century of the Republic,
it should be noted that Velleius regards the struggle between Caesar and Pompey and then
between Antony and Octavian as comprising a single, twenty-year span of civil war (2.89.3);
Valerius Maximus similarly views the last century as a continuous stretch of civil war,
halted by Augustus (9.15.5). For civil war in Augustan culture, see in general (the literature
is extensive), Gurval 1995, esp. 10–13, and, especially, Osgood 2006.
4. Timpe 1986: 73 notes a surge in historical writing in the post-Augustan era but
attributes it to the evolution of the principate and the sort of reactions it spawned. I would
instead suggest that it reflects equally the personal or perhaps familial experiences of those
doing the writing. Noè 1984, among others, surveys the historians mentioned in this
paragraph. See also Gowing 2010.
5. Elder Seneca: Peter 1967: cxviii; Fenestella: Peter 1967: cviiii–cxiii. Perhaps also to
be included in the list of Tiberius historians who wrote of the civil wars is Verrius Flaccus,
the prolific antiquarian who flourished under Augustus (he tutored the emperor’s
grandsons) and survived well into the Tiberian period. Flaccus was the author of the Fasti
Praenestini, though his most ambitious work was a multivolume compendium of
“memorable facts,” rerum memoria dignarum libri (we know the title from Gel. 4.5.7),
which may parallel the work of his coeval Valerius Maximus.
6. On Bruttedius, Peter 1967: cxvi.
7. See Syme 1970.
8. Peter 1967: cxviii.
9. Curious, however, that almost none of the standard biographies of Tiberius find
the episode of his escape from Naples and events of the next couple of years particularly
interesting, a notable exception being Marañón 1956: 26–27.
10. Detailed in Raaflaub and Samons 1990.
11. See especially Cordus at Ann. 4.35.2: num enim armatis Cassio et Bruto ac
Philippenses campos obtinentibus belli civilis causa populum per contiones incendo; “Surely
I am not using assemblies to fire the people to civil war, as though Brutus and Cassius were
under arms and in possession of the plains of Philippi?” Tiberius’ anxiety about the threat
of civil war surfaces still more concretely in other portions of Tacitus’ narrative, e.g., Ann.
4.17.3, 21.3.
12. There are notable and recent exceptions, however, including Bloomer 1992,
David 1998, Rowe 2002, to mention only the most significant anglo- and francophone
studies (Velleius is, moreover, something of a growth industry among German-speaking
scholars at the moment; note, too, the conference on Velleius held April 2008 in Leicester).
Ted Champlin is currently at work on a biography of Tiberius that promises to give greater
prominence to the cultural aspects of his regime. Champlin’s preliminary work on this
project may currently be read on the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics
Web site, at www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/papers/authorAL/champlin/champlin.html.
But we still lack the sort of holistic examinations of Tiberian culture that are so
numerous (for entirely understandable reasons) for the Augustan or even Neronian and
Flavian periods.
13. belli civilis rabies (5.8.5), bellorum civilium vastissima volnera (6.2.8), civilium
bellorum detestandam memoriam (3.3.2), perniciosa seditione dividua civitas (4.4.2), tot
civilium bellorum truculentissimo furore (4.6.4), civil war causes discipline in army to
collapse (9.7.mil.Rom.3).
14. Exx.: those who fought on Caesar’s side: 3.2.22–23, 3.8.7–8; proscribed: 4.7.4,
5.7.3, 6.2.12, 6.8.5–8. Freyburger 1998 surveys Valerius’ references to the civil wars, noting
that his references are generally limited to the major players and generally tend toward
the positive rather than the negative. See also the important discussion in Bloomer 1992:
147–84.
15. See Gowing 2005: 55–56.
16. See Woodman 1977: 109 on 2.96.3 and 148–49 on 108.1 for Velleius’ frequent
references to the brevitas and festinatio of his work. His selectivity and biases are readily
apparent: thus, for instance, he omits all mention of Cato’s suicide, pleading the demands
of brevitas (cf. 2.55.1), or downplays Octavian’s role in the proscriptions (2.66.1–2; cf. the
more equitable distribution of blame found in App. BC 4.16) and excludes reference to
Octavian’s execution of the Perusine council (App. BC 5.48; cf. Vell. 2.74.4, excusing
Octavian for anything regrettable that may have happened in connection with the siege of
Perusia in 40 bc). My thanks to Elizabeth Keitel for drawing attention to these specific
omissions.
17. This remark comes on the heels of Velleius’ long and impassioned outburst about
the murder of Cicero (2.66), an event he clearly deplored (also a good example of an event
he chooses to invest with a certain moral, and perhaps even political, significance by
spending so much time on it).
18. See Gowing 2005: 58, n72. Instances of how the material guides the course of
Valerius’ narrative: e.g., 6.8.7; 7.3.4 (quod sequitur narrandum est); 9.2.praef.; 9.13.2; for
Velleius, see n. 16 and refer to Woodman’s discussions of festinatio (those references
invariably come at moments when Velleius looks for an excuse to skip over something).
19. Strikingly similar to the way the tradition deals with Sextus Pompey: even the
most negative accounts (Velleius’ included) have nothing but good things to say about the
assistance he extended to the proscribed. Velleius is the only source to configure Nero’s
action in this way; cf. the distinctly less glamorous motive imputed by Suetonius:
servis . . . ad pilleum frustra vocatis; “having in vain manumitted a force of slaves” (i.e., to
help in his struggle against Octavian) (Tib. 4.2).
20. For fortuna in Velleius (a recurring, important theme), Schmitzer 2000: 190–225.
21. There may well be personal reasons for the way Velleius configures his narrative in
this portion of the work. At 2.69.5–6 he had included an aside on his uncle, Capito, who
had served on the side of the triumvirs (he was an opponent of the assassin Cassius) and
had been instrumental in exacting the punishment of the tyrannicides. There intervenes
the anecdote on Tiberius’ father (2.75), who had voted rewards for the tyrannicides. The
anecdote prompts a further autobiographical moment from Velleius (2.76), this time about
his grandfather, who had in fact been a partisan of Tiberius Claudius Nero and was thus on
260 afterlife
the opposite side of the political fence to Velleius’ uncle. In short, Velleius’ own family
history, like the emperor’s, featured conflicting allegiances.
22. Cf., e.g., Hor. Carm. 2.1.39 with Page 1959 as well as Nisbet and Hubbard 1978 ad
loc. See also Wiseman 1982: 58.
23. Concordia: Rogers 1943: 33; Levick 1976, esp. 86; Schmitzer 2000, esp. 188
(Schmitzer discusses Velleius’ own references to Concordia and its role in his portrait of
Tiberius; the degree to which Velleius’ work mirrors Tiberian ideology is ably discussed in
Kuntze 1985). Tiberius had thwarted his brother’s efforts to “restore the republic”: Gowing
2005: 31–32; Levick 1976: 34. Similarly, the plot of Scribonius Libo Drusus, thwarted in ad 16
(an act that gave rise to offerings to Concordia), was construed as a prelude to civil war: see
Levick 1976: 149–50. Velleius specifically mentions this as one of Tiberius’ achievements
(2.129.2). Tiberius lovingly restored the Temple of Concord, one of the most significant acts
in his otherwise undistinguished building program. His rebuilding of this temple is well
documented, in texts, coins and inscriptions, providing importance evidence for the
importance of concordia in his thinking. See Richardson 1992: 98–99.
24. This is all the more ironic (and interesting) in light of the convincing argument of
Keitel 1984 that Tacitus configures the reign of Tiberius as essentially a continuation and
exacerbation of civil conflict; in effect, Tiberius wages civil war rather than extinguishes it.
And there were, of course, threats to Tiberius’ authority, real and imagined (cf. the maiestas
trials of the period).
25. The parallels between how Rome dealt with memories of the civil wars and how
Athens dealt with theirs have not been fully explored, but in both cultures and historical
moments we witness societies struggling with the desire to remember trauma and to forget
it (in the case of Athens, this desire was in fact institutionalized in the decree of 403 cited in
the Ath. Pol.) See in general the discussion in Ricoeur 2004: 452–56 and the various studies
(most notably that of Loraux) cited therein.
16
Intestinum Scelus: Preemptive
Execution in Tacitus’ Annals
Cynthia Damon
1. Introduction
Servius Galba was an unlikely contender for imperial power in 68 ce.

Governor of Hispania Tarraconensis since 61, he had been keeping a low
profile for years; there are no achievements of note for him after Claudius’
principate.1 By 68 he was a septuagenarian survivor who had seen five
emperors come and four go. True, he was tied to the interests of the res pu-
blica by birth, wealth, and a traditional career, but it was not public interest
that moved him to challenge Nero. What tipped the balance? Ancient expla-
nations focus not on Nero’s misrule (often used to explain the Pisonian
conspiracy and Vindex’s revolt), but on something more basic: Galba feared
for his life. According to Suetonius, for example, “he had gotten hold of
Nero’s orders about his own execution, which had been sent secretly to pro-
vincial agents” (Suet. Galba 9.2: mandata Neronis de nece sua ad procura-
tores clam missa deprenderat).2 Whether or not such orders had been given
in Galba’s case—Gwyn Morgan (2006: 21) thinks not—Galba could (and
apparently did) point to the executions of numerous other men with a
record like his (e.g., Suet. Galba 10.1: propositis ante se damnatorum occiso-
rumque a Nerone . . . imaginibus; “setting up in front of himself . . . images of
those condemned and killed by Nero”; Plut. Galba 5.2: sx̃m mzqglåmxm
mdqx̃m Õp$ aÃso‹ soÀ| épifiamerssot| ¿kofitqlemo|; “uttering
lament for the most eminent of the men slain by [Nero]”).
For preemptive execution had long been Nero’s policy; the emperor
learned more from his mother than from his tutor.3 Preemptive execution
262 afterlife
is also a recurrent feature in Tacitus’ analysis of imperial paranoia, which, in an era

of “peace and an emperor” (Ann. 3.28.2: pace et principe), nevertheless saw civil war
everywhere and reacted accordingly, often appropriating civil war exempla to moti-
vate the suppression of (what was figured as) dissent. Or at least the attempted
suppression; in fact, as Tacitus shows, the paranoid reaction, when it sounded the
“civil war alarm,” risked rousing real civil war and thereby perpetuating Rome’s
cycle of self-inflicted suffering.4
The specter of civil war haunts Tacitus’ Julio-Claudians, and each of the
emperors for whom his narrative survives is shown coping with it and with those of
his circle who try to exploit the “lessons” of past civil wars: Sejanus, Messalina,
Poppaea, and Tigellinus, to name just a few, are among the powerful figures who
evoke the horrors of civil war for their own self-serving and short-sighted ends. The
year of civil war that erupted with Galba and nearly destroyed the res publica (Hist.
1.11.3) was, in Tacitus’ view, long in preparation.
The present essay traces the intertwined themes of civil war (alleged or
attempted) and preemptive execution (accomplished or feared) in the Annals. It is
a story of many episodes, with the Tiberian scenes serving as foil to the Claudian
and both to the Neronian. Lacking Tacitus’ narrative of Nero’s end we cannot see
whether the trajectory sketched here culminates there, of course. But in his earlier
work our author did create a direct connection between fear of preemptive execu-
tion and real civil war. Two episodes from the Histories, then, will serve as an intro-
duction to the dynamics of the arbitrary exercise of power.
I begin with Otho’s coup. Tacitus’ narrative of the conspiracy that overthrew
Galba is, in its events, very close to the parallel tradition. What Tacitus adds is Otho’s
internal deliberations, fear foremost: “he also contemplated what he feared”
(H. 1.21.1: fingebat et metum). Otho’s chief fear was in fact execution, which he felt
he risked not for anything he had done but simply for who he was (1.21.1). He rea-
sons thus: “Otho can be killed! Accordingly, now is the time for action and daring”
(1.21.2: occidi Othonem posse. proinde agendum audendumque). Otho is afraid that
his temporary eminence as a potential adoption candidate will expose him to the
hostility of the successful heir, Piso, for “suspicion and hatred from those in power
attend the man forecast as next in succession” (1.21.1: suspectum semper invisumque
dominantibus qui proximus destinaretur). And his fear prompts action—the killing
of Galba and Piso—that brings in its train the next phase of the year’s wars, Otho
versus Vitellius. In effect, Tacitus makes his Otho act on the assumption that the
men presently in power will respond to their fears as the real Nero did.
One further passage from the Histories will finish setting the stage. Through
Otho in the scene just discussed Tacitus shows us the rebel’s motivation; he offers
the ruler’s side in an episode from Vitellius’ reign later in the year. Trivial in its
consequences (except to the victim), the episode is nevertheless narrated in
preemptive execution in tacitus’ annals 263
considerable detail over two chapters and introduced with the attention-getting
comment “Junius Blaesus’ death was common knowledge at the time and an object
of talk” (Hist. 3.38.1: nota per eos dies Iunii Blaesi mors et famosa fuit).
Out of prava aemulatio, “perverted rivalry,” says Tacitus, Lucius Vitellius, the
emperor’s brother, accused Blaesus of constituting a greater threat to Vitellius than
his challenger Vespasian (3.38.2). The latter was far away; Blaesus, here in Rome:
“[Vitellius] should beware an enemy in the city, within his embrace . . . , who with his
imperial stock was parading affable and splendid before the soldiers” (3.38.3: in urbe
ac sinu cavendum hostem . . . , qui se stirpe imperatoria comem ac magnificum militibus
ostentet). The intimate setting of the accusation is stressed—“he opens the emperor’s
bedroom door, clasping [Vitellius’] son to his chest and falling at his knees” (3.38.2:
cubiculum imperatoris reserat, filium eius sinu complexus et genibus accidens)—and
the execution of Blaesus follows forthwith (3.39.1). According to Tacitus, however,
Blaesus had done nothing more than attend a party when the emperor was indis-
posed (3.38.1). The allegation of mounting a military challenge to Vitellius—that is,
of restarting the civil wars of 69—came in the first instance from the sort of men
“who spy out rulers’ affronts” (3.38.2: qui principum offensas . . . speculantur); in their
perverted rivalry for influence at court, such men were prompt with “services” like
warning a paranoid ruler against nonexistent dangers, like Blaesus. In Tacitus’ anal-
ysis, however, as we will see, the real danger to Blaesus and his like is an intestinum
scelus, an “inward crime,” that the res publica needs to be warned against.
2. Tiberius
Tacitus’ Tiberius, like his real-world model, does not want to hear about civil war.5
But the subject was unavoidable. In the Tiberian books civil war is most often
evoked in attacks on people who have associated themselves with civil war exempla
in one way or another. Cremutius Cordus, for example, with his annales publishing
praise of Brutus and declaring Cassius last of the Romans (Ann. 4.34.1). The charges
against Cordus, while clearly malicious in intent (4.34.1), are not, in Tacitus’ view,
without merit: Cordus’ writings were dangerous.6 Another civil war threat in the
Tiberian books was Gnaeus Piso (2.76.3, 2.81.1). Though ultimately abortive, the
civil war he started in Syria had precedent in his father’s partisan attachment—
mentioned by Tacitus when Piso is first appointed to Syria (2.43.2)—to Pompey
against Caesar and later to Brutus and Cassius against Caesar’s heir. The civil wars
of the 50s and 40s were followed by the conflict between Antony and Octavian in
the 30s, duly evoked in Tacitus’ report of Germanicus’ visit to the Actium camp of
his grandfather Antony (2.53.2). Cordus, Piso, Germanicus: each man in his way
constituted a real threat to Tiberius and the pax Augusta.
264 afterlife
However, alongside these substantive evocations of civil war, the Tiberian

books contain one character who reads a future civil war, gratuitously and self-
servingly, into the behavior of his enemies in order to poison Tiberius’ mind
against them. I refer, of course, to Sejanus, who in 23 ce encouraged Livia and
Livilla to accuse the elder Agrippina of being hungry for power and counting on
popular support (4.12.3), and who himself argues that a New Year’s Day demon-
stration of support for Agrippina’s older sons is tantamount to civil war (4.17.3: ut
civili bello). Sejanus had been making similar arguments since 17 ce, when he
insisted that Agrippina’s attentions to her husband’s troops were dangerous: “those
attentions were not straightforward, nor was the soldiers’ favor sought for facing
external foes” (1.69.3–4: non . . . simplices eas curas, nec adversus externos <studia>
militum quaeri). In 23, Sejanus prescribed in general terms the treatment so often
applied by Nero later, namely, preemptive execution: “and the sole remedy for
growing discord was if one or another of the most forward be brought down”
(4.17.3: neque aliud gliscentis discordiae remedium quam si unus alterve maxime
prompti subverterentur). Attacks against two of the “most forward” duly follow
(4.18.1). With respect to Sejanus’ principal targets, however, Agrippina and her
older sons (on whom Sejanus keeps up the attack after he gets Tiberius seques-
tered on Capri in 4.67.4), Tiberius is his usual evasive self.7 Though presumably
worried about the possibility of civil war between those loyal to him and those
loyal to (the memory of) Germanicus, he attacks young Nero and Agrippina on
different grounds entirely (5.3.2):
non arma, non rerum novarum studium, amores iuvenum et

impudicitiam nepoti obiectabat. in nurum ne id quidem confingere
ausus, adrogantiam oris et contumacem animum incusavit.
Not arms, not revolutionary zeal, but youthful love affairs and lack of
chastity were his criticisms of his grandson. Against his daughter-in-
law—courage failing him to fabricate even this—his complaint was of
arrogant demeanor and defiant spirit.
If there was any truth to Sejanus’ “civil war” alarm, Tiberius did not acknowledge it
here or later when Germanicus’ second son, Drusus, was eliminated (6.23–24).8
Instead of the quick-acting and savage blade wielded by Nero, Otho, and Vitellius,
Tiberius’ weapon of choice is mud (cf. 5.5: repetitis adversum nepotem et nurum
probris; “with a reiteration of the shameful charges against grandson and
daughter-in-law”; 6.24.1: invectus in defunctum probra corporis; “ railing at the dead
man for his shameful acts”).
Under Tiberius, then, according to Tacitus, the threat of civil war was still real,
but Tiberius managed it successfully and no serious conflicts arose. Preemptive
execution was called for by Sejanus, without justification but also without immediate
effect, Tiberius being wilier than his wily minister. However, the workings of a dan-
gerous mechanism have been exposed.9
3. Claudius
Sejanus’ attack via an analogy for a state with divided loyalties—ut civili bello, “as in
civil war”—becomes a more direct charge of res novae, “revolution,” in Tacitus’ sur-
viving Claudian books.10 In Annals 11 and 12 there are two relevant episodes, one
connected with each of Claudius’ imperial consorts, plus a cautionary tale from
Parthia.11
Book 11 as we have it opens with Messalina’s attack on Valerius Asiaticus for
reasons entirely (according to Tacitus) personal: sexual jealousy and greed (11.1.1).
She is abetted by her son’s tutor, Sosibius, who suggests to Claudius, “with a show
of goodwill” (11.1.1: per speciem benevolentiae), that Asiaticus is a political threat: he
boasted publicly, says Sosibius, of involvement in the murder of Caligula and is
famous in the city on that account, while in the provinces he is rumored to be
planning to approach the armies of Germany, where the Vienne-born two-time
consul will find it easy to rouse the locals (11.1.2). Claudius responds “as if to quash
a war” (tamquam opprimendo bello).
As in Sejanus’ machinations under Tiberius, charging Asiaticus with planning
for armed rebellion seems gratuitous; there is no warrant for it in anything Tacitus
says about the man (11.1–2, 13.43.2). Even the charge’s historicity is suspect, since
Sosibius’ “well-intentioned” and presumably private conversation with Claudius is
unlikely to have been transmitted in the historical record. Self-serving motives,
intimate setting, gratuitous charge, paranoid ruler, preemptive violence: the pattern
will repeat.
Agrippina’s evocation of civil discord has equally bloody consequences, if less
distinguished victims, at least in the first instance. Her private complaint to Claudius
about the disrespect shown by Britannicus to his older “brother” Nero—“discord’s
beginning,” she says (12.41.3: discordiae initium)—leads Claudius to remove by exile
or death men Tacitus labels the best of Britannicus’ teachers, whose pravitas, “per-
versity” (her word), Agrippina describes (12.41.3) as “about to burst forth into public
ruin” (ereptura in publicam perniciem).
Public ruin is precisely what erupts from fraternal discord in a Parthian epi-
sode sketched earlier, where Gotarzes’ murder of his brother and his brother’s
family causes others who feel threatened to back a rival ruler. In the resulting strife,
according to the report that reached Rome, Parthia’s empire is tottering (11.8.2–4,
esp.: summa . . . imperii ambigua).
266 afterlife
Even in their fragmentary state, Tacitus’ Claudian books suggest a contrast bet-
ween Tiberius and Claudius in their response to unfounded evocations of civil war,
the former translating a military alarm (ut civili bello) into a matter of personal
morality, the latter giving to a matter of personal pique a military response
(tamquam opprimendo bello). The Claudian books also prepare the way for the
Neronian by foregrounding discord between Britannicus and Nero.
In the event, however, the brotherly rivalry warned against by Agrippina plays
out in surprisingly muted tones: no state insecurity, no public ruin. When Claudius
dies, for example, some of his soldiers, wondering whether they might have to
choose between Nero and Britannicus, find no alternative to Nero on offer (12.69.1).
Similarly, public reaction to Britannicus’ murder seems to be acceptance of the
inevitable: “discord between brothers was an ancient matter, and rule was not to be
shared” (13.17.1: antiquas fratrum discordias et insociabile regnum; cf. 4.60.3: solita
fratribus odia; “the customary enmity between brothers”). In fact, the brother versus
brother pattern of civil war so dominant in Roman history heretofore seems to
peter out at this point. It is perhaps no coincidence that Tacitus closes book 13 with
the death of the ficus Ruminalis, the tree that 830 years earlier sheltered the infancy
of Romulus and Remus (13.58). This, he says, was considered a prodigy until it
revived with new shoots. But the new shoots of civil war in the remaining books of
the Annals are distinctly unfraternal.
4. Nero
The first Neronian instance of civil war charges used to remove a rival backfires. In
55 ce, Junia Silana, who was angry at the younger Agrippina for interfering with a
prospective marriage, gets two of her dependents to whisper to a freedman of Nero’s
aunt Domitia—also anti-Agrippina—that Agrippina was planning to marry
Rubellius Plautus and to instigate him to revolt (13.19.3: ad res novas). Domitia’s
freedman transmits the accusations to the actor Paris, who passes them on late at
night to a Nero far gone in wine. The praetorian prefect Afranius Burrus, however,
persuades the panic-stricken emperor to investigate before killing anyone (13.20.3),
and his mother makes a stirring and successful rebuttal to the charges against her,
among other arguments challenging her accusers to produce evidence of her hav-
ing suborned troops (13.21.4). Accordingly, instead of revenging herself, Silana ends
up exiled (13.22.2). But the pattern set earlier is again visible: personal vendetta and
whispers, empty charges, paranoid ruler; the only difference is that violence is
averted here by recourse to reality.
The wisdom of investigating such charges is eventually forgotten. Rubellius
Plautus remained a source of anxiety, as did Cornelius Sulla, who also had been
named in 55 ce in connection with a nonexistent conspiracy that identified him as

a possible replacement for Nero (13.23). In his account of 62 ce, Tacitus gives a
three-chapter episode on the preemptive executions of Plautus and Sulla, which are
engineered by the new praetorian prefect Ofonius Tigellinus. Tacitus prefaces the
panel with a statement of Tigellinus’ strategy: “he was ferreting out Nero’s fears”
(14.57.1: metus eius rimatur).12 Specifically, fears of men with famous names and
proximity to powerful armies. Tigellinus’ whispering goes on for most of a para-
graph (14.57.1–3). As a piece of political analysis it is nonsense: Sulla and Plautus are
off in Marseilles and Asia Minor, respectively (14.57.2, 14.23.2), hardly in contact
with the armies of Germany or Syria, and Sulla is said to be a threat because he is
poor and makes a show of segnitia, “indolence”; Plautus, because he is rich and
openly arrogant. The weakness of the case against them highlights the injustice of
their murders and the affront of Nero’s announcement of the murders in the senate
in order to receive supplicationes, “votes of thanksgiving.” By eliminating them,
Tacitus’ Nero claims, he has demonstrated his concern for keeping the state whole
(14.59.4: sibi incolumitatem rei publicae magna cura haberi). But has he?
Tacitus includes in the narrative here two allusions to the idea that the preemp-
tive killing of eminent men on the grounds that they might start a civil war may be
a self-fulfilling prophecy, even though it does not play out as such in the immediate
situation. First, the rumor that Rubellius Plautus (who was in fact lying low, at Nero’s
request: 14.23.2) had joined forces with Corbulo, the commander of a large army in
Syria, who would himself be at risk “if eminent and innocent men were being killed”
(14.58.2: clari atque insontes si interficerentur). Second, and more direct: Plautus’
father-in-law, Antistius Vetus, dispatched a freedman to Plautus with the news of the
coming execution order and a lengthy exhortation to fight back: if Plautus can just
overcome the sixty soldiers that Nero has sent to kill him, advises Vetus, he will gain
time, and many things can happen, things “that might strengthen even into war”
(14.58.4: quae adusque bellum evalescerent).13 Plautus, perhaps thinking of his family
(14.59.1), does not resist, nor does Sulla, and no civil war ensues.
In insisting that he has the incolumitas of the res publica as a great concern (see
above), Nero draws upon the familiar metaphor of Rome as a “body politic,” a met-
aphor that brings with it a consciousness of the state’s vulnerability.14 And the kinds
of consequences that are hinted at or alluded to figuratively in the Plautus/Sulla
episode will become increasingly real as the narrative proceeds.
The next victim of spurious civil war charges is Nero’s wife, Octavia, who is elim-
inated later in 62, when Poppaea—like Tigellinus trying to secure her claim to Nero’s
affection by acting on his fears and stimulating his wrath15—connects her with res
novae. On her knees in front of Nero, Poppaea insists that she is not there to argue
about who is to be Nero’s wife, but to plead for her life, threatened as it is by Octavia’s
supporters, who have shown themselves bolder than one might expect even if they
268 afterlife
were engaged in a seditious war (14.61.2). Which is precisely, she continues, what they
are preparing: “Those weapons were lifted against the emperor! Only a leader was
lacking, easily found once things were in motion” (14.61.3: arma illa adversus princi-
pem sumpta; ducem tantum defuisse, qui motis rebus facile reperiretur). Nero promptly
adopts Poppaea’s res novae line in plotting Octavia’s removal: he looks for an “associate”
for her who can plausibly confess to aiming at “revolution” (14.62.1: rerum . . . novarum).
And finds one: she seduced the fleet commander Anicetus, Nero says in an edict
announcing her exile, “to aspire to an alliance for the fleet” (14.63.1: in spem sociandae
classis). Octavia’s death follows her exile in short order.
Book 14 ends a few chapters further on with an explicit assertion on Tacitus’
part of the connection between an aristocrat’s fear of Nero and an undertaking to
overthrow him: an unsuccessful accusation against Seneca brings one Gaius Piso
into uncomfortable prominence, “whence fear for Piso, and the origin of a plot
against Nero, vast in size and unavailing (14.65.2: unde Pisoni timor, et orta insid-
iarum in Neronem magna moles et improspera). This is the first occasion in Tacitus’
narrative on which the dangerous consequences of the threat of arbitrary execution
become real—Tacitus insists on the historicity of the Pisonian conspiracy (15.73.2).
The conspiracy itself was, as Tacitus says in introducing it, “unavailing”; investiga-
tion was thorough, retribution bloody, Tacitus’ narrative full (15.48–74). But the
now evident danger of real res novae did not prevent Nero’s “friends” or indeed
Nero himself from using false civil war charges for their own ends.
Annals 16, which contains a particularly graphic episode of violent resistance
on the part of a victim of preemptive execution, brings us nearly to the end of the
story. Charges of incipient civil war once again prepare the way: Nero bars one
Gaius Cassius from attending Poppaea’s funeral in 65 and soon connects one Lucius
Silanus to the disgraced Cassius. There follows a speech to the senate accusing
Cassius of having an imago of the tyrannicide Cassius among his ancestral busts,
evidence of seditious intent: “seeds of civil war and defection from the house of the
Caesars were obviously his aim!” (16.7.2: quippe semina belli civilis et defectionem a
domo Caesarum quaesitam). As for Silanus, he boasts noble birth and a haughty
character and is thus a suitable adjutant for novae res, says Nero (16.7.2). Exiled
thereupon by their senatorial peers, Cassius awaits death on an island, but Silanus
fights back. Literally. When a centurion arrives with the invitation to open his veins,
Silanus says he won’t deny his assassin the glory of his task and resists, bare hands
against drawn blade, until he succumbs to frontal wounds, “as in battle” (16.9.2:
tamquam in pugna).16 War was being forced upon him as it would eventually be
forced upon the entire Roman world.17
The most famous victim of an unwarranted civil war charge is of course
Thrasea Paetus, a victim of Cossutianus Capito, worthy son-in-law to Tigellinus.
The real problem, as Tacitus’ account makes abundantly clear, is that Thrasea has
opted out of his senatorial responsibilities. As Capito puts it in a stunningly clever,

if hateful, conversation with Nero, “the report of state business is now read with
unusual care . . . to know what Thrasea has not done” (16.22.3: diurna populi
Romani . . . curatius leguntur, ut noscatur, quid Thrasea non fecerit). And this is tan-
tamount to secession, to faction, and, indeed, if followers be found, to war (16.22.2:
secessionem id et partes et, si idem multi audeant, bellum esse). Thrasea, says Capito,
is Cato to Nero’s Caesar in the talk of the town. The recent removal of a Cassius (see
above) will have accomplished nothing, he argues, if Nero permits men emulous of
Brutuses to flourish (16.22.5).18 Capito, like Poppaea and Tigellinus before him,
knows how to play on the Tacitean Nero’s fears. The order to die follows this little
chat, and another man clarus et insons, “eminent and innocent,” meets his end.
My last Tacitean example of civil war charges used preemptively to eliminate
nonexistent threats is brief but supplies my title. Barea Soranus is joined to Thrasea
Paetus in Tacitus’ memorable formulation “Nero aspired to excise virtue itself with
the murder of Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus” (16.21.1: Nero virtutem ipsam
exscindere concupivit interfecto Thrasea Paeto et Barea Sorano). Against Soranus,
who was governor of Syria in 66, as against Paetus, civil war charges are advanced:
friendship with Rubellius Plautus and “seeking to recruit his province for revolu-
tionary hopes” (16.23.1: ambitio conciliandae provinciae ad spes novas). But Plautus
was now four years dead, and “recruiting the province” is the accusers’ negative spin
on the judicious and energetic provincial administration sketched by Tacitus at
16.23.1.19 The guilty verdict was carefully timed, says Tacitus, to coincide with the
arrival of Tiridates of Armenia for his coronation. For one of two reasons, both bad
(16.23.2). Second reason first: perhaps Nero wanted to demonstrate a regal action
(regio facinore) to his royal visitor. Or, first reason second, so that public attention
to external affairs might overshadow this intestinum scelus, “inward crime.”
In the surviving books of Tacitus’ account of Nero’s reign, then, which cover the
years 54–66 ce, the execution mechanism functions increasingly smoothly. Not all
executions are motivated by the threat of civil war, of course (Agrippina’s execution,
for example, which introduces book 14, is ascribed to Nero’s impatience with her
controlling hand), but those that are so motivated derive an ironic edge from the
events of 69. The threat, however remote, of civil war was fearful, but (as Livy says in
a not unrelated context) the treatment was as intolerable as the disease (praef. 9).
5. Conclusion
The question I cannot quite answer for myself is whether the scelus alluded to at
16.23.2 is the crime of res novae falsely imputed to Soranus or the crime of murder
actually committed by the emperor. Parallels for both usages abound, since scelus is
270 afterlife
everywhere in Tacitus (nearly two hundred times).20 But intestinum is used by him
only here, and it brings with it the notion of self-inflicted harm discussed earlier.
Whichever meaning Tacitus intended—or perhaps he intended both21—intestinum
scelus neatly captures the idea that a ruler who appropriates the community’s
harvest of civil war woe to eliminate his rivals does not really care about the whole-
ness of the res publica but rather is tearing at Rome’s vitals again. The Romulus /
Remus paradigm, our two-headed state, needs to give place to something grimmer.
Erysichthon, perhaps, as pictured by Ovid: “tearing at his own limbs, he began to
rip them apart with his teeth; the unhappy man by diminishing his body gave it
nourishment” (Met. 8.877–78: ipse suos artus lacerans divellere morsu / coepit, et infe-
lix minuendo corpus alebat).22 The consumption metaphor comes easily to mind for
Nero, anyway. Indeed one might say that Tacitus’ Nero performs a twisted improvi-
sation on the role offered him by Seneca in the de Clementia when he substitutes
“emperor” for “belly” in Menenius Agrippa’s parable of the body politic and
describes the emperor as “he who nourishes every part of the res publica as a part of
himself ” (Clem. 1.13.4: is . . . qui . . . nullam non rei publicae partem tamquam sui
nutrit; cf. 1.3.5, 2.2.1).23 The long year of civil war is just offstage.24
notes
1. Galba was consul under Tiberius, governor of upper Germany under Gaius,
governor of Africa under Claudius. For his policy of inaction, see Suet. Galba 7.1: quietem,
“quietude”; 8.1: secessu, “retirement”; 9: desidiam segnitiamque, “sloth and indolence”; and
Plut. Galba 6.4: sóm rtmñhg ja≠ r msqofiom pqaclor mgm; “his customary and innate
disengagement.” Tacitus deemed it real indolence under a pretense of policy (H. 1.49.3).
2. In Plutarch’s version this is less explicit: Nero is simply Galba’s “enemy” (Galba 4.4:
évhqo‹).
3. For Agrippina’s preemptive removal of threats see, e.g., Ann. 12.64–65 (Domitia
Lepida), 12.67–68 (Claudius), 13.1.1 (Marcus Junius Silanus). For Seneca’s advice on the
merciful treatment of those who threaten an emperor’s security see, e.g., Clem. 1.9–10. But
see also section 5 below.
4. See Keitel 1984 for an important discussion of Tacitus’ presentation of the
principate as waging war on the res publica. Keitel focuses on outcomes, which are depicted
in accordance with the urbs capta trope; I focus on causes.
5. See Gowing in this volume.
6. See Martin and Woodman 1989 ad loc.
7. Conversely, apropos of the charges of res novae brought against Vibius Serenus by
his son (4.28.2–3), where Tiberius is not worried about the political situation but is hostile
to the defendant owing to an unrelated incident, he let the charges stand (4.29.2–3).
8. See Gowing p. 256 in this volume for the credit given to (and claimed by) Tiberius
for keeping the Roman world free of civil war, a virtue monumentalized in the Temple of
Concord.
9. In addition to the passages discussed above, where civil war is explicitly evoked by
exempla of past wars or by the term bellum civile, Tacitus also gives notice of revolutionary
threats that are suppressed before they result in war: at 5.8.1, where Publius Vitellius is on
trial for having used the military treasury to finance res novae; at 5.10.2, where a false
Drusus is believed to be planning an approach to his father’s (Germanicus’) troops or an
invasion of Italy; at 6.6.3, where Gallio is accused of sowing sedition and discord by his
flattering attentions to the soldiers.
10. In the passages considered below, res novae, “revolution,” always brings with it the
threat of civil war, since part of the charge is always tampering with the loyalty of military
units. The (false) charge of res novae advanced earlier against Libo Drusus (2.29.1: defertur
moliri res novas; “he was denounced for attempting revolution”), by contrast, was
supported only by “evidence” of his desire for well-nigh limitless wealth and by possible
death threats against members of the imperial family and some senators (2.30.2).
11. There may have been another such incident in the lost books. At 13.43.2, where the
victims of the delator Publius Suillius are listed on the occasion of Suillius’ own trial in
58 ce, Tacitus mentions that “by the intensity of [Suillius’] accusation Quintus Pomponius
was pushed toward the inevitability of civil war (acerbitate accusationis Q. Pomponium ad
necessitatem belli civilis detrusum), the relevant “civil war” probably being the conspiracy of
Annius Vinicianus in 42 ce, in which, according to Dio, Vinicianus too was motivated by
fear for his own safety (60.15.2).
12. Others before him had exploited Nero’s anxieties about these men (see on Sulla
13.47, on Plautus 14.23.2) but without raising the specter of civil strife.
13. Antistius Vetus was himself a future victim of Nero (Ann. 16.10–11).
14. The metaphor is used most memorably, perhaps, in the allegory that Livy puts in
the mouth of Menenius Agrippa on the occasion of the plebeian secession of 494, where
the body’s (plebeian) limbs protest against the freeloading (senatorial) “belly” (2.32.8–12).
Under the empire, this “body” was increasing figured with vital organs (viscera, intestina)
that proved particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted harm. Anchises’ shade, for example,
exhorts the (as yet unborn) Pompey and Caesar to refrain from “turning their powerful
forces against their country’s vitals” (Virg. A. 6.833: neu patriae validas in viscera vertite
vires). The causes of such harm differ, but the metaphor persists: intestina seditio for the
above-mentioned secession (Liv. 2.32.12), intestina bella for the civil wars of Catiline’s youth
(Sal. Cat. 5.2), intestinum malum for the practice of delation (Plin. Pan. 34), and so on.
Applied to civil war, the conceit gains color from the conjunction of metaphorical and
actual carnage; for Lucan’s viscera, for example, see Fantham p. 207–8 in this volume.
Tacitus uses this image in the opening scenes of the Annals: “the body of the res publica is
single and requires rule by one man’s mind (1.12.3: unum esse rei publicae corpus atque unius
animo regendum). The words are attributed to a troublemaker, Asinius Gallio (cf. 1.12.3:
civilia agitaret), deemed greedy for rule himself (1.13.2).
15. Cf. what Tacitus says about Poppaea’s conversations with Nero: “words mixed to
suit fear and anger simultaneously terrified her listener and incited him” (14.62.1: varius
sermo et ad metum atque iram adcommodatus terruit simul audientem et accendit).
16. The violence of Lucius Silanus’ death stands out the more vividly against the
background of the suicide of his uncle Decimus Junius Silanus Torquatus, against whom
Nero unleashed accusers in 64 ce. A lavish spender, they said, he had no future except in res
272 afterlife
novae (15.35.2). Torquatus opened his veins without rejoinder, practical or verbal (15.35.3).
In a rather obscure passage at 16.16 Tacitus seems to criticize such spineless deaths.
17. At 15.68–69, for example, Tacitus describes Nero’s unprovoked attack on the consul
Vestinus as a military campaign: “Nero’s orders were to anticipate the consul’s moves, to
seize his citadel, so to speak, and to crush his band of picked men.” The “citadel” in
question is Vestinus’ house in Rome; the “picked men,” his household slaves.
18. Capito also mentions Marcus Favonius, a would-be Cato and die-hard Pompeian
in the 40s bce.
19. According to Dio, by contrast, Soranus was charged with magic, not rebellion
(62.26.3 „| ja≠ lace lasi simi di s| htcasqø| jevqglåmo|). Dio also omits the
connection between Tiridates’ visit and the attack on Soranus.
20. Scelus is used of revolutionary coups at Hist. 1.5.1, 1.23.1, 1.42 and at Ann. 14.10.3,
etc., and is used of emperor-ordered murder at Ann. 14.1.1, 15.35.1, 15.61.4, etc.
21. On the possibility of scelus having more than one referent, cf. Ann. 11.34.1, where
Vitellius (father of the future emperor) keeps saying o facinus, o scelus, but his hearers
cannot tell whether he is blaming Messalina (for marrying Silius) or Narcissus (for killing
Messalina).
22. Credit for this apt paradigm goes to R. J. Tarrant. The title of the conference from
which this volume arose—“See How I Rip Myself ”—came from Dante’s picture of the
pocket of hell reserved for “sowers of scandal and schism”: Or vedi com’ io mi dilacco! (Inf.
28.30).
23. Dio in fact labels Seneca a “tyrant trainer” (61.10.2: stqammodidrjako|).
24. The famous description of 69 as “that long and single year under Galba and Otho
and Vitellius” (Tac. Dial. 17.2: illum Galbae et Othonis et Vitellii longum et unum annum)
comes from Marcus Aper’s discussion of Rome’s “ancient orators,” which opens with a
reference to Menenius Agrippa (Dial. 17.1).
17
Doing the Numbers: The
Roman Mathematics of
Civil War in Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
Denis Feeney
The starting-point for this essay is the idea that Shakespeare’s extraor-
dinary political and historical intelligence is given a new kind of field of
operations in Antony and Cleopatra. From this perspective, my argument
is essentially a footnote to Paul Cantor’s great book Shakespeare’s Rome:
Republic and Empire (1976), which presents a diptych of two Roman
plays written back to back in 1606–1608, first, Antony and Cleopatra,
followed immediately by Coriolanus. As Cantor (1976: 10) says, “The
more one reads about Rome, the more one is impressed by Shakespeare’s
grasp of the essential nature of the Roman regime and the central issues
involved in Roman history.” Cantor uses these two plays as his test case,
one set in the Early Republic, the other set in the period of the triumvi-
rate, as the empire starts to emerge from the wreckage of the republic in
the last act of the long civil wars. My aim is to bring out the power of
Shakespeare’s intuitions about the nature of the transition from republic
to empire and especially to demonstrate how systematically he repre-
sents the nature of this transition through highly developed
mathematical models that have their inspiration in the Roman mathe-
matics of civil war.
The theme I am interested in is sounded as soon as the play opens,
when Antony is described by the onlooker, Philo, as “the triple pillar of the
world,” that is, as one of the triumvirate along with Caesar and Lepidus,
one of the three pillars holding up the world (I.i.11–13):1
274 afterlife
Take but good note, and you shall see in him

The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see.
We are then deflected somewhat and straightaway introduced to a different kind of

counting, a more romantic kind, as Antony and Cleopatra enter, and their very first
exchange of words is about the reckoning and counting of love (I.i.14–15):
cleopatra If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
antony There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.
Any Latinist reading these lines is bound to think immediately of Cleopatra as

Lesbia and Antony as Catullus, from the Catullan kiss poems (5 and 7).2 At the
beginning of poem 7, Lesbia is represented as asking for the total of Catullus’
hundreds and thousands of kisses (incidentally showing what a bad reader of
poem 5 she is, since poem 5 had ended with Catullus saying how important it was
not to know the total); Catullus then goes on to repeat, more obliquely, what he
has already said in poem 5, that you cannot count the kisses he wants to exchange
with Lesbia. I am a little dashed to read what T.W. Baldwin has to say about
Shakespeare’s familiarity with Catullus in his still-authoritative Small Latine and
Lesse Greeke (1944, 2:551): “I know of but one really close parallel to Catullus in
Shakspere”—and this is not it.3 But I am comforted by the way that this Catullan
atmosphere of the lovers’ very first conversation is recalled in their very last
conversation, as the dying Antony speaks to his Queen from the base of her
monument (IV.xv.19–22):
I am dying, Egypt, dying. Only

I here importune death awhile until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
But the counting that really counts in the end in this play is not tallying love, or
counting down to the last of many thousand kisses, but counting down to one, and
naught, and here we return to the dominant theme introduced by the crucial
number “three” that opens the play, with Antony being described as “the triple pil-
lar of the world.” The number three will obviously be a crucial number in a play set
in the triumviral period, and reference to the triple division occurs frequently.
During their first meeting, Antony says to Caesar: “The third o’th’ world is yours”
(II.ii.68); Menas reminds Sextus Pompey during the banquet celebrating the treaty
of Misenum that “These three world-sharers, these competitors, / Are in thy vessel”
(II.vii.71–72); later during the banquet, Menas and Enobarbus joke on this score as
the drunken Lepidus is carried off the boat (II.vii.89–93):
roman mathematics of civil war in antony and cleopatra 275
enobarbus [Points to the attendant who carries off Lepidus]

There’s a strong fellow, Menas.
menas Why?
enobarbus ’A bears the third part of the world, man. Seest not?
menas The third part then is drunk. Would it were all,
That it might go on wheels!
For all its importance, however, the number three is only a staging post on a road
that takes us from the Many of the Republic to the One of the Empire. The shrinking
of numbers from many to one is a familiar Roman civil war theme, and the best
place to start reading about it is in the first chapter of Philip Hardie’s The epic suc-
cessors of Virgil, where there is an important section entitled “The One and the
Many” (1993b: 3–10). It may seem obvious that anyone looking at Roman civil war
will think in these terms of numerical shrinkage, but this is not at all the case.
Shakespeare’s main source, Plutarch, for example, does not represent the period in
these terms. Yet to Shakespeare it is fundamental to his conception of the issues that
the Romans are leaving behind a plural collective on their haphazard way toward a
unitary destiny under the rule of one. Immediately after Antony and Cleopatra he
would go on and explore in detail what this plural collective was like in Coriolanus,
as Cantor 1976 has shown, but the transition from the many to the one is a theme
that had already resonated powerfully in Julius Caesar, six or seven years before
Antony and Cleopatra. In a key speech, Cassius expresses outrage that Rome, once a
group of families (“a breed of noble bloods”), has degenerated to the point where it
contains “but one only man” (I.ii.151–57):
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!

When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam’d with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
Note the crucial reference that Sextus Pompey makes back to these lines in our play
(II.vi.15–19):
And what
Made the all-honour’d, honest Roman, Brutus,
With the arm’d rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom,
To drench the Capitol, but that they would
Have one man but a man?
276 afterlife
The main trajectory of Antony and Cleopatra acts out the progressive shrinkage of
the crucial numbers, as we shall see, with one figure after another dropping out
until Caesar becomes the One and Antony is reduced to Naught.
Shakespeare’s whole conception of the shape and structure of his play is dom-
inated by the need to make space for this theme to work itself out. Emrys Jones
very importantly stresses how unique Shakespeare is in choosing to start the action
of the play well before the denouement. Other early modern dramatists treating
the story of Antony and Cleopatra, “Giraldi [c.1540], Garnier [1578], Daniel [1594],
or (after Shakespeare) Dryden [1677], cut it down to neo-classical size by opening
the play shortly before the end: their last day alive is all that we see of the two main
characters; the rest is relegated to retrospective narration. Only Shakespeare,
apparently, opens his play well before the closing stages, and he is the only one to
give any sense of the story as told by Plutarch, with its long time perspectives and
all its rich, endlessly qualifying detail” (Jones 1971: 226). Shakespeare begins his
play in 40 bce, years before events reduce the numbers game to a binary polarity
between Caesar and Antony. This theme of a twofold division, with all its concom-
itant themes of Girardian duality, is likewise very familiar to us from Roman con-
texts, and the best place to start reading about it is likewise in the first chapter of
Hardie’s The epic successors of Virgil, where there is an important section entitled
“One and Two” (1993b: 10–11).4 The theme of binary dualism is very important to
Shakespeare also, as we shall see, but the dualism between Caesar and Antony only
starts developing in the second half of the play. By starting far back in the early
period of the triumvirate, Shakespeare gives himself the room to deploy the
momentum in diminution that interests him. In particular, he is able to use the
major minor figures, if I may so call them, of Sextus Pompey and Lepidus in order
to keep the numbers game going, to maintain the sensation that more numbers are
in play than only two, or one.
When Antony tells Cleopatra that he must leave to restore the situation in Italy,
he tells her of the power of Sextus Pompey, represented as equal to that of Caesar
there (I.iii.45–49):
Our Italy
Shines o’er with civil swords; Sextus Pompeius
Makes his approaches to the port of Rome;
Equality of two domestic powers
Breed scrupulous faction.
The phrase “equality of two domestic powers / Breed scrupulous faction” is a hard
one, glossed by John Wilders (1995: 111) as the “equal balance between two powers
within the same country . . . creates factions which disagree over small details.” “The
equal balance between two powers within the same country,” then, refers to the
balance in Italy between Sextus and Caesar. The conception of Sextus as a key extra
number in addition to the Three is reinforced in the opening scene of act 2, where
Sextus Pompey tells Menas that their faction stands up against the triumvirate, and
keeps them from falling out among themselves (II.i.45–46):
Were’t not that we stand up against them all,

’Twere pregnant they should square between themselves.
In act 3, after negotiations between Sextus Pompey and the triumvirate, Enobarbus
speaks of the players as Sextus, plus the other three (III.ii.2–3):
They have dispatched with Pompey; he is gone.

The other three are sealing.
It is only when Lepidus and Sextus have been taken out of the picture that the
options are reduced to two. In fact, Lepidus’ ouster in Sicily by Caesar preceded
Sextus’ murder in Asia by almost a year, but Shakespeare collapses their fates into
one time frame. In the major scene of conversation between Enobarbus and Eros in
scene 5 of act 3, Shakespeare registers the fates of Lepidus and Pompey, showing
how their removal means that there are now only two left, “a pair of chaps”
(III.v.4–19):
eros Caesar and Lepidus have made wars upon Pompey.

enobarbus This is old. What is the success?
eros Caesar, having made use of him in the wars ’gainst Pompey, presently
denied him rivality; would not let him partake in the glory of the action, and, not
resting here, accuses him of letters he had formerly wrote to Pompey; upon his own
appeal, seizes him. So the poor third is up, till death enlarge his confine.
enobarbus Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more,
And throw between them all the food thou hast,
They’ll grind the one the other. Where’s Antony?
eros He’s walking in the garden, thus, and spurns
The rush that lies before him; cries, “Fool Lepidus!”
And threats the throat of that his officer
That murdered Pompey.
The interest in the arithmetic power of the progression is intense, so that Eros uses
mathematical language in talking of Lepidus. In Eros’s second quoted speech,
Lepidus is “the poor third.” This means not just “poor old Lepidus,” but “poor” in
the sense of OED s.v. 4.b: “Depreciatively, with a numeral, denoting the smallness
of the number or sum”—in other words, “the scant third.”
278 afterlife
This theme of dwindling numbers, especially from many to three to two to

one, is a theme particularly identified with Lucan (Hardie 1993b: 5–7; Bartsch 1997:
58–59), and one’s first thought might be that Shakespeare got it from him. There is
considerable debate among Shakespeare scholars over how much Shakespeare knew
or used Lucan, with Jones at the far positive end of the scale and George Logan at
the far negative end.5 Shakespeare’s deployment of this theme does not strike me as
particularly Lucanesque, and a major reason for this is probably the lack of a trans-
lation of Lucan for Shakespeare to use. I do not wish to get bogged down in the
question of how “small” Shakespeare’s “Latine” really was, and I am not claiming
that he could not have read extensively in Lucan if he had wanted to.6 But there is
no denying that Shakespeare was most intimately acquainted with those classical
texts that had a translation of real literary power for him to work with—North’s
Plutarch and Golding’s Ovid, most obviously. The main explanation for his com-
parative lack of interest in Virgil, for example, lies in the fact that there was as yet no
genuinely “compelling” translation in English for him to engage with, as Charles
Martindale has shown.7 It is easy for modern classics scholars to lose perspective on
this point, but if we are honest with ourselves we realize that we are often not so
very different, as we move through a text in translation until we meet a passage that
particularly catches our attention, at which point we go over to the left-hand page.8
In the case of Lucan, Marlowe had translated book 1 in 1593, and it was properly
published in 1600, so it is surely no accident that the great majority of the Lucanesque
pieces of Shakespeare that are usually cited come from book 1;9 but there was no
complete English version until Gorges’s in 1614, and Thomas May’s version of 1626
was the first genuinely successful Englishing of Lucan (Highet 1949: 116).
For Shakespeare’s education in the momentum of these years of Roman his-
tory, far more important than Lucan is Appian. A translation of Appian’s Civil Wars
by William Barker had appeared in 1578, translated not directly from the Greek but
from the 1554 Latin translation of Sigismund Geslen. The preface to the Civil Wars
as a whole presents the entire backdrop in a comprehensive manner that appears to
have caught Shakespeare’s attention. Particularly important are sections 5–6 of the
preface, where Appian describes how the civil war between Caesar and Antony was
the culmination of a movement from “Commonwealth” to the rule of one: “Thus
the Common welth of the Romaines, after diuerse debates, came to vnitie, and the
rule of one.”10 Another vital passage developing this theme occurs in the preface
that opens book 5, setting the scene after the battle of Philippi:
For after Cassius and Brutus, there were lyke ciuill Dissentions, but
wythoute a Generall, that commaunded all as they did, but some leading
armies here, and some there, till Sextus Pompey, the seconde son of
Pompey the Greate, being lefte of that faction, was sette up of Brutus
friends.11 Lepidus being nowe putte from his dignitie, al the authoritie
rested in Antony and Octavian, the whiche things fell out after this sorte.12
In other words, Appian sees a period of chaotic activity after Philippi involving a
number of contenders; this period lasts until the departure of Sextus Pompey and
of Lepidus clears the ground to leave only two antagonists left to fight it out over
who will be number one.13
It is striking not just that Appian shows exactly the same kind of interest in
progressive diminution that we see in Shakespeare and that we do not see in
Shakespeare’s main source, Plutarch. Even more, it is striking that Appian uses
Sextus Pompey and to a lesser extent Lepidus as his way of stressing the sporadic
and complex and shifting nature of the political scene before the final showdown
between the last two, Caesar and Antony; this emphasis on the major minor players
is, likewise, something that we do not see in Plutarch. It is well known to scholars
that Plutarch’s life of Antony has virtually no interest in Sextus Pompey at all and
very little in Lepidus, to the extent that Plutarch does not even go so far as to reg-
ister the death of Sextus or the deposition of Lepidus (Pelling 1988: 244). Appian, on
the other hand, describes the deposition of Lepidus in detail (5.123–26), and he has
a number of very substantial sections on Sextus in his fifth book;14 the surviving
portion of his Civil Wars actually ends fortuitously with the death of Sextus at the
end of book 5, so that the chance accidents of transmission have left Sextus occu-
pying the limelight of closure in Appian’s text.
As Christopher Pelling and others have shown, it was for the Sextus Pompey
material above all that Shakespeare used Appian to supplement Plutarch, since
Plutarch has virtually no material whatsoever to offer on Sextus Pompey.15
Shakespeare seems to have had his interest in Pompey, and to a lesser extent in
Lepidus, piqued by what he read in Plutarch, and he then turned to Appian when
he could not follow up these characters in Plutarch. Plutarch and almost all modern
scholars continue to see Sextus Pompey as a distraction and an irrelevance, but
Appian, and Shakespeare, and a growing band of modern historians know better. 16
As we have seen, Antony even describes Sextus as an equal with Caesar in the
struggle for Italy (I.iii.47–48), and he says to Enobarbus that Sextus “commands /
The empire of the sea” (I.ii.191–92). Although his principal source, Plutarch, says
nothing whatever about the eventual fate of Sextus, or of Lepidus, Shakespeare is
very careful to register the deposition of Lepidus and the death of Pompey in the
exchange between Enobarbus and Eros, quoted above (III.v.4–19).
Appian did not merely provide Shakespeare with information about these
easily overlooked characters; he very probably provided Shakespeare with the germ
of the larger idea that the period cannot be seen as an inexorable progress toward
the domination of Caesar or even toward a face-off between Antony and Caesar,
280 afterlife
but as a complex cluster of contingencies in which other figures have their unpre-
dictable roles.17 Shakespeare’s view of the triumviral period as one involving a
number of players and a number of possible outcomes is nowhere more clearly seen
than in his idiosyncratic treatment of the conference at Misenum in 39 bce, where
Sextus Pompey, Antony, and Caesar met. This is the one great incident involving
Sextus Pompey that Plutarch does dwell on in his life of Antony, drawn to it irresist-
ibly by the melodramatic climax to the banquet on Sextus’ galley, where Menas
offers to cut the cable and make Sextus “master not just of Sicily and Sardinia, but
of the empire of the Romans” (32.6).18 As Pelling has shown, Shakespeare seizes on
this set piece with relish, devoting scenes 5–7 of act 2 to it, with Menas asking
Pompey, “Wilt thou be lord of all the world?” (II.vii.60).19 In Shakespeare’s hands
the incident serves to accentuate the interest in the numbers game, because he is so
determined to keep the focus on plurality that he inserts Lepidus into the conference,
maintaining the interest in “three plus another” that governs the first two acts.20
Now, Lepidus was as a matter of fact not present at Misenum, for it was only Caesar
and Antony who met with Sextus there. Lepidus is not present in Plutarch (32) or
Appian (5.72–73).21 We are, of course, all grateful that Shakespeare included Lepidus
in this scene, not least because Lepidus’ helpless drunkenness at the banquet is one
of the funniest things in a very funny play.22 Yet putting Lepidus at Misenum is a
major infringement on the historical record, the biggest single “howler” in the play.
It is not quite as grave as putting Queen Margaret in Richard III’s London, when she
had returned to France in 1476 and had already died before Richard came to the
throne in 1483. Still, given Shakespeare’s usual scrupulous fidelity to Plutarch, his
innovation here is very striking, and it is remarkable that I have found no modern
commentator who mentions that Shakespeare’s sources did not have Lepidus pre-
sent at the conference.
Shakespeare has put Lepidus at Misenum despite the record for the same reason
that he has supplemented Plutarch’s overly binary focus with material from Appian
on Sextus Pompey and Lepidus: he is intent on keeping open the sense of contingent
possibility in the transition from republic to monarchy and therefore cannot resist
the opportunity to put all four of the last contenders onstage together. Again, it
seems very likely that this broader conception of a process in stages, from a large
number to a smaller number to a pair and then to the final number of one, is a con-
ception that is more indebted to Appian than to anyone else.23 Shakespeare’s reading
of this momentum in Roman history is doubtless informed, as David Quint finely
demonstrates, by his response to the rather analogous momentum in early modern
English history, chronicled in his English history plays, whereby “a strong central
monarchy” emerged dominant over a competitive and divided nobility, with their
“local prerogatives and power.”24 As a careful student of this trend in his own national
history, Shakespeare comes predisposed to his reading of Appian in this regard.
Such a view of the political momentum of the play is related to the kind of point
that scholars have made about the fractured nature of the play’s sympathies and per-
spectives. Janet Adelman (1973) in particular has written memorably on this aspect
of Antony and Cleopatra, commenting on the way that this play is very unlike the
earlier tragedies in regularly offering “perspectives which are totally unrelated to
those of the protagonists” (42) and giving us “competing visions throughout” (45; cf.
Quint 2008: xxi–iii.). She singles out the banquet on Pompey’s galley as an example,
remarking that “it is precisely in forcing us to move from one perspective to the next
abruptly and without mediation that Antony and Cleopatra achieves its most
characteristic effects” (43). She argues, quite rightly, that the effect of this is to “force
upon us an awareness of scope, of how various a place the world is” (43), but students
of Roman civil war will interpret these effects politically as well, for the impact is
exactly like the one with which we are familiar in our reading of Lucan, above all,
where we are deprived of one governing point of view, as Jamie Masters (1992: 90)
has shown: “The poem, the civil war, is and takes as its subject the internal fracturing
of authority. It is a world where what should be one is many, where the unity of the
Roman state is painfully divided, and where, until the final victory is won by one side
or the other, there will be many potential authorities each vying for supremacy.”
Once Pompey and Lepidus are gone, then the scene is set for the final show-
down between the last two standing, Caesar and Antony. Here we are greatly assisted
by Jones’s account of the structure of the play in his important study, Scenic Form
in Shakespeare. As Jones (1971: 225) points out, “There are no act-divisions in the
Folio text [of Antony and Cleopatra], and the five-act arrangement that is accepted
in all modern standard editions does little to bring out the true structural lines of
the play.”25 He argues (1971: 68–70) that many of Shakespeare’s plays are best seen as
having a structure based on two movements that are split by an interval, and his
analysis of Antony and Cleopatra along these lines is brilliantly convincing in my
view, not least because it fits with wonderful power and precision into the numerical
themes that are my main focus. Jones (1971: 229–30) identifies scene 6 of act 3 as the
end of the first half of the play. Immediately before this closing scene, in scene 5 of
act 3, we hear of the elimination of Lepidus, which reduces the triumvirate from
three men to two: “the poor third is up …; Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps,
no more” (III.v.11–13). We also hear in this penultimate scene of the elimination of
Sextus Pompey (III.v.18–19), and the erasure of Lepidus and Pompey is once again
referred to in the conversation between Caesar, Agrippa, and Maecenas in the next
scene, immediately before the interval that according to Jones closes off the first
half of the play (III.vi.24–30). From now on, then, it is all Antony and Caesar.
After the elimination of the other contenders and after the failure of the other
“unity” represented by the marriage of Octavia and Antony (II.vi.118), the second
great Roman civil war theme, that of doubleness, comes to dominate for the
282 afterlife
second half of the play, as there are only two players left.26 The Roman republic is
founded on a twinned sharing of supreme power between the two consuls, and the
civil wars see this ideal twinned harmony going rancid as one pair is pitted destruc-
tively against another (Sulla and Cinna, Caesar and Pompey, Caesar and Antony).27
Antony and Caesar become exemplars of the inveterate Roman curse that pits
brother against brother, so that civil war becomes merged with fratricide.28 Through
the marriage with Octavia, by Shakespeare’s idiom, they are brothers, and they are
twice referred to as brothers.29 As Maecenas puts it, speaking of Caesar’s reaction to
Antony’s death, they are mirrors for each other (not an image used in Roman civil
war discourse, but an amplification of the metaphors of “likeness” and “parity” that
govern so much of their civil war imagery):30 “When such a spacious mirror’s set
before him, / He needs must see himself ” (V.i.34–35). Each becomes one half of a
divided world. Antony after defeat speaks of how he was one “who / With half the
bulk o’th’ world played as I pleased” (III.xi.63–64); Enobarbus speaks of the battle
of Actium as the moment “When half to half the world opposed” (III.xiii.9); after
Antony’s death, Caesar remarks that “The death of Antony / Is not a single doom;
in the name lay / A moiety of the world” (V.i.17–19).
The end point of this rivalry between equals is Antony’s death, as Caesar
becomes “sole sir o’th’ world,” in Cleopatra’s words (V.ii.119). When Caesar says
goodbye to her with “I’ll take my leave,” she replies: “And may through all the world!
’tis yours” (V.ii.132–33). As Caesar says after Antony’s death, their equalness has now
been divided by his disappearance: at the end of his oddly (apparently) heartfelt
lament for Antony’s death, he bemoans the fact “that our stars, / Unreconciliable,
should divide / Our equalness to this” (V.i.46–48). The division of their equalness
no longer makes each of them half, as before: it has now made Caesar One; it has
made Antony Naught.
On his way to becoming the Naught to Caesar’s One, Antony of course misun-
derstands what it means for him and for Caesar to be each a half of the world.
Repeatedly he imagines that he can solve the problem of the Other by meeting him in
single combat, and he is joined in this fantasy by Cleopatra (III.vii.30; III.xiii.22–28;
IV.iv.36–37). Antony, however, does not properly understand that he and Caesar are
not individuals, but synecdochic figures, individuals who embody thousands of
others.31 Antony romanticizes and personalizes the conflict, seeing it as a clash of man
against man. The outmoded futility of such a perspective is repeatedly exposed, most
savagely in the aside uttered by Enobarbus after Antony has left the stage to write a
letter challenging Caesar to single combat (III.xiii.29–36):
Yes, like enough high-battled Caesar will

Unstate his happiness, and be staged to th’ show
Against a sworder! I see men’s judgements are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward

Do draw the inward quality after them
To suffer all alike. That he should dream,
Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will
Answer his emptiness!
Caesar, on the other hand, never loses sight of the synecdochic nature of command:
as Antony and Cleopatra indulge their fantasies of single combat, Caesar knows
that Antony is what Antony represents and vice versa.32 He expresses this most viv-
idly when he cynically orders that those who have deserted from Antony should be
put in the vanguard of the Caesarian army when it attacks Antony’s army at
Alexandria (IV.vi.9–11):
Plant those that have revolted in the van

That Antony may seem to spend his fury
Upon himself.
Eventually Antony will be Antony, just a body, but first he has finally to lose his
identity as the synecdochic Antony, that is, as someone whose name represents the
identity of the person and of power and command. See how he responds when,
back in Alexandria after defeat at Actium, he summons servants and no one instantly
appears (III.xiii.94–98):
antony [Calls for servants.]

Approach there!—Ah, you kite!—Now, gods and devils,
Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried “Ho!”,
Like boys unto a muss, kings would start forth
And cry “Your will?”
Enter servants.
Have you no ears? I am
Antony yet. Take hence the jack and whip him!
When he says “I am Antony yet,” he means, “I am still the person who can claim
command, I am still not just an individual.” Only at the moment of death is he
finally just an individual, and at that moment his sense of identity becomes fluctu-
ating and radically unanchored.
The great scene of his attempted suicide opens with Antony coming onstage
and asking a question of his attendant, “Eros, thou yet behold’st me?” (IV.xiv.1).
What is that “me”? He goes on to talk of how clouds lose their shape, so that “That
which is now a horse, even with a thought / The rack dislimns and makes it indis-
tinct / As water is in water” (IV.xiv.9–11). This prompts the guarded and cautious
response from Eros, “It does, my lord,” and Antony continues (12–14):
284 afterlife
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is

Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
The moment at which he can say “Here I am Antony,” when he is just Antony,
without metaphorical or synecdochic extension, is the moment at which he no
longer has a grasp even on his bodily boundaries.
In the same way, all his former empty metaphorical greatness becomes mere
physical heaviness at the end. Enobarbus had earlier expressed incredulity that
Antony could “dream, / Knowing all measures, the full Caesar will / Answer his
emptiness” (III.xiii.34–36). Now, dying, Antony becomes just himself, just a dead
weight, and the metaphor is unforgettably made real as the actors playing Cleopatra
and her ladies have physically to pull the substantial body of Antony up from the
stage into their tower (IV.xv.33–35):
cleopatra Here’s sport indeed! How heavy weighs my lord!

Our strength is all gone into heaviness;
That makes the weight.
The fate of Antony that I am sketching here is made concrete in the mathe-
matics of the play. If Caesar is the One left, “the sole sir o’ the world,” then Antony
must be made Naught. This is a development of the Roman numbers games, which
cannot be derived from Roman sources, and has to be a distinctively Shakespearian
and post-Roman development because only after the post-Roman adaptation of
zero is this extra flourish possible.33 The theme is first sounded in scene 3 of act 2,
the scene with the soothsayer, when Antony reflects that his luck does not hold
against Caesar: “His cocks do win the battle still of mine / When it is all to naught”
(II.iii.35–36). The momentum that will take Antony to naught begins already in
scene 5 of act 3, just before the interval hypothesized by Jones: here Enobarbus
responds to Eros’s announcement that Antony wants to see him in connection with
the start of the campaign against Caesar by saying, “ ’Twill be naught” (III.v.22). He
means, as John Wilders (1995: 186) glosses, “either ‘something worthless’ or
‘something disastrous’. ” The two meanings come together when the same Enobarbus
announces the catastrophe of the defeat at Actium five scenes later: “Naught,
naught, all naught! I can behold no longer!” (III.x.1).
The climax comes as soon as Antony dies in the arms of Cleopatra (IV.
xv.66–70):
cleopatra O withered is the garland of the war,

The soldier’s pole is fallen; young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone
And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.
With “the odds is gone,” she condenses the previous sentence (“young boys and
girls / Are level now with men”): everything is on a par, and there are no meaningful
distinctions left between great and small. Ten lines later she amplifies the conceit in
yet more hyperbolical language, concluding with the crucial word of nothingness
(IV.xv.79–82):
It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stolen our jewel. All’s but naught.
Here another doomed equality is set up, this time not between Antony and Caesar
but between humans and gods. The human world equaled the gods’ world until
Antony left it; now, with Antony gone, “All’s but naught.”
At this point Cleopatra is acceding to the numbers game, but, after all, there is
still one act, a seventh of the play’s length, to go, and as the surviving partner of
Antony she represents a major complication to the Roman men’s numbers game.34
Antony may have been reduced to “naught” in the division with Caesar’s “all,” but
Cleopatra remains onstage. Her role as queen and as Antony’s wife interferes with
the male mathematics of the Roman dynasts. All the Romans keep trying to take
her out of the equation, as when Enobarbus, in the great scene that opens the sec-
ond half of the play on Jones’s hypothesis, objects to her presence at Actium (III.
vii.1–14). In the end, in the last speech of the play, her future fame with Antony is
acknowledged by Caesar as taking both her and Antony out of the play’s diminishing
arithmetic, leaving them together in a new number, as “a pair” (V.ii.357–59):
She shall be buried by her Antony.

No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous.35
Prompted, I suggest, by Appian, to whom, as we have seen, he came as a reader

attuned by the recent momentum toward state consolidation in England,
Shakespeare would appear to have intuited in very deep ways some of the most dis-
tinctive themes of the Roman civil war mentality together with their embodiment
in mathematical form—the dwindling of numbers from many to one, the division
of the state between pairs and the resulting split mentalities. The most striking cor-
roboration of this claim is to be found by comparing his Roman civil war plays to
his English ones, which had all been written before Antony and Cleopatra. In the
286 afterlife
plays about the English civil wars I do not find the distinctively Roman frameworks
for the relationship between the one and the many, and surprisingly little even of
the binary dualism. Shakespeare tends to deploy other motifs of civil war for his
English plays: the theme from Lucan’s proem of swords turned against the owners’
own guts is common,36 as is imagery of disease and discord.37 Specifically numerical
imagery of the kind we have been examining in Antony and Cleopatra is rare and
undeveloped.38
The comparative lack of binary images is particularly striking. Considering
how tailor-made the binary divide between Lancastrians and Yorkists and their
white and red roses might appear to be for developing the language of splits into
opposing pairs, it is fascinating how little Shakespeare makes of this Roman civil
war theme. The scene of the plucking of the white and red roses in 1 Henry VI II.iv
has much discussion of duality and judgment between pairs, but in general this
framework is curiously undeveloped. The main occasion upon which we enter into
the Girardian twinning territory with which we are familiar from Roman sources,
and that is so clear in Antony and Cleopatra, is with the opposed pair of Hal and
Hotspur in 1 Henry IV.39 The sixteen-year-old Hal and the thirty-nine-year-old
Hotspur are made to appear as equals, with Hal’s father even telling him that
Hotspur is “no more in debt to years than thou” (III.ii.103).40 They share the same
name (“Harry to Harry,” IV.ii.132), and Vernon reports Hal’s challenge to Hotspur
by saying “I never in my life / Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly, / Unless a
brother should a brother dare / To gentle exercise and proof of arms” (V.ii.51–54);
Hal tells Percy when they meet in battle that England cannot “brook a double reign,
/ Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales” (V.iv.65–66). Shakespeare could produce
a binary pair when he wished to, then, but it is not his default mode. The out-
standing archetypal scene of the horror of civil war in the English history plays
comes during the battle of Towton in 3 Henry VI (II.v), when first a son comes
onstage bearing the body of his father, whom he has just killed, and then a father
comes onstage bearing the body of his son. These are hierarchically organized
images of vertical derangement, with up-down relationships violated, as befits the
larger context of threatened kingship and hierarchical order; they are quite differ-
ent from the dominant images of lateral derangement we know from the Roman
setting, where brother kills brother.41
The other large Roman theme that animates Antony and Cleopatra—the rule
of one emerging from discordant and contingent possibilities—is not present in
the same way in the English plays. It is very important that it is a sensibility attuned
to republicanism that we see at work in the Roman plays. Issues of legitimacy and
usurpation form the background to the English civil war plays, and they can be
worked out without this kind of mathematics, but to go from many and count
down the numbers to one is something that can be done only after you have a fully
worked out idea of what the many is like and what it would be like to decline from
that many to a unity: this is something that Shakespeare could find only in Roman
rather than in English history. Again, the movement to centralized monarchy that
Shakespeare had charted in his English history plays must provide an arena for
receptivity for him as he contemplates the emergence of the sole rule of Caesar, and
the sense of loss as well as gain in this process is recognizable in both cases, as stu-
pendous and charismatic individuals such as Antony and the Plantagenet lords go
under to the new model regimes.42 But if the dogged and unglamorous centralized
bureaucratic rules of Augustus and of Henry VII have a great deal in common, the
multiplicities from which that unified power emerged are very different, since in
the English civil war plays an ideal monarchical unity is always in the background
as the norm from which the contenders have fallen.
These differences between the English and the Roman history plays bear out
the power of G.K. Hunter’s insight (1977: 108) that “the Roman state offered
[Shakespeare] a milieu in which he could escape from the pressure of teleology.” As
Charles and Michelle Martindale finely gloss this statement, Shakespeare could
“examine historical events which had not directly determined the present lives of
his audience and which did not have to be shaped into any kind of sacred history or
aetiology.”43 This degree of distance from a Roman past that nonetheless felt familiar
and pertinent enables Shakespeare to experiment with a view of history that is far
more contingent than the one on view in the English plays. As Cantor 1976 so pow-
erfully argues, Shakespeare has a deep grasp of what made the Roman republic
distinctive and of what the differences were between the republic and the state that
supplanted it.44 More than this, the contingent nature of the movement from the
republic to the monarchy is something that Shakespeare finds compelling to ima-
gine. Plutarch in his Life of Antony says that “It was predestined that the government
of all the world should fall into Octavius Caesars handes” (Plu. Ant. 56.3), but this
is not really what Shakespeare’s play feels like.45 Considering how hard it is even for
us now to shake ourselves free of the idea that Augustus’ settlement was somehow
bound to happen, it is astonishing how unteleological Shakespeare’s play feels and
how vividly he captures an atmosphere of disordered contingency.
This is the aspect of Appian, I think, that particularly caught his imagination.
He was able to use Appian to inform his conception of a historical momentum that
did not have to happen just the way it did.46 Complex shifts of scene and a parade
of diverse characters keep our perspectives chopping and changing. Plutarch clearly
provides the fundamental undergirding of the play’s events, but Shakespeare goes
to Appian for the major minor figures of Sextus Pompey and Lepidus, and he uses
these figures above all to remind us that before there was one man, there were not
just two, but three and four. The lasting impression left by the play in general is that
of variety, and the bewilderingly contingent variety of the historical process is
288 afterlife
evoked here through intelligent political analysis that owes much of its power to the
Roman models of civil war and especially to the mathematical templates that were
the most intellectually compressed expression of those models.
notes
Warm thanks to the organizers of the conference, to the audience at Amherst and also
on another occasion at the University of Toronto, to Christina Kraus for her thought-
provoking response, and to the Press readers for valuable suggestions. I am especially
grateful to David Quint for his stimulating questions and comments after my presentation
and for invaluable criticism of a draft of this chapter. All references to Antony and Cleopatra
follow the text of Wilders 1995.
1. I follow Shakespeare’s manner of referring to the characters within the play, thus
giving “Antony,” not “Antonius.” In general practice we should follow Shakespeare in
referring to the future Augustus as “Caesar,” not “Octavian.” Ronald Syme (1939: 113)
called the use of the name “Octavianus” “dubious and misleading,” but he maintained it
nonetheless for the period before 27 bce, not really because it possessed “the sanction of
literary tradition,” as he said, but to further his demystifying of the figure of “Augustus.”
2. And any Shakespearian will think of Juliet’s words to Romeo: “They are but beggars
that can count their worth; / But my true love is grown to such excess, / I cannot sum up
half my sum of wealth” (II.vi.32–34).
3. Baldwin is referring to 2 Henry IV I.i.47, “He seem’d in running to devour the way”
(of a horse), playing off Catullus 25.7, viam vorabit. Catullus’ obscenity made him a suspect
author for schoolboys (1.109), but he was in fact regularly read at grammar schools (1.116:
287). H. R. D. Anders (1904: 282–84) is slightly more open on the possibility of Catullan
intertextuality in general. This allusion in our play would be typical of the technique nicely
encapsulated by Henry 1873–92: 1.724, comparing Virg. A. 1.496–97 with Henry VIII
IV.i.84–90: “Parallel, but (as usual in Shakespeare, and to his great honour) without
imitation.”
4. We return to the Girardian themes of doubleness below.
5. Logan 1976: 122: “Shakespeare appears to have known and cared relatively little
about Lucan”; cf. 131: “Shakespeare . . . nowhere gives evidence of knowing more of Lucan
than a few passages from Book I and the outline of the work as a whole.” Jones 1977, esp.
273–77, is far more positive; cf. Ronan 1988a/1988b.
6. Jones 1977: 273–77 makes a strong case for Shakespeare having done at least some
systematic reading in Lucan outside book 1, but the dominance of book 1 remains clear.
7. Martindale 2004: 100–101. This is not to say that Virgil does not matter in our
play: see Wilders 1995: 66 for bibliography. The early scene where Antony leaves
Cleopatra is an extended parody of the scene in Virgil Aeneid 4 where Aeneas leaves
Dido (our apprehension of the intertextuality is complicated by the fact that Virgil’s
mythical characters are themselves at this point calqued anyway on the only very
recently dead Antony and Cleopatra). Even before that scene our attention is caught by
Antony telling Enobarbus to “Let our officers / Have notice what we purpose,” while he will
“Break the cause of our expedience to the queen” (I.ii.174–76), just as Aeneas instructs his
officers to prepare for departure while he will find the right time to approach the queen
(Virg. A. 4.288–94). During the following scene, Antony’s “Quarrel no more” (I.iii.66) is
based on Aeneas’ desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis (A. 4.360). Cleopatra taunts
Antony with “play one scene / Of excellent dissembling” (I.iii.78–79), picking up the first
word of Dido’s first speech of attack, dissimulare (4.305); she throws at him his “honor”
(I.iii.80, 97), recalling Aeneas’ notorious pietas (likewise picked up in her jibe “be deaf to
my unpitied folly,” I.iii.98). The Tempest, since Hamilton 1990, has regularly been held up
as a play with particularly Virgilian intertexts: for a demurral, and a case for the rather
ghostly nature of the Virgilian presence in that play, see Martindale 2004: 99–100 (with
bibliography, n. 34).
8. So, with bracing common sense and honesty, Barkan 2001: 42.
9. A clear example in our play comes at II.i.45–48, where Sextus Pompey speaks of
himself as the factor that keeps the triumvirate from fighting each other, just as in Lucan
(1.99–100) Crassus is the factor that keeps Caesar and Pompey from fighting each other. See
Highet 1949: 116 for the fate of Marlowe’s translation of book 1, “dated 1600, but entered at
Stationers’ Hall in 1593.”
10. Appian, Civil Wars 1.6, tr. William Barker 1578, ap. Schanzer 1956.
11. Since the whole run of sense here and in the subsequent narrative is that first
Sextus Pompey and then Lepidus were got rid of, Shakespeare may conceivably have
taken “sette up” to mean “brought to bay by Brutus’ friends” (OED s.v. “set up” hh (b),
“to bring to bay”). Barker, however, must have meant “established by Brutus’ friends,”
since he was working from Geslen’s Latin version, which has the unhistorical and absurd
a Cassianis in fastigio potestatis collocatus est for Appian’s soπ| lfi≠ søm Bqo‹som
épamzqåhg. It looks as if Geslen misunderstood épamzqåhg as a part not of épamaiqåx,
“to make away with, destroy,” but of épamoqhæx, “to set up again, restore.” Geslen’s
misunderstanding of the idiom is comparatively venial, since Appian is idiosyncratic in
his use of épamaiqåx to mean “kill afterward or together with” (LSJ s.v. 2), so that we
should follow the translation of Gabba 1958, “fu ucciso con gli ultimi seguaci di Bruto,”
rather than that of Veh ap. Brodersen 1987, “ebenso wie zuvor Brutus und Cassius den
Tod fand,” Carter 1996, “eliminated like Brutus’ followers,” or White 1913, “was slain, as
Brutus and Cassius had been.”
12. Appian, Civil Wars 5.1, tr. William Barker 1578, ap. Schanzer 1956.
13. Christina Kraus very aptly points out to me how closely Appian’s momentum
resembles that of Tacitus in the opening of the Annales, where we twice see a diminution of
numbers leading to the emergence of the sole figure of Augustus (1.1.1 and 1.2.1); in the
second of these sentences, we move, exactly as in Appian, from Cassius and Brutus through
Pompeius, Lepidus, and Antonius. Richard Greneway had published a translation of
Tacitus’ Annales in 1598 (Highet 1949: 118), but I know of no argument for Shakespeare’s
familiarity with Tacitus’ Annales.
14. 5.25–26 (popularity of Pompey), 5.71–73 (Misenum), 5.77–122 (a very long account
of the showdown between young Caesar and Pompey).
15. Pelling 1988: 37, with reference especially to MacCallum 1910: 648–52. On the
importance of Appian already in the composition of Julius Caesar, see Thomas 1989: 64–66.
290 afterlife
16. M. W. MacCallum (1910) is bizarrely grudging on the score of Shakespeare’s

recognition of the importance of Sextus Pompey in the triumviral period, claiming that
Shakespeare has exaggerated his significance (373–78) and almost peevishly remarking that
it “is hardly to his credit, if, on Appian’s hint, he realises the importance of Sextus
Pompeius’ insular position and naval power, for he lived in the days of Hawkins and Drake”
(333; his later appreciation of Sextus’ role in Appian, as perceived by Shakespeare, is more
just: 650–51). Such marginalizing views of Sextus Pompey were entrenched by Syme in his
Roman Revolution (1939), where Pompey is described as an “adventurer” (189, 228) and a
“brigand” (232). For an important account of this negative tradition, and for a compelling
reassessment of Sextus’ actual historical importance, see the papers in Powell and Welch
2002 and, above all, the major recent study of Powell 2008. The work of reassessment best
begins by following up the index of Powell 2008 under “Pompeius, Sextus; most dangerous
enemy of Octavian.” For Appian’s crucial insights into Sextus’ status, which I argue here are
the germ of Shakespeare’s, see Gowing 1992: ch. 11, esp. 202–5.
17. In addition to Lepidus and Sextus Pompey, another major minor figure in Appian
is Antony’s brother, Lucius Antonius: Schanzer 1956: xxv–xxvi. On Appian’s sympathetic
treatment of Lucius Antonius, see Gowing 1992: 242–44. Shakespeare refers on three
occasions to the troubles caused by this brother (I.ii.93–99, II.i.42–43, II.ii.47–56), but he is
not a character, and not much is made of him.
18. All translations of Plutarch are those of Thomas North.
19. Pelling 1988: 205. As befits the way so many characters are counting in this play,
Menas repeats his question (“Wilt thou be lord of the whole world?”) and then adds,
“That’s twice” (61).
20. Note Antony’s language in II.vi.25–26, where he tells Sextus he is outnumbered
on land by the Big Three: “At land thou know’st / How much we do o’er-count thee”
(turned punningly by Sextus into a reproach for Antony’s cheating him of his father’s
house: “Thou dost o’er-count me of my father’s house” (27)). II.vii.92 shows Menas still
thinking big, just after offering to make Sextus “lord of all the world”—when he says of
Lepidus, “The third part then is drunk. Would it were all,” this is as close as poor Lepidus
comes to being No. 1.
21. Nor in Dio (48.36–38).
22. Well, an intermittently very funny play.
23. Cf. Gowing 1992: ch. 8 for the way Dio and Appian recognized the potential
significance of Lepidus and “therefore did not relegate Lepidus to the status of an entirely
minor character” (123).
24. Quint 2008: xv; cf. his larger argument for this superseding of the old nobility by a
modern monarchy as a main theme of seventeenth-century tragedy in Quint 2006 (14–17
on Antony and Cleopatra).
25. See p. 66 for the data on which of the folio plays had act and scene divisions and
which did not. Cf. Wood 1996: 1: “The Folio text [sc. of Antony and Cleopatra] showed no
act divisions, which were probably first formulated for the play by Nicholas Rowe in his
1709 edition, together with geographical locations.”
26. Girardian reading of this doubleness in Baines 1996.
27. Masters 1992: 43–45 is a brilliant teasing out of this theme of civil war as a perverse
rewriting of consular government.
28. See the material collected in Nisbet and Hubbard 1970: 399 and in Watson 2003 on
Horace Epode 7, a poem that describes the civil wars as the working out of the ancestral
curse that follows from the murder of Remus by his brother, Romulus. There is much rich
material on the importance of the oscillations between Two and One in Roman civil war
discourse (especially in Statius’ Thebaid) in Braund 2006 and on the importance to Lucan
of “doubling” in Bartsch 1997: 54–6; in more general terms, on “Pensare il ‘doppio’ a Roma”,
see Bettini 2000, esp. 147–81.
29. First at the moment of betrothal, where Antony says to Caesar, “from this hour, /
The heart of brothers govern in our loves” (II.ii.155–56); then after Antony’s death, when
Caesar apostrophizes him as “my brother” (V.i.42: note that Shakespeare has diverged from
his source here, for North gives “brother in law” in his translation of the corresponding
moment in Plu. Ant. 78.2, where Plutarch uses jgdersñm, a generic word for any
connection by marriage).
30. On the key word par, see Henderson 1998: 203, and on the “likeness” of the two
sides in civil war, Jal 1963: 322–26, 415–16, Bartsch 1997: 54–55.
31. Leigh 1997: 155 for synecdoche and its perversions in civil war (cf. Hardie 1993b:
4, 7).
32. Just as Antony’s officer, Ventidius, acknowledges the new realpolitik when he will
not pursue a triumph after defeating the Parthians, declaring that “Caesar and Antony have
ever won / More in their officer than person” (III.i.16–17) and “I’ll humbly signify what in
his name, / That magical word of war, we have effected” (31–32).
33. On the invention of zero, see Kaplan 1999, which points out (22, 109) that ancient
sources use abacus imagery of a person being valued at 10,000 or merely 1, while only in
early modern sources do we find references to a person being valued at zero. We see the
crucial difference in Pompey the Great’s speech at the battle of Pharsalus in Lucan book 7,
when he acknowledges that he has lost. Pompey rails at Fortune for wanting to destroy
everything, saying he has given his wife and children as hostages to fate: “Why do you rip
everything? Why do you toil to destroy everything? Already there is nothing, Fortune, that
is mine” (7. 665–66: omnia quid laceras? quid perdere cuncta laboras? / iam nihil est, Fortuna,
meum). Here the contrast between “all” and “nothing” is very powerful, but it is not an
arithmetical image: Pompey is not saying that he has been reduced to nothing, but that
there is nothing he has left for Fortune to take.
34. My thanks to David Quint’s intervention at the conference, as he pressed me to
take into proper account the surviving presence of Cleopatra in the last act.
35. As Mark Morford put it to me, Lucan likewise has a binary duo left remaining
after the victory of Caesar’s father over Pompey at Pharsalus, the “matched pair” that is
Caesar and Liberty: par quod semper habemus, libertas et Caesar (7.695–96).
36. Ronan 1988b, on Lucan 1.2–3: populumque potentem / in sua victrici conversum
viscera dextra.
37. Note, e.g., 2 Henry IV III.i.38–40: “Then you perceive the body of our kingdom /
How foul it is; what rank diseases grow, / And with what danger, near the heart of it;”
1 Henry VI III.i.191–93: “As fester’d members rot but by degree, / Till bones and flesh and
sinews fall away, / So will this base and envious discord breed.”
38. Number games of a different kind can, however, be of great importance: see Quint
2006: 15 for the tripartite splits of 1 Henry IV, with “King Henry and his court, Prince Hal
292 afterlife
rioting with Falstaff in the tavern, and Hotspur and the other noble rebels, who would
themselves divide the realm into three parts as the playwright does.”
39. David Quint refers me to the classic account of this paired likeness in Empson
1935: 43–46.
40. More true to the relative ages is the observation of Henry IV in the second play,
saying that in the past Percy “like a brother toil’d in my affairs” (2 Henry IV III.i.62).
41. See Elaine Fantham’s chapter in this volume for the ubiquity of brother-killing-
brother imagery in Lucan’s portrayal of the civil war. Note, however, that, as she points out,
Lucan twice refers to the motif of sons killing their fathers (2.149–50, 3.326–27). At the end
of Richard III, when Richmond announces the hoped-for end of the civil wars, the theme
of brother killing brother is sounded, in conjunction with the theme of father and son
killing each other: “England hath long been mad, and scarr’d herself; / The brother blindly
shed the brother’s blood, / The father rashly slaughter’d his own son, / The son, compell’d,
been butcher to the sire” (V.v.23–26).
42. See Quint 2006: 15–17, 2008: xx.
43. Martindale and Martindale 1990: 142. Hunter’s powerful insight falls short in
development, however, when he (1977: 109) says that the end of the civil wars is just a blank
in Antony and Cleopatra and that Shakespeare is not writing history; this is very much not
the case and does no justice to Shakespeare’s eerily well-developed sense of Roman history.
44. Martindale and Martindale 1990: 151–52 overstates the degree to which
Shakespeare was not interested in the constitutional forms of power. This is not really the
case even in Julius Caesar, which the Martindales discuss there, and certainly not in Antony
and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, as Cantor 1976 shows.
45. Certainly Caesar speaks as if history is on his side, telling Octavia to “let
determined things to destiny / Hold unbewailed their way” (III.vi.86–87), embodying a
“detached, yet all-comprehending voice” at the middle and end of the play (Jones 1971:
230). And Nigel Wood (1996: 4), referring especially to the important scene with the
soothsayer in II.iii, is right to point out that “History is a succession of rapid events that
appear not to represent present or retrospectively manufactured order, yet the audience is
reminded at cardinal moments that Caesar is favoured by Historical necessity, not Antony
or Cleopatra.” Yet the felt force of the play’s movement does not endorse a sensation of
preordainment: on the crucial role of fortune in Shakespeare’s vision of history here, see
Wilders 1978: ch. 3, “Fortune and Nature” (29–52); cf. Quint 2008: xx on the way “Key events
seem governed by sheer chance” in our play.
46. I recommend Pelling 2009 as another case study of Shakespeare’s ability to
penetrate to core conceptions of his ancient sources once he has had his attention brought
to focus: Pelling studies the way that Shakespeare reads through North’s translation of
Plutarch to intuit the tragic modeling of Plutarch’s narrative patterns, thus enabling
himself to “think like a Greek tragedian.”
18
“My brother got killed in the
war”: Internecine Intertextuality
Richard Thomas
This chapter is concerned with intertextual aspects of civil war literature

and with the way such intertexts complicate and intensify the aesthetic
response to the suffering and loss associated with civil discord and its ulti-
mate consequences. The recognition of other instances of civil conflict,
across centuries or millennia, works against the merely local or straight-
forwardly historical and lends meanings and intimations that are universal
in time and space. This is of course true of any war intertexts. So a reader
of Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy,” with or without the knowledge of
Owen’s death in the First World War, barely needs to move past the title to
be engaged in timeless questions that arise from Virgil’s depiction of
youthful death in the Italian wars of the Aeneid. But the engagement is
particularly sharpened in the case of civil war intertexts, where the struggle
is up close and the enemy familiar and homophone.
1. Dylan
I begin with a case study, one of the most recent war poems in my corpus,
actually a song rather then a poem, and one that may seem at first glance
to be remote from the topic of this volume. It does, however, conform to
the proposition set out in the preceding paragraph, that is, by use of a
number of intertexts it turns out to be about no particular war, but more
importantly also about a number of wars, bundled together through the
song’s allusivity or complex of references. I have elsewhere treated Bob
294 afterlife
Dylan’s song “Lonesome Day Blues,” from “Love and Theft” (Sony 2001) (Thomas
2007a). The very title of the album, “borrowed” as the quotation marks show from
Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(1993), trumpets the intention to plunder the musical and literary traditions that
the recent Dylan has been renewing in complex ways. The title of “Lonesome Day
Blues” is taken from a blues song by Blind Willie McTell, but Dylan’s lyrics have
nothing to do with that song. The song’s speaker is not doing well:
Well, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day

Yeah, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
I’m just sittin’ here thinking
With my mind a million miles away
In the third verse, we hear in more detail of his woes:
Well, my pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war
Well, my pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war
My sister, she ran off and got married
Never was heard of any more
The war is unspecified, but it looks like Vietnam, the war of Dylan’s formative years,
and that is what we assume when we get to verse 8, with its brutal image of a war
gone wrong:
Well my captain he’s decorated—he’s well schooled and he’s skilled

My captain, he’s decorated—he’s well schooled and he’s skilled
He’s not sentimental—don’t bother him at all
How many of his pals have been killed
But it turned out this verse was an appropriation of a line from an obscure Japanese
novel, Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, which on p. 243 has “There was nothing
sentimental about him—it didn’t bother him at all that some of his pals had been
killed.” This line takes the reader away from Vietnam to the Sino-Japanese War and
World War II, both from the Japanese narrator’s focalization weirdly but effectively
merging with that of the earlier American, whose “brother got killed in the war.”
Classicist Dylan fans who heard the next verse but one for the first time were
wrenched out of the American context they had assumed to be in play. Dylan was
undeniably reworking Virgil:
I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd

I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m going to speak to the crowd
I am goin’ to teach peace to the conquered
I’m gonna tame the proud
internecine intertextuality 295
The similarity with Mandelbaum’s translation of Aeneid 6.851–53 is self-evident:
But yours will be the rulership of nations,

remember Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,
to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.
The intrusion of Virgil’s warrior Aeneas, and through him of the Roman civil war that
is the backdrop of the Aeneid, complicates the song in interesting ways. While Anchises’
words to Aeneas belong in mythic time to a world before Rome is Rome, Aeneas also
in various ways stands for his descendent Augustus. The lines will have resonated with
Roman readers for whom the granting or denying of clemency for the defeated was a
live issue as well as one on which Augustan propaganda was interested in having a say.
Accordingly, Dylan’s use of the lines activates civil, not just Roman, wars.
Other lines on Dylan’s album intensify the sense that civil war is in the air. The
ending of “Bye and Bye,” whose lyrics suggests the interchangeability of time (“Well
the future for me is already a thing of the past”), may also work for the world of
Rome, the world in which Virgil saw Augustus, descendent of Aeneas in his own
propaganda, turn republic into empire: “I’m gonna establish my rule through civil
war / Gonna make you see just how loyal and true a man can be.” Given the presence
of Virgil on Dylan’s album, this works well for Augustus. And in “Honest with Me”
empire comes up again: “I’m here to create the new imperial empire / I’m going to
do whatever circumstances require.”
But the intertextual hybridity of the war of “Lonesome Day Blues” is still more
complicated. Eyolf Østrem, a Web aficionado of Dylan, reports the singer’s use of
two passages (uncovered by “Nick”) from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn:1
“Lonesome Day Blues” (verse 3): “My sister, she ran off and got married /
Never was heard of any more”
Huckleberry Finn (ch. 17): “ . . . and my sister Mary Ann run off and got
married and never was heard of no more”
“Lonesome Day Blues” (verse 9): “Last night the wind was whisperin’,
I was trying to make out what it was / Last night the wind was whisperin’
somethin’—I was trying to make out what it was / I tell myself
something’s comin’ / But it never does”
(verse 11): “Well the leaves are rustlin’ in the wood—things are fallin’
off of the shelf / Leaves are rustlin’ in the wood—things are fallin’ off the
shelf
296 afterlife
Huckleberry Finn (ch. 1): “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.
The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so
mournful; . . . and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and
I couldn’t make out what it was.”
The first of these quotations comes from the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode of

the novel, which has itself been seen as Twain’s metaphor for the broader Civil War.
It is also noteworthy that the tale Huck is here spinning is just that, a fiction. If
Dylan’s Twain reference complicates our identification of the singer’s “my brother
got killed in the war,” making us move maybe from Vietnam back to the American
Civil War, the Virgilian lines that immediately follow the reworking of Huck Finn
force us back even further, to the wars of Virgil’s youth, the civil wars that tore apart
and reordered the Roman world.
Dylan, then, provides a case study of how intertextuality creates glimpses into
a multiplicity of related contexts. I now focus more centrally on three civil wars
beyond those of Rome: the English Civil War, the American Civil War of 1861–65,
and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. These events themselves are of enormous
scale, and my treatment is necessarily abbreviated. At the same time it is perhaps
curious that from within such events poets and writers who may safely be assumed
to have been schooled in the story of Rome’s civil wars do not necessarily make
connections. Where they do, however, the effect is as complex as that in “Lonesome
Day Blues,” and there is established through a variety of intertextualities a sense of
the shared and ever-repeating calamity that is civil war.
2. Marvell, Cowley, and Denham
The Roman civil wars were very much in play in the minds of English poets of the
1640s and 1650s. That of course was a natural consequence of thinking about the
monarchy via the Caesars, a way of thinking hardly confined to this place or time.
In 1644, Robert Stapylton, Royalist translator of Virgil, addressed the young Prince
Charles in a dedicatory epistle to his translation Pliny’s Panegyricke: A Speech in
Senate; Wherein publicke thanks are presented to the Emperour Traian (Smith 1994:
40). Stapylton sees himself as the new Pliny, Charles and the future Charles II as the
Caesars present and to come:
What fitter wish can I make to so much goodnesse, then that of the
Romane Senate to their Emperours? May you be happier then Augustus,
better then Trajan: to whom you are now so just a Parallel, that I present
his Character as a marke of your own height in honours whereon if your
Highnesse please sometimes to cast your eye, you may discerne how you
out-grow him in those perfections, which render you the Modell of your
Excellent Parents, and the joy of all their Loyall Subjects, among the
faithfullest whereof, as my study, so my hope is ever to be number’d.
The fate of the father would parallel that of Caesar more than Augustus, though the
young addressee would return from the ashes but to a world less parallel to that of
the Caesars.
As Annabel Patterson (1990: 23), among others, has noted of the events of
1640–60, “analogies to Roman history were not only drawn but wrestled for, as
Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode,’ or Cowley’s The Civil Wars, to mention only familiar
examples, testify.” She goes on to note that Thomas May, in his 1647 History of the
Parliament of England, would implicitly justify his own change of allegiance from
Royalist to parliamentarian by quoting Dio, who had claimed that the armies of
Brutus and Cassius stood for liberty while those of the other side, Antony and the
future Augustus, stood for tyranny. May died on 23 November 1650, and his change
of allegiance to the republican side was too late to save him from Marvell’s lash:
soon after the death of May, Marvell produced his satire “Tom May’s Death,” redo-
lent of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, the pumpkinification of Claudius, in its disquieting
satire of the deceased. In the course of denying May access to Elysium, Marvell
reworks the opening of May’s 1627 translation of Lucan’s poem by putting a variant
of Lucan’s opening words in the mouth of May’s supporter Ben Jonson, himself
already in Elysium of course:
“Cups more than civil of Emathian wine,

I sing” (said he) “and the Pharsalian sign,
where the historian of the commonwealth
in his own bowels sheathes the conquering health.”
Also from the 1650s is Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return
from Ireland,” in which critics have detected the presence of May’s Pharsalia
(Donno 1972: 238). Here is May’s description of Caesar translated from Lucan
1.143–57:
but in Caesar now

Remains not only a great general’s name,
But restless valour, and in war a shame
Not to be conqueror; fierce, not curbed at all,
Ready to fight, where hope or anger call
His forward sword; confident of success
And bold the favour of the gods to press;
O’erthrowing all that his ambition stay,
And loves the ruin should enforce his way.
298 afterlife
May’s translation of the famous simile follows:

As lightning by the wind forced from a cloud
Breaks through the wounded air with thunder loud,
Disturbs the day, the people terrifies,
And by a light oblique dazzles our eyes,
Not Jove’s own temple spares it; when no force,
No bar can hinder his prevailing course,
Create waste as forth it sallies and retires,
It makes and gathers his dispersèd fires.
May dedicated the work to Charles I, who is to be identified with Caesar, an
association brilliantly disrupted by Marvell twenty-three years later when he wrote
his ode on Cromwell. The intertext and its function clearly involve “correction,”
with Lucan’s lightning simile in Marvell’s ode now working for Cromwell, whose
thunderbolt takes care of May’s “Caesar,” whose head is “blasted” by Marvell’s
Cromwellian lightning (9–16 and 21–24):
So restless Cromwell could not cease

In the inglorious arts of peace,
But through the adventurous war,
Urgèd his active star.
And, like the three-forked lightning, first
Breaking the clouds where it was nursed,
Did thorough his own side
His fiery way divide
Then burning through the air he went,

And palaces and temples rent;
And Caesar’s head at last
Did through his laurels blast.
Syntax in 23–24 backs up the intertext, with object (“Caesar’s head”) preceding verb
(“blast”) recalling the same features of May, there somewhat clumsy (“Not Jove’s own
temple spares it”). It is noteworthy that Marvell has added a different Virgilian inter-
text, which also serves to depict Cromwell as the new replacement of Caesar. The
phrasing “could not cease / In the inglorious arts of peace” surely recalls the closing
sphragis of the Georgics, where a new Caesar, Octavian, also strikes like lightning at the
deep Euphrates following the final engagement of the civil war at Actium and
Alexandria, while the poet in contrast is in Naples, “flourishing in the arts of inglo-
rious peace” (4.564: studiis florentem ignobilis oti). Marvell then clearly engages with
the texts of Lucan and Virgil, two of the most familiar Latin texts of his day, in order
to invoke to his own contemporary situation the players of Rome’s civil discord.
Other poets of the English Civil War glance at their Roman predecessors in
depicting their own troubled times. Abraham Cowley and John Denham provide
two examples of dynamic intertextual relationships. The former was seriously
engaged with the realities of agriculture and collected numerous passages of
Virgil and Horace on country life in Several Discourses by way of Essays (1688). As
Anthony Low (1985: 246) has demonstrated, Cowley comes close to Virgil in
shared experience and outlook when he writes in the early 1650s (The Civil War,
2.15–16):
The’ astonish’d Plowmen the sad noyse did heare,

Look’d up in vain, and left their work for feare.
The Virgilian traces are apparent, both from the end of Georgics 1, when civil discord
disrupts agriculture, and from the parallel context at the end of Georgics 3, when
plague and the death of the ox bring plowing to a halt (G. 1.506–7 and 3.517–19):
non ullus aratro

dignus honos, squalent abductis arva colonis.
No worthy honor to the plow, the fields go fallow, bereft of farmers.
it tristis arator
maerentem abiungens fraterna morte iuvencum
atque opere in medio defixa reliquit aratra.
Sadly the plowman goes, unyoking the steer that grieves at its brother’s
death, and he has left the plow stuck in the middle of its work.
The image of the plow left in the field, its work undone, with all the dire conse-
quences involved in that abandonment is a powerful one, and it became a familiar
trope. So in 1645, John Abbot wrote in similar vein (The Fable of Philo, 13–14; cf. Low
1985: 246):
the drum shall speak
In every Village warre, the rural swaine
Shall leave his tillage, Shepheards leave the plaine . . .
the Glebe Land

Shall unmanured and untilled stand.
The plough shall be neglected.
But there is also a shared reality at work, a reality that is hard for us to recover. That
mid-seventeenth-century agriculture in England had reached a level of sophistica-
tion comparable to that of Virgil’s Rome makes the cultural underpinnings of the
300 afterlife
intertextuality unexpectedly familiar. A peasant/agricola leaving his plow is not

simply a shared literary trope; it functions as an indicator of cultural disaster.
Cowley’s “astonish’d Plowmen” who leave their work in fear at The Civil War
2.15–16 not only look to the Georgics but also recall the suspension of agriculture
at Aeneid 7.511–30, where the din of war calls out the Latin peasants who trade
their farm implements for weapons (7.523–25): non iam certamine agresti / stipiti-
bus duris agitur sudibusve praeustis / sed ferro ancipiti decernunt; “it is not now a
matter of rustic struggle with sticks or fire-scorched stakes, but with two-edged
iron they vie.” Cowley abandoned his poem after the first Battle of Newbury in
1644, with only three books completed. A version of the first was put out in 1679.
The second and third books were lost until two manuscripts came to light in
fairly recent times, with books 1–3 published for the first time 1973.2 Allan
Pritchard has gathered many of the intertexts in Virgil and Lucan, and from these
it is clear that Cowley’s allusive style brings the Italian and the English wars into
close alignment.3
This is particularly felt in Cowley’s catalog of participants, which responds in
broad terms to the catalog of Italian warriors at Aeneid 7.647–817. Nothing could
point more directly and exclusively to Virgil than the opening at 2.5–6, recalling as
it does Juno’s summoning up of the Fury Allecto, who is mentioned six times by
name in Aeneid 7: “For dire Allecto, risen from the Stygian strand, / Had scattered
Strife and Armes through all the Land.” Nobody dies in Virgil’s catalog while Cowley
conflates catalog and battle narrative and in doing so draws from Virgilian passages
outside the catalog of Aeneid 7 and precisely, in later scenes, from the Italian war. He
will doubtless have been familiar with the similar intertextual complexity of Milton’s
Lycidas (1637), which combines disparate passages from different Eclogues. So at
2.84, Cowley depicts the death of the aged William Fielding, earl of Denby (“The
crimson Streame all staines his reverent White!”), much as Virgil did that of the
aged Mezentius (10.837–38, 907–8). Even more striking is the death at 2.151–56 of the
youthful, highly eroticized Royalist Charles Cavendish (2.140: “Hector in his Hands,
and Paris in his Face”), who dies with a version of the flower simile of Aeneid
11.67–71 (at the funeral of the youthful, eroticized Pallas):4
Like some fair Flower, which Morne saw freshly gay,

In the fields generall ruine mowne away.
The Hyacinth, or purple Violet,
Just languishing, his colourd Light just set.
Ill mixt it lies amidst th’ignobler Gresse;
The country daughters sigh as by’it they passe.
Or at 2.327–28 the wounded are eaten by fish, attracted by the blood from their
wounds:
Some, not yet slaine, are caught by fish beneath,

And feele their painfull Buriall ere their Death.
The lines recall the grotesque image at Aeneid 10.559–60, Aeneas’ prediction of a sim-
ilar death for those he is about to kill: alitibus linquere feris, aut gurgite mersum /
unda feret piscesque impasti vulnera lambent; “you will be left for wild birds, or
drowned in the tide you will be carried by the wave and hungry fish will lick your
wounds.” Virgil is not the only author engaged by Cowley, who continues the interest
in Lucan, along with other literary figures, in a manner that shows the same literary
conflation and intensification that is part of other civil war intertextuality.5
Finally for the English Civil War there is the Royalist John Denham, whose
approach was somewhat different. Close to Charles I, he was in the king’s company
in the months leading up to the execution in early 1649. His intertextual civil war
consisted of writing a translation of A. 2.1–558. That is, he ended the Fall of Troy, as
his translation is called, with the body of the decapitated Priam lying on the beach
(2.557–58): iacet ingens litore truncus / avulsumque umeris caput et since nomine cor-
pus; “On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King, / A headless Carkass, and a name-
less Thing.” Denham thus drew an analogy not simply between the two decapitated
kings, Priam and Charles, but also perhaps between Charles and Pompey, whose
death and decapitation occurred to Servius and to any number of other Virgilian
readers of the lines from Aeneid 2:
Thus fell the King, who yet surviv’d the State,

With such a signal and peculiar Fate.
Under so vast a ruine not a Grave,
Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have:
He, whom such Titles swell’d, such Power made proud
To whom the Scepters of all Asia bow’d,
On the cold earth lies th’ unregarded King,
A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.
It is notable that Dryden used Denham’s line when he came to the death of Priam
in his great 1697 translation of the Aeneid, thereby affiliating himself with the obvi-
ously Royalist point of view of his predecessor.
3. Melville, Bryant, Stoddard, and Lowell
It may seem somewhat curious that the poets of the American Civil War, whether
of the Union (Whitman and Melville) or the Confederacy (Henry Timrod and
Sidney Lanier), made so little connection to that of Rome. Although the term “civil
302 afterlife
war” is used from the outset, it is as common during the conflict and immediately
after to see it called “The Great Rebellion,” “The Rebellion,” “The War of Secession.”
Perhaps a sense of guilt in the young country deflected contemplation on parallel
historical events. This relative absence may be related to J. D. McClatchy’s (2005:
xvi) broader noting of the apparent discrepancy in the quality and scale of American
Civil War literature:
It is such stuff as epics are made on. Yet no one great, sweeping
poem—no American Iliad—ever emerged from this most momentous
event in the lives and imaginations of Americans. All the arts, in fact,
shied away. The most talented novelists of the day—from Henry James to
Mark Twain to William Dean Howells—avoided the subject. Our leading
painters were doing Hudson Valley scenes. Our strongest composers were
studying in Europe. Many of the best poets were writing moralistic
meditations on nature.
Of course there are exceptions, notably Whitman and Melville, but there is not
much in the way of overt intertextuality directed toward the literature of previous
civil wars. Nineteenth-century America was of course not as well schooled in the
classics as seventeenth-century England, and this was particularly true in the south,
where “planters preferred telling stories to reading books, and what writers there
were tended to be gentlemen amateurs” (McClatchy 2005: xx). Even southern poets
of quality, such as Sidney Lanier and Henry Timrod (one of the chief intertexts of
Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times; see Polito 2007), make no real connection with
the literary civil war tradition.
For the north there are a few exceptions. Herman Melville in 1866 published a
book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Dedicated to those who “in the
war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers,”
it contains poems on specific battles and engagements but also on more reflective
matters. I have found only two references in Melville to the civil war tradition, one
to the War of the Roses: “In North and South still beats the vein / Of Yorkist and
Lancastrian” (“Battle of Stone River, Tennessee”). The other is more extensive,
hearkening back to the Roman experience but only to deny the relevance of that
experience (“The Surrender at Appomattox,” April 1865):
The warring eagles fold the wing,
But not in Caesar’s sway;
Not Rome o’ercome by Roman arms we sing,
As on Pharsalia’s day,
But treason thrown, though a giant grown,
And Freedom’s larger play.
All human tribes glad token see

In the close of the wars of Grant and Lee.
This poem is of interest precisely in its attempt to free the American experience
from the taint of association. There is nothing intertextual here, which is not in
Melville’s manner, nor a mark of literature of the time. Another instance of the
denial of association is found in Richard Henry Stoddard’s Abraham Lincoln: An
Horatian Ode (1865), in verses that are as interesting for the current issue as they are
without poetic merit (24–36):
We woke to find a mourning Earth

Our Lares shivered on the hearth,
The roof-tree fallen, all
That could affright, appall!
Such thunderbolts, in other lands,

Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared with us, till now,
Each laurelled Caesar’s brow!
No Caesar he, whom we lament,

A man without a precedent,
Sent, it would seem, to do
His work and perish too!
Written in the same year as that of Stoddard’s friend Melville, the poem seems to
echo it or be echoed by it (“No Caesar he, whom we lament” ~ “But not in Caesar’s
sway; / Not Rome o’ercome by Roman arms we sing”)—Melville came first one
would hope. But Stoddard also seems to look to Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” the meter of which, along with a version of the
title, Stoddard replicates.6 There is therefore something appealing about the inter-
textual potential of 29–30, lines that look not only to Rome and to Caesar but also
to Marvell’s England and his Cromwell: “Such thunderbolts, in other lands, / Have
smitten the rod from royal hands.” The “laurelled Caesar’s brow,” which places the
death of Lincoln in a Roman context, also invokes the lightning bolt, taken from
Lucan’s simile, with which Marvell’s Cromwell struck the head of Charles I: “And
Caesar’s head at last / [the bolt] Did through his laurels blast”—with Pompey,
Charles I and Abraham Lincoln triple victims in the timeless collective of civil
discord.
Similar strategies are at work with William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878), a New
Englander and great supporter of Lincoln, who translated the Iliad and Odyssey and
wrote poems on a wide variety of topics, mostly on nature—rivers, forests, flowers, and
304 afterlife
the like. In September 1861 he came out with “Our Country’s Call.” Its opening is in the
Virgilian tradition activated by Cowley and other poets of the English Civil War:7
Lay down the axe; fling by the spade;

Leave in its track the toiling plough;
The rifle and the bayonet-blade
For arms like yours were fitter now.
In the same year, 1861, the opening year of the Civil War, Bryant also wrote a
translation of one of Horace’s strongest anti–civil war poems, entitling it “Civil
War. From Horace” (Epode 7):
Ha! whither rush ye? to what deeds of guilt?

Why lift the sword again?
Has not enough of Latian blood been spilt
To purple land and main?
Not with proud Carthage war ye now, to set

Her turrets in a blaze;
Nor fight to lead the Briton, tameless yet,
Chained on the public ways.
But that our country, at the Parthian’s prayer,

May perish self-o’erthrown.
The wolf and lion war not thus; they spare
Their kindred each his own.
What moves ye thus? blind fury, heaven’s decree,

Or restless guilt? Reply!—
They answer not; upon their faces, see,
Paleness and horror lie!
Fate and the wrong against a brother wrought

Have caused that deadly rage.
The blood of unoffending Remus brought
This curse upon our age.
It is to my knowledge the only poem of Horace Bryant translated, and it is hard in

the circumstances not to see the closing words, “brought / This curse upon our age,”
as having contemporary application.
But it would be left for a later poet, himself fully trained in the classics, fully to
implicate the American and Roman wars. Robert Lowell’s immediate post–World
War II “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” is in passing a deeply ambivalent reading of
the Aeneid, with the old man of Concord playing in his reverie the role of Aeneas
but in his own narration morphing into Mussolini or Hitler:
And I stand up and heil the thousand men,

Who carry Pallas to the bird-priest.
My concern here is solely with the old man’s waking from the funeral of Pallas, who
dies in Virgil’s mythologized version of civil war (Trojans and their Italian allies
versus Italian):
Church is over, and its bell

Frightens the yellowhammers, as I wake
And watch the whitecaps wrinkle up the lake.
Mother’s great-aunt, who died when I was eight,
Stands by our parlor sabre. “Boy, it’s late.
Vergil must keep the Sabbath.” Eighty years!
It all comes back. My Uncle Charles appears.
Blue-capped and bird-like. Phillips Brooks and Grant
Are frowning at his coffin, and my aunt,
Hearing his colored volunteers parade
Through Concord, laughs, and tells her English maid
To clip his yellow nostril hairs, and fold
His colors on him . . . It is I. I hold
His sword to keep from falling, for the dust
On the stuffed birds is breathless, for the bust
Of young Augustus weighs on Vergil’s shelf:
It scowls into my glasses at itself.
So the narrating, dreaming Aeneas has become a Lowell, who on awakening remem-
bers back eighty years to the funeral of Charles Russell Lowell (1835–64), Union
hero of the Civil War. The poet closes in confrontation with a scowling Augustus,
ultimate victor of the Roman civil wars, and protofascist in Lowell’s postwar reading
in a poem that collapses and unites historical moments as potently as any of the
texts—or song—in question.
4. Spender, Lorca, Parsons, and Radnóti
In the Spanish Civil War, the poetry belonged to the antifascist republicans. If
poetry is effective at pointing to pain and loss, then theirs was the winning cause.
As Stephen Spender put it (Spender and Lehmann 1939: 7):
306 afterlife
Poets and poetry have played a considerable part in the Spanish War,
because to many people the struggle of the Republicans has seemed a
struggle for the conditions without which the writing and reading of
poetry are almost impossible in modern society.
This was particularly so after the Falangists murdered Federico García Lorca. I have
elsewhere quoted a poem of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, who would him-
self be murdered in 1944 by the SS and the Hungarian army, but who had also met
Lorca in Paris and, in 1937, written a poem in his remembrance:8
Loved poet of Hispania,

true lovers sang your poetry,—
and so what else could they, the others, do,
you were a poet,—than murder you.
The people fight their war alone: heia,
Federico García!
The final section of Spender’s anthology is entitled “Lorca,” as is the first of the
three poems by Geoffrey Parsons, one of a number of Anglophone poets of the
Spanish Civil War. It begins in similar vein:
The Fascists have only one answer for a poet—

Their stuttering lead syllables prevent repartee
Putting an end to his stanzas and fancy speech.
The poem focuses on the ease with which the poet is killed when civil war is under
way. A later stanza is particularly relevant to our theme:
What is the power of words against flight of bullets?

A puff of articulate air, no deflector of death;
But they dared not listen, they burst the bubble of speech.
No Virgilian could encounter these lines without thinking of the ninth Eclogue and
its famous lines, as the shepherd poet Moeris replies to Lycidas’ question about the
security of the master singer Menalcas. That one’s poetry, Lycidas had heard, had
saved him from the depredations of a war-torn pastoral landscape, from the death
that comes even to the poet. The singer’s fate is not spelled out, but there are no
grounds for such optimism (11–13):
audieras, et fama fuit; sed carmina tantum

nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia quantum
Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas.
So you had heard, and so the story went, but our poems
Lycidas, have as much power as they say Chaonian doves do
at the coming of the eagle.
I have no sense that Parsons was invoking these lines, and the thought is a natural
one, but Radnóti is a different matter, for he in fact wrote a number of “Eclogues”
after Virgil. “First Eclogue” (1938) was written within two months of his translation
precisely of Virgil’s ninth, and it is demonstrably an application of Virgil’s dark
times to Radnóti’s own.9 Given the connection between Virgil’s first and ninth
Eclogues, Radnóti’s title is itself an act of intertextual virtuosity. He rewrites these
lines of the Virgilian poem, making Lorca the poet for whom the eagles come, in
verses that are particularly chilling in light of the Hungarian poet’s own fate (“First
Eclogue”):
Shepherd
Is it true what I hear?—on the crest of the wild Pyrenees, that blazing
muzzles of cannon debate among corpses frozen in blood,
that bears and soldiers alike take fright from that place? That armies
of women, the child and the aged, run with their tightly-tied bundles
and throw themselves down on the earth when death comes circling over?
that corpses outnumber any who come there to clear them away?
Say, for you knew him, did he that they call Federico survive?
Poet
No. It’s been two years now since they struck him down in Granada.
Shepherd
García Lorca is dead! and yet there was no one would tell me!
Rumors of war travel swiftly; of all men that one, the poet,
vanishes thus! and Europe—did Europe mourn for him then?
Poet
Nobody noticed. Be glad if, finding the shattered lines in
the embers where burnt the pyre, the rummaging wind should learn them;
and if they inquire, then tell his inheritors nought else remains.
In Radnóti’s vision the wars of Virgil’s Rome become the wars of Europe in the
twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War that took García Lorca and the Second
World War that resulted in the execution of the Hungarian poet himself, both mur-
dered by their fascist oppressors and buried in mass graves, powerless poets when
the eagles of Mars came for them. But it is the poets, and their nightingales, that live
on, alone and in their intertextual communities, keeping the memory of civil dis-
cord alive as surely as any monument.
308 afterlife
notes
1. See http://dylanchords.nfshost.com/41_lat/lonesome_day_blues.htm.
2. Pritchard 1973: 3–18 for the circumstances of composition and publication.
3. Pritchard 1973: 36–42 and ad loc. for the following examples.
4. And to a lesser extent, A. 9.433–37 (death of the youthful, eroticized Euryalus). See
Pritchard 1973 ad 2.145–56 for the outpouring of mourning when the body of Cavendish
was laid out in London.
5. See Pritchard 1973: 41–51 for further connections.
6. Stoddard, a man of many meters, used this one, a stanza of two iambic tetrameters
followed by two trimeters, on only two other occasions, in his “The dreary winter days are
past” and “Salve, Regina.”
7. In 1817 he had translated G. 3.242–54, beneath the title “Love’s power,” with a
footnote “from the Latin”; see Godwin 1883, 2:293.
8. For fuller discussion, see Thomas 2001: 119–22; 2007b: 199–204. The translation is
that of Ozsváth and Turner 2000: 83.
9. See George 1986: 365–72 for a discussion of the two poems.
Abbreviations
AA Archäologischer Anzeiger
AHR American historical review
AJA American journal of archaeology
AJPh American journal of philology
ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
BICS Bulletin of the institute of classical studies of the University
of London
BSR Papers of the British school at Rome
BullCom Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale
di Roma
CIL Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum
CJ Classical journal
ClAnt Classical antiquity
CompCrit Comparative criticism
CompDr Comparative drama
CPh Classical philology
CQ Classical quarterly
CW The classical world
DArch Dialoghi di archeologia
G&R Greece & Rome
GIF Giornale italiano di filologia
HSCPh Harvard studies in classical philology
IJNA International journal of nautical archaeology and
underwater exploration
310 abbreviations
JDAI Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts

JHS Journal of Hellenic studies
JIES Journal of Indo-European studies
JRS Journal of Roman studies
JWarb Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld institutes
LIMC Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (Zurich 1981–2009)
LSJ Liddell and Scott, Greek–English lexicon. 9th ed., rev. H. Stuart Jones
(1925–40); suppl. by E. A. Barber and others (1968)
LTUR Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae (Rome 1993–2000)
MDAI(R) Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts,
römische Abteilung
MLQ Modern language quarterly
MRR The magistrates of the Roman republic, ed. T. R. S. Broughton. 3 vols.
(Cleveland 1951–86).
OCD The Oxford classical dictionary. 3rd ed., ed. S. Hornblower and
A. Spawforth (Oxford 1996).
OLD Oxford Latin dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford 1982)
PCPhS Proceedings of the Cambridge philological society
PLLS Papers of the Liverpool/Leeds/Langford Latin seminar
PP La parola del passato
PVS Proceedings of the Virgil society
REA Revue des études anciennes
RIDA Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité
RSP Rivista di studi pompeiani
SO Symbolae osloenses
TAPhA Transactions of the American philological association
TLG Thesaurus linguae Graecae
WS Wiener Studien
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Index
Achaemenides, 134–36 Annius Eros, 198

Achilles, 136–38, 140 Antistius Vetus, Lucius, 267
Actian games, 196 Antonius, Marcus, 108–10, 133, 138–39, 143,
Actium, 5, 16, 80, 84, 119, 133, 137–39, 143, 152, 166, 187–202, 230, 244, 249–50
152–53, 180–81, 187–205, 210, 233–34, in Shakespeare, 273–88
241–44, 250, 263, 282–85 Apollo, 191–93, 196, 234
artistic representations of, 187–205 Apollo (at Pompeii), Temple of, 198
Adherbal, 210, 216 Apollo Actius, Temple of, 196–97
Aemilius Lepidus, Marcus (cos. 78), 79 Apollo Palatinus, Temple of, 241
Aemilius Paullus, Lucius, 141–42 Appian, 27, 106, 108–9, 112, 115–16, 278–80,
Aeneas, 113, 133–35 285, 287
shield of, 141–54 Ara Pacis, 192
Aequimaelium, 176, 182 Asinius Pollio, Gaius, 9, 28–29, 83
Afranius, Lucius, 159–60 Atilius Regulus, Gaius, 141–42
Afranius Burrus, Sextus, 266 Aufidius Bassus, 251
Agamben, Giorgio, 171–82 Augustales, 188, 196
Agrippina the Elder, 264 Augustan Concord, Temple of, 10
Agrippina the Younger, 265–67 Augustine, 3
Alba, 147–49 Augustus, 10, 15, 122, 140–41, 145, 152, 154,
Alcaeus, 212, 225 171–82, 187–202, 233–34, 240
Allecto, 5–6, 239, 300 Res Gestae, 108, 145
Althusser, Louis, 45, 63 triumph, 10, 231
Ammianus Marcellinus, 93 See also Octavian.
Anchises, 139–43 Aurelian (emperor), 97
Anicetus, 268
Anna, 134 bacchants, 226–28
Annales Maximi, 145 Ballista (praetorian prefect), 96
330 index
Barea Soranus, 269 conflict of the orders (struggle of the

Brindisi (Brundisium), 167 orders), 10, 74–76, 113
Britannicus, 265–66 Corbulo (Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo), 267
Bruttedius Niger, 251 Corfinium, 167
Brutus (Marcus Junius Brutus), 40, 42, 116, Cornelius Sulla, Faustus, 266–67
141 Cossus (Aulus Cornelius Cossus), 141
in Lucan, 211 Cossutianus Capito, 268–69
Buthrotum, 136–37 Cowley, Abraham, 299–301
Cremutius Cordus, Aulus, 251–52, 263
Caesar. See Julius Caesar, Gaius. Crepereius Calpurnianus of
Calpurnius Piso, Gaius, 268. Pompeiopolis, 105, 107
See also Pisonian conspiracy Cures, 147
Calpurnius Piso, Gnaeus, 263 Curio (Gaius Scribonius Curio), 165
Calpurnius Piso Licinianus, Lucius, 262 Cyriades, 95
Camillus (Marcus Furius Camillus), 10
Capitol, 150–51 Dante, 20–21
Carthage, 135, 142–43 decemvirs, 245
Cartilius Poplicola, Gaius, 193–95 Deiphobus, 140
Cassius, Lucius, 268 Denham, John, 299–301
Cassius, Spurius, 172 Dido, 134–35, 140
Cassius Dio, 89, 106–10 Dio. See Cassius Dio
Cassius Longinus, Gaius, 268 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 17, 27, 105–6,
in Shakespeare, 275 113–15, 151
Catiline (Lucius Sergius Catilina), 54–65, Dionysus, 193, 227–31
152, 172 Dirae, 5–6
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Discord, 3–8, 10, 209–11
Cato), 48–49 discordia, 4–5, 209–11
Cato the Younger (Marcus Porcius Cato Domitia, 266
Uticensis), 162–64, 229 Dylan, Bob, 293–96
in Lucan, 207–19
in Sallust, 47–48, 59–65 elegy, 233–45
Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus), 274 Empedocles, 5, 209, 211
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), 9–10, 15, Ennius, Quintus, 5, 137–38, 209–10
28–37, 40–42, 49–54, 105, 110, Eteocles, 217
164–65, 180
Cincinnatus (Lucius Quinctius Fabius Maximus, Quintus, 141–42
Cincinnatus), 171–82 Fabricius Luscinus, Gaius, 141–42
Cincius Alimentus, Lucius, 171, 179 Fasti Capitolini, 145
Cinna (Lucius Cornelius Cinna), 78–81 Favonius, Marcus, 106, 111–12
Claudius (emperor), 265–66 Fenestella, 251
Claudius Gothicus (emperor), 97 ficus Ruminalis, 266
Claudius Marcellus, Marcus, 140, 142 Flavius, Lucius, 163
Cleopatra, 10, 108, 133, 138–39, 143, 193, Florus (Lucius Annaeus Florus), 26
244 fratricide, 126–27, 214–18
in Horace, 223–32 freedmen, 187–202
in Shakespeare, 273–88
concordia, 13, 15, 49–50, 54, 66, 164, 209, Galba (emperor), 261–63
256 Gallic emperors, 94
Concord, 3, 7–8, 10 Gallienus (emperor), 87–99
Temple of, 3–4, 10 Gates of War, 4, 10, 111, 210
index 331
Gauls, 150–51 Lyotard, Jean-François, 46–47

Germanicus, 263 lyric poetry, 223–32
Glaucia (Gaius Servilius Glaucia), 77
Gotarzes, 265 Macellum (in Pompeii), 198–200
Gracchi, 4, 9, 26–41, 81, 163, 179–81 Machiavelli, 13
See also Sempronius Gracchus, Gaius Macrianus, 96
and Sempronius Gracchus, Tiberius Maecenas (Gaius Maecenas), 241
Maelius, Spurius, 171–82
Hannibal, 138–39, 143 Maevius, 219
Helenus (seer), 138 Manilius, Marcus, 150, 209, 211
Helenus (son of Pyrrhus, King of Manlius Capitolinus, Marcus, 149–52, 172
Macedon), 138 Marcellus, 140–41
Henderson, John, 45–46, 67 Marius, Gaius, 65, 77, 83, 124, 162
Hercules (Heracles), 193, 202 Mark Antony. See Antonius, Marcus
Hirtius, Aulus, 122 Mars Ultor, Temple of, 196
Historia Augusta, 16, 87–99 Marvell, Andrew, 296–98
Homer, 135 May, Thomas, 297–98
homo sacer, 171–82 Melville, Herman, 301–3
homonoia, 7, 13 Meliboeus, 4, 147, 244
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 9, 19, Menenius Agrippa, 270
25, 42, 126, 210, 223–31 Messalina, 265
House of the Vettii. See Vettii, House of. Mettus, 148–49
Ilioneus, 134 metus hostilis, 9, 50, 59, 66, 121
Isis (at Pompeii), Temple of, 188–93 Micipsa, 210, 216
misericordia, 48, 61, 63
Julius Caesar, Gaius, 15, 83–84, 111–12, 141, Misenum, 274, 279–80
159–68, 255 Mummius, Lucius, 141–42
in Lucan, 207–19 Mutina, 121–22, 234
in Sallust, 61–65 Myrsilos, 225
Junia Silana, 266–67
Junius Blaesus, Quintus, 263 Naumachia Augusti, 196–98
Juno (at Carthage), Temple of, 146–47 naumachiae, 196–99
Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus), 135–39
Lepidus (Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Nero (emperor), 265–70
triumvir), 80, 115 Nerva (emperor), 129
in Shakespeare, 273–81 Nestor, 120
Lesbia, 274 Nicopolis, 138, 196
Life of Probus. See Historia Augusta
Lives of the Gallieni. See Historia Augusta Obellius Firmus, 198
Livia, 250, 264 Octavia (sister of Augustus), 281
Livilla, 264 Octavia (wife of Nero), 267
Livius Drusus, Marcus, 26, 83, 114 Octavian, 84, 108, 138–39, 187–202,
Livy (Titus Livius), 9, 15, 19, 146–52, 228–32, 250
171–82 in Shakespeare, 273–88
Lorca, Federico Garcia, 305–6 See also Augustus.
Lowell, Robert, 304–5 Odaenathus of Palmyra, 94–96
Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 4, 7, 11, Odysseus (Ulysses), 140
21, 120, 207–19, 278, 297 Ofillia Romana, 198
Lucian, 105 Opimius, Lucius, 76–77
Lucretius Carus, Titus, 35–36, 209, 213, 215 Orestes, 136–37, 218
332 index
Ostia, 193 Bellum Catilinae, 37–38, 55–67, 163, 210

Otho (emperor), 121–24, 262–63 Bellum Jugurthinum, 39, 149, 216
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 211–12, 217 Histories, 38, 66
Saturninus, 77, 180
Palatine, 151, 153 Scaeva (in Lucan), 216
Pansa (Gaius Vibius Pansa Scipio Aemilianus, Publius
Caetronianus), 122 Cornelius, 141–42
Paris (actor), 266 Scipio Africanus, Publius
Parthia, 265 Cornelius, 141–42
Pentheus, 227–29 Scipio Nasica, Publius Cornelius, 77
Perseus (son of Philip V), 138 Securitas Augusta, 193
Perugia (Perusia), 119, 122, 233–34 Sejanus (Lucius Aelius Sejanus), 264–65
Petreius, Marcus, 159–61 Sempronius Gracchus, Gaius, 3, 9, 26–42,
Petronius, 6–7, 198 76, 180
Pharsalus, 119, 121, 208, 211 Sempronius Gracchus, Tiberius, 9, 26–42,
Philip V, 138 76, 179–80
Philippi, 119, 121, 234 senatus consultum ultimum, 162, 165, 180
Pisonian conspiracy, 268 Seneca the Elder (Marcus Annaeus
Plutarch, 111, 275–76, 279–287 Seneca), 129, 251
Pollio. See Asinius Pollio, Gaius Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus
Polynices, 217 Seneca), 127, 209, 214, 217, 270
Pompeia, 249 Sertorius, Quintus, 79
Pompeii, 187–92 Servilius Ahala, Gaius, 171, 176,
Pompeius Magnus, Sextus. See Sextus Servilius Nonianus, Marcus, 291
Pompey. Sextus Pompey, 115, 229, 249–50
Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus), 4, 7, in Shakespeare, 274–81
51–52, 54, 80, 83–84, 111–12, 116, 119, Shakespeare, William, 16, 273–88
128, 141, 159–65, 229 Silanus (Lucius Junius Silanus), 268
in Lucan, 207–19 Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius
Poplicola. See Cartilius Poplicola, Gaius. Asconius, 217
Poppaea, 267–68 Sinon, 134–36
Praeneste, 193–95 Sisenna (Lucius Cornelius Sisenna), 81,
Priam, 134 128
Probus (emperor), 91–92 Social War, 78–83
Propertius, Sextus, 4, 7, 20, 139, 190–92, Sosibius, 265
233–45 Spartoi, 217
proscriptions, 78, 80, 109, 215 Spurius Maelius. See Maelius, Spurius.
Pyrrhus. See Neoptolemus. stasis, 46–47, 212
Pyrrhus (King of Macedon), 135–39, 143 Statius (Publius Papinius Statius), 11
Stoicism, 208–9
Radnóti, Miklós, 306–7 Strebel, H. G., 106
Remus, 5, 9, 25, 147–48, 216. See also Sulla (Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix), 4, 14,
fratricide 37, 52–55, 77–84, 124, 128, 177–78,
Romulus, 5, 9, 140–147, 151, 216. See also 181, 215–16
fratricide in Lucan, 215–16
Rubellius Plautus, ?Sergius, 266–67 Sulpicius Rufus, Publius, 82
Rullus (Publius Servilius Rullus), 163
Rutilius Rufus, Publius, 35 Tacitus (Publius Cornelius Tacitus), 16, 89,
93, 119–29, 261–70
Sabines, 147–48 Agricola, 128
Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), 9, 14, 18, Annals, 119, 261–70
37–42, 45–67, 123–26, 163, 210, 216 Histories, 11, 15, 119–29, 261–63
index 333
Tarpeian Rock, 150 Troy, 113–14, 238

Tarquinius, 152 tyrannicide, 178, 180
Tatius, Titus, 148
Thebes, 234–39 Valerian (emperor), 96
Theodosius I (emperor), 88, 98 Valerius Asiaticus, 265
The thirty tyrants. See Historia Augusta Valerius Maximus, 18, 250, 252–54
Thrasea Paetus (Publius Clodius Thrasea Varro (Marcus Terentius Varro), 9, 15, 25–42
Paetus), 268–69 Velleius Paterculus, 18, 27, 250, 252, 254–58
Thucydides, 14, 17, 46–48, 58–59, 105–16 Verrius Flaccus, Marcus, 173–74, 179
Tiberius (emperor), 10, 249–57, 263–65 Vespasian (emperor), 74
Tiberius Nero (Tiberius Claudius Vettii, House of, 17, 188–93
Nero), 249–52, 255 Vettius Conviva, Aulus, 188
Tigellinus (Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus), 267 Vettius Restitutus, Aulus, 188
titanomachy, 234 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 4–6, 19,
Trajan (emperor), 129 133–43, 145–54
Trimalchio, 198 Vitellius (emperor), 121, 262–63
triumph, 10, 19, 94, 97, 99, 153–54, 208, 225, Vitellius, Lucius, 262–65
230–31 Volteius, 217–18
triumvirate, 9, 80
in Shakespeare, 273–88 Zenobia, 97–98

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part i Beginnings, Endings

1. The Two-Headed State: How Romans Explained Civil War, 25

2. Word at War: The Prequel, 45

3. Rome’s First Civil War and the Fragility of Republican

4. Civil War? What Civil War? Usurpers in the Historia Augusta, 87

5. “Learning from that violent schoolmaster”: Thucydidean Intertextuality and

6. Tarda Moles Civilis Belli: The Weight of the Past in

7. Aeacidae Pyrrhi: Patterns of Myth and History in Aeneid 1–6, 133

8. Ab Urbe Condita: Roman History on the Shield of Aeneas, 145

part iii Aftermath

9. Creating a Grand Coalition of True Roman Citizens:

10. Spurius Maelius: Dictatorship and the Homo Sacer, 171

11. Representations and Re-presentations of the Battle of Actium, 187

12. Discordia Fratrum: Aspects of Lucan’s Conception of Civil War, 207

13. “Dionysiac Poetics” and the Memory of Civil War in

14. Propertius on Not Writing about Civil Wars, 233

16. Intestinum Scelus: Preemptive Execution in Tacitus’ Annals, 261

rhiannon ash teaches classics at Merton College, Oxford University. She

william w. batstone is professor of Greek and Latin at The Ohio State

brian w. breed is associate professor of classics at the University of

cynthia damon is professor of classical studies at the University of

elaine fantham is Giger Professor of Latin Emerita, Princeton University. She is

denis feeney is Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University. He is the author

andrew feldherr is professor of classics at Princeton University. He is the author

harriet i. flower is professor of classics at Princeton University, where she teaches

alain m. gowing is professor of classics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

cam grey is an assistant professor in the department of classical studies at the

michèle lowrie is professor of classics at the University of Chicago. She is author

christopher pelling is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. His books

david quint is Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale

andreola rossi is the author of Contexts of War: Manipulation of Genre in Virgilian

t. p. wiseman is emeritus professor of classics at the University of Exeter and a

However, what distressed the people . . . was the building of a

Why not a Temple of Discord? Augustine wonders (C.D. 3.25) “whether

ante lupos rapient haedi, vituli ante leones,

sic eat, o superi: quando pietasque ﬁdesque

3. Rome’s Civil Wars

A Temple of Discord? To Machiavelli, at least, having the advantage of Augustine in

My title is taken from the most systematically misunderstood author in

2. Florus 3.17.3 (2.5)

3. Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae 2.11.2–3

4. Appian Civil Wars 1.1.1, 1.2.4–5

5. Velleius Paterculus 2.3.2–3

he ended in untimely death a life that he could have lived most

6. Cicero De republica 1.31

7. Cicero De oratore 1.225–26 = Lucius Crassus Suasio legis Serviliae fr. 24

distinction as a leading politician, to say what you did in a crowded

8. Cicero Ad Atticum 8.11.1–2 = De republica 5.8 (trans. D. R. Shackleton

9. Varro De lingua Latina 9.6

10. Varro(?) fr. 58 Funaioli = Gellius 17.21.48

And in that same period Diogenes the Stoic, Carneades the

11. Varro Antiquitates humanae fr. 21.3 Mirsch = Gellius 13.13.4

It is legally possible for a private citizen even to summon to law those

12. Varro Menippean Satires fr. 512 Astbury = Nonius 310L

Or the satirist’s observation of the decadence of modern equites:

So in those days a keen soldier didn’t avoid a bad-tempered horse that