Roman Civil War Discourses

I am concerned with the intersection of historiography and political culture of the Roman late republic. I am particularly interested in how discourses, narratives, and intellectual traditions developed following the Social War and civil wars of the 80s BCE through to the Triumviral period to make sense of the era’s core personnages - like Sulla and Caesar - and ideas like libertas and crudelitas.

One of my current research efforts examines Sallust’s representation of Lucius Cornelius Sisenna in Iug. 95.2. In this project, I explore how Sallust’s representation of Sisenna is fundamentally ambiguous in a way that casts a wide ideological net, one which rolls Sisenna up with Sallust’s other antagonists, and that this passage should be read cautiously in light of Sallust’s other ideological commitments. As a secondary claim, I argue that Sallust represents a set of intellectual traditions developed ‘outside’ the city of Rome, in both a literal and conceptual sense, in light of the exclusions and memory sanctions that the city of Rome underwent during Sulla’s proscriptions. I contrast these intellectual traditions with those that took place “in” the city, which were more homogenous and reflective of the political and material power wielded by the beneficiaries of Sulla’s dictatorship in the years immediately following his death. I connect these claims to more recent social science scholarship on political epistemic communities.

Another research effort I am working on proposes that the the political and literary culture of Rome became inextricably bound during Caesar’s dictatorship and through the Triumviral period, and that we can employ a dialectical model to understand development of the dominent intellectual traditions on Caesar, the so-called “Caesarian Narrative” that comes down to us in non-contemporary sources like Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, and Plutarch. I am particularly interested in the sources for Caesar’s youth and the role of Gaius Oppius in contributing to this dominant intellectual tradition.

This project goes beyond its narrow historiographical claims to say something about the ways in which enduring systems of belief emerge during and following periods of substantial, polarizing internal contestation, and how these written traditions are fundamentally linked to the political practice of these periods.