In this volume, based on a conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts in 2007, a group of contributors from the US and the UK offer a variety of approaches to the Roman civil wars. The topic is expansively conceived: in the introduction, the editors emphasize the way that the civil conflicts of the first centuries b.c. and a.d. were envisaged as manifestations of universal Discordia. They then venture the question of whether civil war might be regarded not as a particular instance of political breakdown, but more generally, as a kind of overarching structural feature of Roman history. However stimulating such speculation may be, it is nonetheless clear that the subsequent essays are on surer footing when they are engaged in specific historical enquiry. And arguably, the most valuable contributions are those that offer an alternative to the perspective of those canonical authors who present civil discord as Rome's foundational trauma.

T. P. Wiseman's opening chapter is one example. He begins by pointing out that before Horace had identified the slaughter of Remus as the original cause of recurring civil wars (Epod. 7.17–20), ‘other more down-to-earth explanations had already been offered, by Romans who were perhaps better placed than the freedman's son from Venusia to make a judgment’ (25). His focus is Varro, who sees such violence as the result of a relatively recent schism in the res publica, between the common people and a political class increasingly motivated by personal gain. This analysis is complemented in the next essay by Will Batstone, who shows that for Sallust too, the Roman state was split by a form of social antagonism allowing for no common ground. Harriet Flower goes back even further, arguing that the struggle for power between the few and the many had already brought an end to traditional Republican politics with Sulla's coup in 88 b.c. Kurt Raaflaub demonstrates that Caesar had attempted, as early as his consulship of 59 b.c., to build a ‘grand coalition’ of the various groups of Roman citizens who were marginalized by the senatorial élite, whereas Michèle Lowrie's study of the dictatorship and the homo sacer contains some insightful perceptions on Augustus’ success in reconciling the conflict of interests between these opposing factions. The volume thus provides an effective synopsis of civil war as a political phenomenon in the Roman Republic.

Other contributors assess the impact of civil war in Rome after the first century b.c. With Cam Grey's chapter on the Historia Augusta, the volume extends its limits as far as the third century a.d. Grey concludes that, in this period, when notions of Roman citizenship were considerably more diffuse, distant battles between the armies of imperial usurpers were no longer recognizable as civil wars. Grey's observation is valid in the context, but it would be premature to assume that those who identified with Rome were no longer concerned in Late Antiquity with the threat of civil strife, as is suggested in the introduction (11–12). The figure of Discordia civilis continues to loom large in the poetry of Claudian (In Ruf. 2.235–6), to give just one example.

In the examination of the civil wars’ wider influence on Roman culture, Barbara Kellum's piece on the legacy of Actium is especially noteworthy. Kellum shows that, in certain sections of Roman society, this civil conflict was not always made out to be a foreign one: for freedmen such as the Vettii, who decorated one of the dining-rooms in their house at Pompeii with images of the battle, Augustus’ victory over Antony was celebrated as the beginning of a new era of privilege and social status. Other examples from Pompeii support Kellum's argument that, at a local level, important persons often appropriated scenes from history or myth for the purposes of self-representation. These findings suggest that a more thorough exploration of the interface between literary texts and material culture would open up a broad spectrum of responses to civil war among the different classes of Rome's ‘citizens of discord’.

The volume closes by addressing the reception of the Roman civil wars in modern literary works. Denis Feeney demonstrates that ‘Shakespeare's extraordinary political and historical intelligence is given a new kind of field of operations in Antony and Cleopatra’ (273). For Shakespeare, then, the wars of the Roman Republic were distinguished from the wars of the English monarchy, which he treated in his other historical plays, by basic mathematics; that is to say, Rome's civil wars are plotted as the diminution of many into one, rather than the division of the one into many. Feeney suggests that Shakespeare's reading of Appian may have inspired him to give prominent rôles to Lepidus and Sextus Pompey, and thus to depict Augustus’ emergence as a matter not of teleology, but of contingency. This combination of sensitive textual analysis and keen political insight characterizes the best work in the collection.

Of course, each individual contribution contains its own interesting observations — though as is to be expected, space does not always allow them to come to grips with the full complexity of the topic. Overall, this survey outlines key issues and possible directions for future research into the history of the Roman civil wars and their place in the imagination.