Caesar's Civil War, the story of the general's contest with the Pompeian party through nineteen months of civil war, is an unfinished masterpiece. The author abandoned it when he found himself living in a different world than that which saw its commencement. The narrative ends after Pompey's death, amidst the preliminaries to the Alexandrian war that initiated the next phase of the fight for primacy of Rome. The work shows the brilliance for which Caesar's oratory, like his generalship, was known: it was a political judgment, not a literary one, that relegated the Civil War...

Caesar's Civil War, the story of the general's contest with the Pompeian party through nineteen months of civil war, is an unfinished masterpiece. The author abandoned it when he found himself living in a different world than that which saw its commencement. The narrative ends after Pompey's death, amidst the preliminaries to the Alexandrian war that initiated the next phase of the fight for primacy of Rome. The work shows the brilliance for which Caesar's oratory, like his generalship, was known: it was a political judgment, not a literary one, that relegated the Civil War...

When Romans applied the term "parasite" to contemporaries in dependent circumstances, or clientes, they were evoking one of the stock characters of ancient Greek comedy. In the Roman world the parasite was moved out of his native genre into the literatures of invective and social criticism, where his Greek origins made him a uniquely useful transmitter of Roman perceptions. Whenever the figure of the parasite is used to mask a person in Roman society, we know that an effort of interpretation is underway. The fit between the mask and its wearer is in the eyes of the beholder, and in...

Civil wars, more than other wars, sear themselves into the memory of societies that suffer them. This is particularly true at Rome, where in a period of 150 years the Romans fought four epochal wars against themselves. The present volume brings together exciting new perspectives on the subject by an international group of distinguished contributors. The basis of the investigation is broad, encompassing literary texts, documentary texts, and material culture, spanning the Greek and Roman worlds. Attention is devoted not only to Rome's four major conflicts from the period between the 80s BC and...

Studies on the Text of Caesar's Bellum civile is a companion volume to Damon's revised Oxford Classical Texts edition of Caesar's Bellum civile, his account of his civil war with Pompey. Comprising three parts, this volume investigates the detailed philological arguments that underpin the revised edition of the text. The first part supplements the preface of the Oxford Classical Texts edition, providing an expanded background on the history of the text and a more detailed argument for the shape of the stemma. The second part is a discussion of nature and the causes of the difficulties present...

Oxford Classical Texts, also known as Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, provide authoritative, clear, and reliable editions of ancient texts, with apparatus criticus on each page. In this revised critical edition of Caesar's account of his civil war against Pompey during 49-48 BC, Damon allows readers to get closer to the renowned author's original writings than ever before. Based on a new collation of the ancient manuscripts and on a stemma that permits the reconstruction of the archetype more frequently than has previously been possible, the text is...