This volume constitutes a welcome and stimulating contribution to the long-standing debate about the final decades of the Roman Republic, a debate that has become even more vigorous in the light of recent geopolitical developments. The book assembles eleven papers in three thematic groups, defined by the editors as (1) the arts of government, (2) the interaction of society and government and (3) the creation of memory for future government.
In the first paper Cornwell shows how leaders used negotiations to create legitimacy in the civil war of 49–48 bce. She points out that wars on the peripheries of the Mediterranean made interactions in the city of Rome often almost impossible, thus giving rise to new diplomatic spaces such as villas and commander’s tents. Such practices were not new, but went back at least to the time of the Second Punic War, with extended periods of warfare in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere. As the geographical realities were the same between the late third century bce and the forties of the first century bce, the shift in practices between the two time periods must reflect a change in the norms and conventions that related to these realities. By the early 40s bce this had led to what Cornwell convincingly describes as ‘a construction of diplomatic space within the social framework of amicitia’ and ‘an orientation … away from public, political space’ (p. 31).
E. Zucchetti, drawing upon E. Laclau’s theory of popular subjectivity alongside A. Gramsci’s framework of ‘hegemony’, deals with the way in which ‘the people’ became a category of political communication in 49/48 bce. Although Zucchetti is surely right to emphasise a bottom-up perspective on the civil wars, his argument carries a certain risk of downplaying the importance of armed men of military age. In particular, the claim that ‘the large majority of the populus Romanus did not partake in the war directly’ (p. 34) would deserve more careful contextualisation. According to recent estimates by Scheidel and Tan, mobilisation rates during the civil wars of the first century bce ranged from 8 to 9% of the overall free population (W. Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century [2017], p. 186; J. Tan, ‘Climate Change and Rome’s Changing Republic’, in: M. Balbo and F. Santangelo [edd.], A Community in Transition: Rome Between Hannibal and the Gracchi [2022], pp. 21–54, at 41–2). When it comes to gauging the impact of military service on late Republican society more broadly, it is instructive to compare these rates with the American Civil War, undoubtedly one of the most disruptive internal conflicts in recorded history. During this war, the Union mobilised roughly 10% of its population, whilst the Confederacy’s mobilisation rate was c. 14 to 17% of its non-slave population and c. 11% of the South’s overall population (Scheidel [2017], p. 175). The estimated Roman rates are equivalent. As in nineteenth-century North America, soldiers in Republican Rome certainly were the most powerful agents in times of open conflict, clearly superior to the rest of society in their potential for applied violence.
O. Liubimova focuses on Caesar’s civil war coinage, and in particular on the issue RRC 452, which features an enigmatic numeral. After convincingly dating the series to 48 bce and pointing out that these coins were primarily minted as payment for Caesar’s troops, she identifies the most probable context for the coin as Caesar’s 52nd-birthday celebration in his military camp at Apollonia. In the subsequent chapter L. Kersten deals with the role of divine kinship in the civil wars of the 30s bce. She shows that only Octavian and Sextus Pompeius referred to their powerful father figures in this way, as both were too young for the traditional cursus honorum. Thus, in times of uncertainty and crisis, the shifting pattern of social generations and their movement towards younger leaders favoured those who were privileged in terms of kinship.
B. Jordan analyses the role of client kings and allies in the context of the civil wars, a topic that has recently gained broader attention (e.g. G. Traina, La guerre mondiale des Romains: de l’assassinat de César à la mort d’Antoine et de Cléopâtre [2023]). In many cases the sources seem to suggest that allied rulers held more agency than the Roman representatives of the hegemonic, albeit internally fragmented, superpower. In particular in the East, the deep entanglement of Romans in regional power networks had already started in the generations before 49 bce, but, after the outbreak of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, these dynamics, as Jordan convincingly argues, initiated a broader shift from ‘interstate amicitiae towards personal relationships’ (p. 106), by which allied leaders intensified their personal relations with individual Romans.
S. Tariverdieva looks at Marcus Agrippa and his brother as paradigmatic for the existential challenges and rifts of a civil war generation. Whilst Marcus supported Caesar and Octavian, his brother fought with Cato the Younger in Africa. Tariverdieva addresses the question, why and how the two brothers, from a comparatively unimportant family, had ended up in such relations of personal friendship with Cato and Octavian. Due to the nature of the available sources, she mostly focuses on the figure of Marcus Agrippa, arriving at the interesting hypothesis that the Vipsanii had a patron, tentatively identified as L. Marcius Philippus (cos. 56 bce), who was well connected with both Caesar and Cato. This plausible reconstruction sheds light on how allegiances and careers were formed through personal contacts in the period leading up to the civil wars of the 40s and 30s bce.
In the subsequent chapter V. La Salvia and M. Moderato offer an archaeological perspective on the siege of Corfinium, albeit curiously without reference to the fundamental study by G. Veith (‘Corfinium: eine kriegsgeschichtliche Studie’, Klio 13 [1913], 1–26). A brief overview of Caesar’s account is followed by a description of recent archaeological fieldwork. This fieldwork, however, does not seem to have focused on either the dynamics or the impact of the siege. Rather, it was related to matters of urban structure and development, without applying the now commonly established methods of conflict and battlefield archaeology, such as large-scale surveys, landscape studies, LiDAR scans, the study of satellite images and cadastral plans, or targeted excavations of extramural sites in search of potential siegeworks or military camps.
On much firmer ground, B. Augier explores the changing face of the command structure in the civil war period, with a focus on the role of a shared military spirit in the creation of consensus. He convincingly conceptualises late Republican military authority as grounded in an interplay of bottom-up value systems and top-down role models. It is important to recognise that this interplay was subject to constant demographic and social transformations due to military losses and promotions. Augier touches upon these aspects by pointing to the importance of legati and tribuni militum and the growing importance of personal ties for the selection of such crucial posts in the 40s and 30s bce.
As F. Gauthier reminds us, the waging of war depends on the availability of funds. In this respect the late Republican civil wars were no exception. Indeed, Gauthier can show that these conflicts fundamentally relied on a well-established set of measures that had been characteristic at least since the third century bce, namely ‘improvisation, ad hoc requisitions, and the exploitation of fiscal regimes already in place’ (p. 154). The main difference was the enormous scale of military financing after 49 bce. Gauthier exemplifies this by the fiscal measures taken by both sides in the Philippi campaign of 43/42 bce, conceptualised as a proper ‘war economy’. Although this term may strike some readers as overly ‘modernist’, it seems justified by the systematic way in which the costs of war were recuperated from provincial regions, particularly the densely urbanised areas of the East, coupled with an intense output of coinage through military mints.
The mentalities of the 40s and 30s of the first century bce are brought to the fore by J. Gerrish in her chapter on the figure of Mithridates in Sallust’s Histories. She proposes to see the civil wars as a ‘form of “collective” or “cultural trauma”’, due to ‘the widespread breakdown of models …, as traditional systems of morality, politics, economies, patronage, and so forth failed under the pressures of internecine strife’ (p. 170). One possible way to deal with such trauma can be ‘normative inversion’, which means uniting against an external enemy. Gerrish argues that this was made impossible by the nature of late Republican civil war and that Sallust deliberately exemplifies this conundrum in his portrayal of Mithridates. According to her elegant reading, we should understand Mithridates as an amalgamation of the ‘sincere’ and the ‘false’ historian who tries to establish his own, highly curated account of events. This could be understood as a critique of triumviral propaganda and attempts to establish an ultimate truth without alternatives.
In the final chapter Westall sheds important new light on Asinius Pollio, the context and aims of his work and its political agenda. Westall’s convincing and careful exegesis of Horace (Carm. 2.1.1) shows that the consulate of Metellus Celer and Afranius in 60 bce was not the actual starting point of the Histories, but the time in which the political issues that feature in Pollio started. Drawing upon recent research on the contents and structure of Pollio’s work, Westall convincingly argues that it was of ‘more limited temporal scope (49–40)’ and ‘in many ways similar to the commentarii of Caesar dedicated to the civil war of 49–48, but marked by a flair for the dramatic and a penchant for self-referentiality’ (p. 182).
Overall, this book has much to offer to anyone interested in the turbulent final decades of Republican Rome. Its significance goes well beyond narrow antiquarian interest. In the introduction the editors state that ‘the study of the Roman civil wars of the late Republic has never been more potentially rewarding’ (p. 3), and this view is certainly valid.
