Narratives of reconciliation in Caesar’s Commentarii
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Romans appreciated reconciliation and even celebrated and advertised it by dedicating temples and coins to Concordia . Accordingly, Caesar’s Commentarii value reconciliation as well. Indeed, I will argue that, in spite of the war-bulletin tone that often pervades the Commentarii , reconciliation plays a key-role in Caesar’s accounts both of the Gallic and of the Civil War. In particular, in the first part of my paper I consider some narrative strategies whereby Caesar advertises his openness toward reconciliation in BG. Caesar’s self-fashioning in his dealings with Dumnorix and Ariovistus in BG 1 exemplifies a typical script: Caesar (says he) is willing to extend his gratia , but some enemies refuse it, and Caesar’s biased narrative presents such refusal as highly unreasonable; but their stubbornness voids any attempt at reconciliation, and war ensues. Other episodes from the BG confirm this pattern. In part two, through an analysis of the siege at Brundisium ( BC 1.26) and of the blockade at Oricum (3.15), I suggest that, in the BC , Caesar follows the same script as in the BG ; but the BC presents a more rich and technical vocabulary of reconciliation along with some exceptional narratological devices. I try to show how the artful narrator sharpens his tools to deal with the thorny topic of reconciliation in a civil war. In the third and last part of my paper, I place Caesar’s representation against two contemporary letters found in Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus; briefly, I consider some contemporary responses to Caesar’s narratives of reconciliation.
Source: Trends in Classics
DOI: 10.1515/tc-2024-0014
Author: Luca Grillo
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,489
OpenAlex ID: W4404299324