My dissertation describes the way that some of the greatest men in the late Republic wrote about violence. The problem of narrating violence is that any attempt to do so is a rhetoricization of reality. In addition, each author was faced with the choice of which victims to include. Thus, by looking at the assumptions that underlie these moments we can achieve a deeper understanding of the narrative intentions of any given author.
Caesar justified his own activities in Gaul as responses to provocative acts committed by the Gauls or Germans. Retaliation propels his narrative, aligning with audience expectations and lending Roman victories a satisfying quality of closure. Likewise, in the Bellum Civile Caesar depicts his men suffering multiple cruelties until he is compelled to respond. By wrapping his activities in the respectable cloak of retaliation, his violence is purified of darker implications. By contrasting Caesar's writing to that of his Continuators, I am able to highlight ways that Caesar's narrative techniques exploit human impulses to craft a compelling story.
Like Caesar, Cicero employs vivid accounts of violence to motivate his hearers to desire revenge. In the case of Cicero, violence retold was used to encourage the passing of a senatus consultum ultimum or to sway the verdict of a jury. I posit from this that Caesar's techniques may owe more to forensic training than to military reportage or historiographical tradition.
Hirtius, on the other hand, shows an inability to control his dramatic effects and is unable to create the same sense of closure that Caesar so neatly achieves in the Bellum Gallicum despite focusing exclusively upon Gallic casualties. The author of the Bellum Africum shows more interest in the dissolution of command and order that occurs at the end of the African campaign. The author of the Bellum Hispaniense demonstrates the difficulty of crafting historical narrative by including in his account every violent event, even those that are strategically irrelevant, and offers us the closest thing we have to a soldier's eye-view from this period.
