Studies in Ancient Civil War
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Edited by:
Civil war has shaped the course of civilisations throughout time, and studying this multifaceted phenomenon offers invaluable insight into the cohesive forces and disintegrative potentials of human culture. Yet our understanding of how polarisation, violent disintegration, and reconciliation transformed the ancient world remains limited to date. Against this backdrop, the new book series Studies in Ancient Civil War (StACW) provides a unique and timely academic forum for exploring the processes and implications of civil war in antiquity, from factionalisation and destructive internal strife to reintegration and reconstruction.
Interconnecting historical, philological, and archaeological perspectives, this peer-reviewed series covers the wider Mediterranean world and the Near East from the second millennium BCE through the first millennium CE. It seeks to deepen our understanding of the profound impact that the collapse and reconstruction of political orders in civil wars had on ancient societies. The series welcomes outstanding monographs and edited volumes which explore any given aspect of the complex nature of ancient civil war (including its wider socio-political, cultural, and ideological implications), and which examine its lasting reverberations throughout time.
Advisory Board:
Christoph Begass (Mannheim), Lutz Berger (Kiel), Boris Chrubasik (Toronto), Hannah Cornwell (Birmingham), Matthias Haake (Tübingen), Wolfgang Havener (Heidelberg), Nicola Hömke (Rostock), Troels M. Kristensen (Aarhus), Michèle Lowrie (Chicago), Dominik Maschek (Trier/Mainz), Jan Meister (Bern), Christoph Michels (Münster), Josiah Osgood (Washington DC), Richard Payne (Chicago), Francisco Pina Polo (Zaragoza), Cristina Rosillo-López (Sevilla), Andrew Scott (Villanova), Matthew Simonton (Arizona), Frederik Vervaet (Melbourne), Christian Wendt (Bochum)
Book proposals can be sent either to the series editors Henning Börm (henning.boerm@uni-rostock.de), Carsten Hjort Lange (lange@society.aau.dk), and Johannes Wienand (editor-in-chief, j.wienand@tu-braunschweig.de) or directly to De Gruyter.
For more information also visit the blog of the project on Hypotheses.
Topics
Authoritarianism is everywhere on the advance; democracies seem fragile and threatened. We console ourselves that where rule by the people has long established itself, it has never collapsed from internal causes. Except it did, once: in Rome.
This book gathers together Roman historians with political scientists and scholars of other periods of authoritarian takeover to explore how open and democratic political systems have historically fallen prey to autocrats. The Late Roman Republic is the main focus, with a mix of large-scale thematic and analytical chapters paired with more detailed case studies, from some of the leading scholars in the field. Other chapters widen the scope, analysing comparable cases from ancient Athens to Napoleon to Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain.
The book as a whole draws on contemporary political science scholarship on democratic decay and competitive authoritarianism. It shows that these concepts are not only applicable to modern states, but that we can properly use them to study past democratic collapses as well. This provides the tools for a more historically-informed understanding of how republics die, as part of a renewed conversation between historians and political scientists.
Lucan’s Bellum Civile (or Pharsalia) on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey is one of Europe’s most significant reference texts on human destructiveness. However, despite its significance in European intellectual history, the epic has been largely forgotten. The author gives an enthusiastic introduction to Lucan’s volume, opening up new interpretative perspectives by combining approaches from literary studies and psychotraumatology
This academic volume delves into the complex cultural dynamics of civil war in the ancient world, examining the polarising factors, violent disintegration, and potential for reconciliation that shaped Mediterranean cultures in Greek and Roman antiquity. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book explores the social, political, economic, and ideological determinants of civil war, and its long-term reverberations on ancient societies. Through investigation of civil wars, the book reveals the cohesive forces and disintegrative potentials of societies, promoting a deeper understanding of the preconditions, processes, and implications of internal conflict and conflict resolution in antiquity. This joint effort by an international team of scholars builds on recent trends in scholarship, taking an integrated approach to examine ancient civil war from cross-cultural and inter-epochal perspectives. As a result, the book offers a fresh survey of violent inner conflict in the Greek and Roman world, providing an invaluable resource for comprehending the complexities and profound effects of civil war on ancient societies.
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.
