A Culture of Civil War? – bellum civile in the Late Republic and the Early Principate - 22-23-24/06/

Scholarship has invested much effort in reconstructing the episodes of civic bloodshed, as well as their causes and consequences that tore apart the Roman republic, from the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and his followers in 133 BC to the battle of Actium in 31 BC. Yet although there have recently been notable efforts to broaden the perspective accounts of this period still tend to limit the scope of their analysis to the incidents of political murder or the years of actual warfare, the preceding political machinations, and the de-stabilizing consequences for the res publica. The conference aims to demonstrate that this period merits a much more extensive type of investigation: ‘the age of civil war’ consists of more than intermittent periods of in-fighting and the eventual emergence of the principate. The constant threat and regular recurrence of internecine warfare also transformed Rome’s cultural imaginary; but to write a cultural history of civil war at Rome, we need to explore how the reality (and fear) of civil war became a pervasive aspect of Roman thinking on politics, society, and the nature of civic communities. The conference is designed to bring together historical, archaeological, and literary perspectives to reconstruct the ‘culture of civil war’ that emerged in first-century BC Rome.

FECHA/DATE/DATA: 22-23-24/06/2017

LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: University of Konstanz (Konstanz, Germany)

ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Wolfgang Havener (Heidelberg); Ulrich Gotter (Konstanz)

INFO: web - wolfgang.havener@zaw.uni-heidelberg.de

INSCRIPCIÓN/REGISTRATION/REGISTRAZIONE: Gratis/free/gratuito

PROGRAMA/PROGRAM/PROGRAMMA:

Thursday, 22 June 2017

9.30 Introduction – Wolfgang Havener (Heidelberg): Bellum civile – Studies in the Semantics of a Terminological monstrum

Section 1: Civil War and the Socio-political System of Late Republican Rome Chair: Martin Jehne (Dresden) 10.00 Carsten Lange (Aalborg): Naval Operations during the Late Republican Civil War (41-36 BCE): Victories by Land and Sea 11.30 Hannah Mitchell (Oxford): Defining and Justifying Neutrality in Civil War 14.00 Henning Börm (Konstanz): Stasis at Rome? Hellenism and the bella civilia 15.00 Kathryn Welch (Sydney): Women and Civil War: A Longer View

Section 2: Historiography and Biography of the Civil War Era 16.30 Wolfgang Havener (Heidelberg): Exemplarity and exempla virtutis in an Era of Civil War

Friday, 23 June 2017

9.00 Harriett Flower (Princeton): Self-representation in a Time of Civil Strife: Latin Autobiographical Writing in the Early 1st Century BC 10.00 Ulrich Gotter (Konstanz): Authorising Slaughter, or how Roman Generals Justify Themselves in the Wake of Civic Bloodshed

Section 3: A Transformation of Norms and Values? Chair: Christian Witschel (Heidelberg) 11.30 Federico Santangelo (Newcastle): Piety and Civil War 14.00 Andrew Stiles (Oxford): Civil Wars, Divination, Dynasties, and Family Trees 15.00 Kit Morrell (Sydney): Missing in Action? Law, Ethics, and Civil War 16.30 Amy Russell (Durham): The Spaces of Civil War

Section 4: A Language of Civil War 17.30 Catherine Steel (Glasgow): From seditio to bellum civile: Internal Enemies in Roman Oratory, 133-49 BC

Saturday, 24 June 2017 9.30 Ingo Gildenhard (Cambridge): Adjusting to the New Normal: Cicero’s Correspondence, 49-44 BC 11.00 Matteo Cadario (Udine): The Image of the Roman Ruling Class in the Age of the Civil Wars 12.00 Closing remarks