Restraint Conflict And The Fall Of The Roman Republic

"The Romans harped endlessly on "morality," a cultural feature long ignored as a literary trope or misappreciated as a mere marker of elite status. This book shows how, instead, social norms of personal restraint was part of a habitus of foundational values that acted as meta-rules for the Roman aristocratic performative-competitive political system. The book investigates these norms and explicates their positive content in the republican framework and their resulting place in the Romans' habitual mental map. The book then examines how the social norms came into irreconcilable conflict, arguing that-far from Rome progressing from a pristine past moral state to a sad moral nadir-the same "morals" of personal self-control stabilized and destabilized the Republic at different points in time. The values eventually lost their prohibitory force to constrain action, but not because they were abandoned. Rather, disputes over the proper application and meaning of the norms in novel political and social circumstances grew into violent clashes as disputants presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the essential values and, accordingly, imagined their opponents as bent on the Republic's destruction, while no normatively acceptable third-party judge could exist to resolve the conflicts. Thus, the aristocracy's consensus formed and then cracked along axes over what constituted normative restraint behavior, which both accounts for the ubiquity of this cultural feature, and which automatically undermined a central pillar of the performative-competitive structure itself"--

"The Romans harped endlessly on "morality," a cultural feature long ignored as a literary trope or misappreciated as a mere marker of elite status. This book shows how, instead, social norms of personal restraint was part of a habitus of foundational values that acted as meta-rules for the Roman aristocratic performative-competitive political system. The book investigates these norms and explicates their positive content in the republican framework and their resulting place in the Romans' habitual mental map. The book then examines how the social norms came into irreconcilable conflict, arguing that-far from Rome progressing from a pristine past moral state to a sad moral nadir-the same "morals" of personal self-control stabilized and destabilized the Republic at different points in time. The values eventually lost their prohibitory force to constrain action, but not because they were abandoned. Rather, disputes over the proper application and meaning of the norms in novel political and social circumstances grew into violent clashes as disputants presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the essential values and, accordingly, imagined their opponents as bent on the Republic's destruction, while no normatively acceptable third-party judge could exist to resolve the conflicts. Thus, the aristocracy's consensus formed and then cracked along axes over what constituted normative restraint behavior, which both accounts for the ubiquity of this cultural feature, and which automatically undermined a central pillar of the performative-competitive structure itself"--

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The second century BCE was a time of prolonged debate at Rome about the changing nature of warfare. From the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 to Rome’s first civil war in 88 BCE, warfare shifted from the struggle against a great external enemy to a conflict against internal parties. This book argues that Rome’s Italian subjects were central to this development: having rebelled and defected to Hannibal at the end of the third century, the allies again rebelled in 91 BCE, with significant consequences for Roman thought about warfare as such. These "rebellions" constituted an Italian renewal of the war against their old conqueror, Rome, and an internal war within the polity. Accordingly, we need to add 'internal war' to the already well-established dichotomy of foreign and civil war. This fresh analysis of the second century demonstrates that the Roman experience of internal war during this period provided the natural stepping-stone in the invention of civil war as such. It conceives of the period from the Second Punic War onward as an 'antebellum' period to the later civil war(s) of the Late Republic, during which contemporary observers looked back at the last 'great war' against Hannibal in preparation for the next conflict.

Revised and updated to include the latest research in the field, this second edition of a popular history text examines how the Roman republic was destabilized by the unplanned growth of the Roman Empire. Central discussion points include: the government of the republic how certain individuals took advantage of the expansion of the empire Julius Caesar's accession to power the rise of the Augustan principate following Julius Caesar's murder. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship and including an expanded and updated guide to further reading, a chronology, and a guide to the provinces of the Roman Empire, students of history and classical studies will find this a helpful and accessible introduction to this complex period in history.