Armitage / CIVIL WARS

part i

Roads from Rome

1

Inventing Civil War

The Roman Tradition

Civil war was not a fact of nature, waiting to be discovered. It was an artifact of human culture that had to be invented. That invention, a little over two thousand years old, can be dated quite closely to the first century b.c.e. The Romans were not the first to suffer internal conflict but they were the first to experience it as civil war. Perhaps having been first to define what was “civil”—­meaning, among fellow citizens—­they inevitably understood their most wrenching conflicts in definitively political terms, as clashes among citizens that rose to the level of war. Those elements would remain at the heart of concepts of civil war for much of its history.

Thus, having conceived the “civil” and then joined it—­reluctantly, paradoxically, but irreversibly—­to the idea of war, the Romans created the unstable, fissile compound that remains disturbingly with us today: “civil war.”

The inventor is unknown. He—­and it must have been a man, because he was surely a Roman citizen—­joined together two distinct ideas to make an explosive new amalgam. No one before that obscure Roman had yoked these two elements together. The Greeks had a clear understanding of war, or what they called polemos—­from which many modern languages derive the fighting word “polemical.” But they imagined the “wars” within their own communities as “something completely different” from what the Romans had.1 This is not to say that there was an unbridgeable chasm between Roman and Greek ideas of internal strife. Roman writers sometimes attributed the origins of their own political divisions to the importation of dangerous Greek notions like “democracy.”2 The primal Greek historian Thucydides influenced his successors among Roman writers, most notably Sallust, “the rival of Thucydides” (as another Roman chronicler called him).3 And in the first century c.e., Roman historians writing in Greek naturally used Greek terms to describe Rome’s civil wars.4 And yet, despite these continuities, the Romans were sure they were experiencing something new, for which they needed a new name: civil war, or, in Latin, bellum civile.

For the Romans, war had traditionally implied something quite specific. It was an armed conflict, in a just cause and fought against an external enemy. Mere aggression did not count, for that could hardly be just. Nor did individual violence rise to the level of war, because that could not be constrained by the laws of war, which the Romans had. And the enemy (hostis) was by definition unfamiliar, either from outside Rome or at least beyond the community of free Roman citizens: Romans fought wars against slaves, like the great leader of the slave revolt Spartacus, and they battled against pirates in the Mediterranean; they also warred against enemies on their frontiers, such as Parthians and Carthaginians. What made “civil” war so different was that the enemies were all too familiar and could even be thought of as familial: it was one’s fellow ­citizens—­or cives—­who were on the other side. Such a war, then, challenged the standard Roman criteria for war, the very definition of it, to the breaking point. The enemies were not others; they were, in effect, the same. And it was hard to see a struggle against them as just when it so obviously affronted the very definition of justice in war, which implied a legitimate enemy as well as a proper cause for self-­defense.

The resulting idea of civil war was deliberately paradoxical: a war that could not be a war, fought against enemies who were not really enemies. In the propaganda battles during Rome’s civil wars, the competing sid