THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM CARSTEN HJORT LANGE * I am very grateful to Professor John Rich for many useful comments and suggestions. For criticism and suggestions I should also like to thank CQ's anonymous referee.
Many of the wars of the Late Republican period were largely civil conflicts, and there was thus a tension between the traditional expectation that triumphs should be celebrated for victories over foreign enemies and the need of the great commanders to give full expression to their prestige and charisma, and to legitimate their power. Most of the rules and conventions relating to triumphs thus appear to have been articulated as the development of Roman warfare brought new issues to the Senate's attention. This paper will examine these tensions and the ways in which they were resolved. The traditional war-ritual of the triumph and the topic of civil war have both received renewed interest in recent scholarship. However, attempts to define the relationship between them have been hampered by comments in the ancient evidence that suggest the celebration of a triumph for victory in a civil war was contrary to traditional practices. Nevertheless, as this paper will argue, a general could expect to triumph after a civil war victory if it could be represented also as over a foreign enemy (the civil war aspect of the victory did not have to be denied); only after a victory in an exclusively civil war was this understood to be in breach of traditional practices.Molte delle guerre del periodo tardo-repubblicano furono nella maggior parte dei casi conflitti civili, ed esiste pertanto una tensione tra l'aspettativa tradizionale secondo cui i trionfi avrebbero dovuto essere celebrati solo per le vittorie sui nemici stranieri e il bisogno dei grandi comandanti di fornire piena espressione al loro prestigio e carisma, e di legittimare il loro potere. Molte delle regole e delle convenzioni relative ai trionfi perciò appaiono essere stati articolati come se lo sviluppo della guerra romana portasse nuove questioni all'attenzione del Senato. Con questo articolo si esamineranno tali tensioni e i modi in cui furono risolte. Il tradizionale rituale militare del trionfo e il soggetto della guerra civile hanno entrambi ricevuto rinnovato interesse in recenti studi. Comunque, tentativi di definire la relazione tra loro sono stati ostacolati da commenti nelle fonti antiche secondo cui la celebrazione di un trionfo per la vittoria in una guerra civile era contraria alle pratiche tradizionali. Ciononostante, come si dedurrà in questo articolo, un generale poteva aspettarsi di trionfare dopo una vittoria in una guerra civile se questa poteva essere rappresentata anche come una vittoria su un nemico straniero (l'aspetto di guerra civile della vittoria non doveva essere negato); solo dopo una vittoria in una guerra meramente civile il trionfo sarebbe stato inteso come una rottura con le pratiche tradizionali.There has been a recent outpouring of research on the Roman triumph, 1 and much of this attention has focused on the rules and conventions for qualifying for a triumph. We are best informed about this topic by Livy's evidence for the late third and early second centuries, and as a result much of the discussion has dealt mainly with this per...
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