RT Journal Article
T1 The Bellum Civile Pompeianum: The War of Words
A1 López Barja de Quiroga, Pedro
K1 Ideology
K1 Res publica
K1 Populus
K1 Vindicare in libertatem
AB The irrelevance of ideology is perhaps one of the most strongly held views shared by the historians of the Late Republic. As indicated by Matthias Gelzer in 1912, in those final years of the Roman Republic, ‘political struggles were fought out by the nobiles at the head of their dependents’. In his opinion, this was nothing more than a power struggle, in which slogans or ideas were merely propaganda, without any real value. In 1931, analysing the political proposals of Cicero, Gelzer's disciple Hermann Strasburger rejected the existence of political parties, as, in his opinion, terms such as optimates or populares were merely propagandistic mottos and pure wordplay. As a result, it became widely believed that the civil war between Caesar and Pompey was nothing more than a struggle between dignitates, that is, a confrontation for leadership between ambitious politicians who were not prepared to compromise. More recently, in 1994, Luigi Loreto considered the conflict between Caesar and Pompey to be aimed at seizing power, unlike ‘ideological’ wars, where the aim was to maintain or instate a specific type of social or political order.
PB Cambridge University Press
SN 0009-8388
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44827
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44827
LA eng
NO López Barja de Quiroga P. THE BELLVM CIVILE POMPEIANVM: THE WAR OF WORDS. The Classical Quarterly. 2019;69(2):700-714. doi:10.1017/S0009838820000014
DS Minerva
RD 28 abr 2026