3 Quotes by David Armitage

The pressure to define civil war is often inversely related to the political stakes for offering such a definition: the higher the pressure to be precise, the greater the chance that exactitude will itself be a source of political contention.

The wider the grant of Roman citizenship, the broader the scope of civil war. As Florus argues, “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or a fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire, so much so that it cannot rightly be called a civil war, nor even a social or an external war, but it was a war with something of all of these – and yet worse than war.

For many Romans, civil war remained the war that dared not speak its name. The words bellum civile had to be weighed carefully and spoken sparingly, if ever at all, because of the harsh memories of major conflicts.