sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 2

David García Domínguez / Juan García González / Federico Santangelo (eds.): Connected Histories of the Roman Civil Wars (88-30 BCE)

In this stimulating volume, a panel of distinguished scholars approaches the realities of Rome's civil wars by way of a methodology which offers "a decentred vision of the Roman polity" (5) without ignoring the consequential realities of the unequal distribution of Roman power throughout the city's empire. Their approach is based on the pioneering work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an eminent economic historian of the early modern period, and is routinely denominated connected history. The terminology is not always exact, but in this volume connected history is marked by an emphasis on underlining links between the centres of Roman power and the multiple groups, often local or regional, sometimes inside and often outside Rome or Italy, which experienced and shaped that power - often by way of unsimple, unequal relationships. To their credit, the editors acknowledge the provisional and unavoidably selective nature of this approach: it eschews "any claim to exhaustivity". (2) But all ancient history is selective and provisional, and the interdependencies thrown up by this volume are often illuminating not least because they complicate any reductive reconstruction of the effects and efficacy of Roman power. The pertinence of this approach to the Roman civil wars, when power relationships were contested on a Mediterranean-wide scale, is obvious.

In the opening paper, Dominik Maschek deploys connected history as a means of taking us beyond "traditional concepts such as elite competition or rural desolation" as central dynamics in the civil wars. We need, the point is underlined, a thicker description. And so Maschek argues here that Rome's predatory economic domination of the Mediterranean, because it exacerbated inequality even while it improved Italy's overall economic circumstances, played an important part in fomenting the unrest which led to political instability. Maschek's attention is not riveted on the urban elite but on ordinary people in the Italian countryside: there are good reasons to infer that, even at this level, economic inequalities, and therefore social restlessness, were exacerbated in troubling ways.

Catilian Balmaceda furnishes readers with a reliable survey of Rome's civil war narratives, especially the accounts in Sallust, Velleius Paterculus, and Appian. She deftly underlines how these texts, each in its own way, exhibit a sensitivity to the connections (geographical, temporal, sociological) which played a part in defining the circumstances which led to civil war. Sallust tends to operate by way of moralising rather than economic or sociological observations; Appian at times approaches a modern orientation. Nonetheless, although put in different terms and viewed from a different perspective, ancient historians were profoundly aware of the interdependencies which marked Rome's civil war.

When campaigning against Mithridates, Sulla put local mints to work in the production of currency required by his army, issues which then circulated locally as Roman armies became integrated, if only temporarily (and, in an important sense, parasitically), in regional commerce. Local coinage, too, played a role in funding Roman forces. Lucia Carbone assembles numismatic evidence which illustrates these operations. In this way, she underlines economic connections arising from Rome's military presence in eastern Mediterranean.

It has long been recognised how Rome exploited provincial rivalries - competition between cities and political contentiousness within cities - as a means of sustaining its domination. For these antagonists, the unstable circumstances of civil war threw up fresh opportunities - but also new perils. David García Dominguez takes this up in an analysis conditioned by a theoretical approach to the actions of local parties in civil wars advanced by the eminent political scientist Stathis Kalyvas. Amid civil war, locals possessed agency and could advance their position inside Rome's empire. But this came with risks, not least because Roman belligerents were by no means averse to often indiscriminate violence. Nonetheless, this dynamic - the exertion by locals to find some advantage for themselves - was a factor in the playing out of Rome's civil wars.

By drawing attention to a vigorous policy of colonisation in Roman Spain, David Espinosa Espinosa elaborates Gabba's thesis, advanced in 1954, that the Sertorian War marked a continuation of the Social War and the supervening Sullan civil war. [1] These Spanish colonies, Roman zones into which citizens and allies immigrated, were naturally affected by political strife in the capital and in Italy. Many in these communities, it is argued, will have been displeased when they were excluded from the grants of citizenship made by Rome to Italian allies during and after the Social War. Hence a receptiveness to Sertorius and his cause, not least, in the case of some, the promise of citizenship as a reward for military service. Thus one can see in the Sertorian War the operation of local aspirations which were indeed closely connected to impulses still roiling Italian politics at the same time.

Staying with the Sertorian War, Toni Ñaco del Hoyo, Jordi Principal, Gerard Cabezas-Guzmán, and Gerard Ventós make a careful study of the routes, by sea and by land, which connected Italy with Sertorius' theatre of war. These were vital but perilous passages for manpower and supplies, and their frequent disruption, by parties animated by different interests, both prolonged the campaigns led by Metellus and Pompey and affected political circumstances in Rome - not least (and perhaps more could have been made of this) because of Sertorius' role in the piracy which led to grain shortages in the capital.

The reality of Mediterranean connectivity is also illustrated, as Juan García González demonstrates, in the actions of the Sertorian legate M. Marius, to whom Sertorius' alternative Roman government assigned the province of Asia. Owing to this arrangement, the inhabitants of Asia had to contend with the presence two rival governors. Marius' administration of Asia, García González argues, reflected in significant ways Sertorius' approach to governing in Spain. It also contrasted with the heavy-handed treatment which Sulla had visited on the province. Consequently, cities in Asia had something to gain by accepting the legitimacy and leniency of Sertorius' administration; doing so could not be viewed as rebellion since Marius was careful to observe the proprieties of his Roman administration. Thus, for several years, the Third Mithridatic War was deeply implicated in the operations of the Sertorian War, itself an enterprise that might have turned out very differently had Marius and other Sertorian officers fared better in the east.

Opportunity thrown up by civil war is a Leitmotiv of this volume, and it is the central theme of Laura Pfuntner's detailed examination of the careers of the Cornelii Balbi and Publius Sittius. These men made themselves indispensable to powerful figures in Rome, relationships which they exploited in establishing themselves as towering figures on Rome's periphery: Spain in the case of the Balbii, Africa in the case of Sittius. Pfunter casts her appraisal in terms of the modern sociological category of brokerage, a move which underlines the multifaceted ambitions of her subjects and facilitates a balanced scrutiny of their actions in terms both of Roman and local political and cultural factors.

In addition to these papers, this volume includes an introduction by the editors in which they explain and contextualise the project of connected history. There is also a post-scriptum by Giusto Traina in which he offers a concise review of the most salient contributions made by the chapters which make up this book. These are very helpful bookends. The vantage point of connected history directs our attention to key structural features of the late republic - colonialism and the institutions of Roman imperialism, for instance, or the mechanics of the Roman economy - and their importance in shaping, sometimes determining, the political realities of the late republic. At the same time, proper attention is paid here to the agency of groups and individuals acting within the spaces, physical and conceptual, defined by these structures. In sum, then, a fine volume which goes a very long way towards establishing the vital importance of putting the principles of connectivity to work when thinking about the interdependencies which animated the history of the late republican civil wars. Contributors and editors are to be congratulated.

Note:

[1] Gabba later took the view that it was the Perusine War which concluded Italy's Social War: 'The Perusine War and Triumviral Italy', HSCPh 75, 1971, 139-160.