From Hannibal to Sulla: The Birth of Civil War in Republican Rome

The book works on the assumption that the period from roughly the Second Punic War constituted, conceptually speaking, an ‘antebellum’ period to Rome’s later civil wars. The book looks at two questions: The origin of civil war itself -- the actual fighting -- and the other is the origin of the concept of bellum civile (and related terms). At its core, then, this book combines two ideas: 1) antebellum (concept from the American Civil War) on the one hand, and 2) the (great) war before the war on the other hand; in preparing for the next conflict, Rome looked back at the last great one.