Social War Research Articles

The Sabinus Code: A Contribution to the Discussion on Political Agitation on Roman Republican Coins

The article analyses the iconography of the denarii bearing the scene of the Punishment of Tarpeia, issued by L. Titurius Sabinus during the Social War, re-examines its previous interpretations and offers a new one, linking it with the internal political struggle between the Optimate faction related to the tribune of the plebs M. Livius Drusus and their opponents. The author suggests that the figure of the notorious traitress was used intentionally, in terms of the political struggle against Drusus himself or his former partisans who had been found guilty of parricide and exiled under the Lex Varia, in order to prevent them from returning to Rome.

Paradox of Voting: Extra-Urban Voters in the Late Roman Republic

Summary It is almost universally supposed on general principles that Roman citizens who did not live near the city of Rome were effectively disenfranchised by the logistical difficulty of traveling to the capital to vote, and thus that citizen participation in state decision-making was derisively small; this poses a difficulty for the ‘popular’ model of the functioning of the Roman Republic that has won considerable adherence in recent years. However, a systematic review of evidence for voting by citizens who lived around the peninsula and even for non-citizens’ travel to Rome before 90 BC to apply direct pressure on major votes, shows that distance did not present an insurmountable obstacle to meaningful participation in Roman political life by Italians and extra-urban citizens. It also demonstrates the great importance citizens attached to the vote (suffragium) – a guarantee of their freedom, and the key mechanism by which they influenced their political leaders. This in turn helps to clarify why many Italians, including those of modest means, would have desired Roman citizenship in the run-up to the ‘Social War.’

Epitaph for Timokritos Who Fell in Battle Against the Aetolians

The metrical inscription celebrates the death of the soldier Timocritus, who was killed in a clash with the Aetolians. Previous editors have unanimously dated the text to the end of the third century BCE, believing the war event to be related to one of the assaults the Aetolians made against Acarnania during the social war of 220‑217 BCE. A re-examination of the text and a comparison with other metrical epigraphs found on site and with historical sources allows an alternative dating proposal to be made. According to Livy, the polis of Tyrrheus was attacked again in 192‑191 BCE by the Etholos-Syriac troops of Antiochus III. In the absence of an autopsy examination or images of the find, it therefore seems plausible to ascribe the inscription either to the end of the third century BCE, linked to the events of the social war of 220‑217 BCE, or to the beginning of the second century BCE, connected to the Aetolo-Syrian attack of 192‑191 BCE.

Italici an Itali?

During the Social War, certain linguistic choices must have had particular importance for the rebel Italian allies who fought against Rome. This article aims to demonstrate why the insurgents were likely to have rejected the term Italici and adopted the name Itali as their self-designation. A thorough analysis of the meanings and connotations of Greek and Latin terms used for the inhabitants of Italy clearly indicates that during the war the ethnonym Itali allowed the rebel Italians to radically dissociate themselves from the Romans and strengthen their own common identity.

Un’iscrizione di Alba Fucens: organi municipali e rapporti con Roma nel I secolo d.C.

Abstract - A precious epigraphic document, a latin inscription from Alba Fucens from the first half of the first century AD, which can be reconstructed in its content also thanks to the sixteenth-century transcription by the humanist Mariangelo Accursio, offers the opportunity to take a look at certain aspects relating to the administrative organization of the Italic municipia of the early imperial age. The epigraph provides interesting informations about the judicial structure of municipium and certifies the presence in Alba Fucens of a praefectus Caesaris, a key figure in defining the relationship between local communities and central power in the changed context following the bellum sociale; last issue worth noting is that relating to the mentioned public building intervention which fits well into the activity, typical of this period, aimed at adapting the city facilities to the new political needs arising from the urbanization process following the end of the social war.

The Merry affair: etiquette, politics, and diplomacy in the early republic

ABSTRACT On 2 December 1803, President Thomas Jefferson threw a dinner party at the White House. In violation of diplomatic etiquette, when dinner was called Jefferson offered his hand to Dolley Madison, the wife of the Secretary of State, rather than to Elizabeth Merry, the wife of the newly appointed British minister. The incident sparked a social war. In response to the ensuing controversy, Jefferson hurriedly wrote out his Canons of Etiquette, describing a radical, new form of American etiquette that marked an important step forward in the United States’ quest for sovereignty and equality with the nations of Europe.

Pociski z bezpośrednim przekazem, czyli rzecz o napisach na glandes plumbeae spod Askulum z okresu wojny ze sprzymierzeńcami (91–89 p.n.e.)

Bullets with a direct message, or the inscriptions on glandes plumbeae near Asculum from the social war (91–89 BCE) In antiquity, various inscriptions were placed on the projectiles fired from the throwing weapons. These could be the names of the artisans and soldiers who made them in the camp before the battle, or those who fired them to compete with each other and who wanted to demonstrate the accuracy of their hits on the target. There were also names of units to which the soldiers belonged or where they originated from. They also included information about the deities, the names of the leaders and the references to values that guided the fighters. Attempts were also made to exert psychological effects on opponents, the aim of which was to provoke and humiliate them. A significant number of glandes plumbeae with symbols and inscriptions placed on them dating back to the decline period of the Republic (133–30 BCE) have been preserved. The glandes from Asculum are also very interesting, as they further our knowledge about the siege of this city (90–89 BCE), which was located in the area of Picenum, where the battles were fought during the bellum Marsicum (91–87 BCE). The inscriptions placed on the projectiles provide us with extremely valuable data supplementing few accounts of ancient authors.

Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger

ABSTRACT This article applies an anarchist lens to the food sovereignty movement. It analyzes food regimes as capitalist agriculture regimes which rely on the State’s monopoly on hunger, wherein the State relies on the dispossession of people from their land and food systems, the protection of property, and the primacy of capital. The interdependence of this State-capital-property trinity is violently enforced, and manufactures compliance through counterinsurgent strategies of social war. The State monopoly on hunger justifies a new offshoot of the larger food sovereignty movement, a prefigurative praxis which dismantles all food regimes to build new counter-worlds: food anarchy.

Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime against Humanity and Nature

The last decade has seen a growing interest in the intersection of genocide and ecocide, with calls from scholars and activists to include forms of environmental destruction as crimes against humanity. Scorched Earth enters this discussion with a historically informed analysis of how wars have targeted the environmental basis for human life. Through ten case studies ranging from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Emmanuel Kreike contributes to current debates by introducing “environcide” as a concept bridging genocide (a crime against humanity) and ecocide (a crime against nature). At the heart of Kreike's argument is an analysis of how belligerents target and weaponize the environment as a widespread and long-standing strategy of war.Kreike defines environcide as intentionally or unintentionally damaging, destroying, or making inaccessible the “environmental infrastructure” on which life depends: the burning or flooding of fields; the destruction of irrigation, food storage systems, and hunting grounds; the requisitioning of food and livestock; and the extirpation of prey animals. For Kreike, environcide is “total war” in that it constitutes the destruction of both society and environment. Wars are not fought over abstract territory but “about, with, and in what animates, fills, and enriches space: the environmental infrastructure that sustains populations, states, and armies” (3). Scorched Earth challenges the separation of social war and environmental war into distinct “fields of inquiry” (197). Indeed, Kreike traces this flawed distinction to the pervasive nature-culture dichotomy, arguing that so long as “nature” and “culture” are ontologically segregated, wars against society will be considered “humanitarian concerns, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” while wartime environmental destruction will be relegated to a separate legal domain (395). Kreike goes on to challenge other overlapping binaries, including the Western (modern)/non-Western (premodern) dichotomy that frames European societies as outside or beyond nature, and non-European societies as living within nature (and vulnerable to its caprices).To support its claims, Scorched Earth carries the reader through a sweeping sequence of case studies: the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, the Spanish conquest of America, the Thirty Years' War, seventeenth-century Indigenous warfare in eastern North America, the wars of the Spanish Succession and Austrian Succession, settler colonial genocide in North America, genocide in West Africa, environcide in the Dutch East Indies, and colonial conquests in Southwest Africa. These cases reflect an extraordinary body of research, detailed analysis, and clear storytelling. Kreike demonstrates impressive skill as a historian and narrator, mixing familiar and lesser-known cases together in informative ways. Some parts of the narrative are heavy with forensic detail, but the book is at its best when connecting strategies of environcide between distant times and places.Scorched Earth makes a solid attempt to translate this history into theory, but its contributions here are questionable. Despite the intent to transcend the nature-culture binary, much of the historical narrative reinforces this dichotomy by describing a deterministic nature with limited agency and complexity—a mostly passive vessel through which violence is transmitted from one human to another. Rarely are environcidal consequences traced beyond the immediate social effects that benefit perpetrators or destabilize victims. Rather than a socio-environmental history, this is a history of war with an emphasis on the environment.Scorched Earth makes little engagement with political economy or structural factors over the longue durée. Whereas the immediate impacts of warfare on rural agriculture are prominently featured, Kreike generally ignores the underlying imperial, colonial, and capitalist logics of expropriation that animate and justify environcidal violence, along with the political and cultural ecology of the impacted infrastructural systems. To be sure, Kreike limits his subject in time and space to the battlefield. But in so doing, Scorched Earth misses the opportunity to make a compelling theoretical contribution to the structural origins of environcide, in wartime or otherwise.Finally, this structural weakness admits an awkward attempt to merge victims and perpetrators. Kreike details numerous environcidal tactics deployed by non-Westerners; for example, Indigenous Americans against European settlers, or Acehnese rebels against Dutch colonial soldiers. These instances of “native” environcide are intended to destabilize the Western/non-Western dichotomy and buttress Kreike's argument that environcidal warfare was not a purely European invention. But this narrow focus on the symmetry of events and tactics ignores the stark asymmetry of the structures shaping the broader conflict. Colonial invaders and Indigenous peoples burned each other's fields and food supplies under vastly different circumstances. To imply a conceptual equivalence is to overlook each side's profoundly different relationships to land and realities of survival.Scorched Earth contributes to a vigorous and timely conversation on the linkages between genocide, ecocide, and environmental violence with detailed analyses of the impact of war on environmental infrastructure. The book misses opportunities to engage existing theory; indeed, the promise to connect historical analysis with genocidal/ecocidal criminality is never fully realized. But the strength of Kreike's case studies should offer considerable inspiration for others to pick up where Scorched Earth leaves off.

Testimony of Diodorus Siculus about the Italian embassy to Mithridates during the Social war: reliability and problems of interpretation

Testimony of Diodorus Siculus about the Italian embassy to Mithridates during the Social war: reliability and problems of interpretation

From the Time of Troubles to the Unity Day: Memory, Forgetting and Re-imaging the Past in Russian History

This article examines how the memory of one of the largest sociopolitical crises in the history of Russia (called the Time of Troubles) modified over 400 years. This process is considered as an example of rethinking the traumatic experience of the past and forming a national-patriotic myth on its basis. Several stages of the evolution of the memory of the Time of Troubles are issued: the XVII century – when the interpretation of these events was mainly religious; the XVIII century – when heroic and patriotic ideas about the time of troubles were formed in accordance with the ideals of classicism; the XIX century – the time of the development of the monarchical myth of the Romanov dynasty coming to power; the XX century – when the peasant war and the struggle against foreign intervention became the main dominant in the understanding of events; Modern Russia and the annual celebration of the National Unity Day – a public holiday established in 2005 in memory of the liberation of Moscow in 1612, the main idea of which is the unification of all peoples on the territory of the Russian Federation. It is noted that for centuries in the cultural memory of Russian society, two layers of ideas about the Time of Troubles coexisted. One of them – negative – was the memory of social upheavals and civil war, the other – positive – the memory of victory and overcoming the Troubles, evoking a sense of national pride and hopes for the future.

The Political and Economic Origins of the Roman Revolution

The paper considers some economic and legal aspects of the struggle for the public land in Late Republican Rome. This period is one of the most controversial in ancient history; it brought many significant changes to the socio-economic and political life of Rome and contributed much to its transformation from Republic to Principate. Nevertheless, there is no special paper examining the competition between the Romans and Italians for the ager publicus populi Romani which started with the agrarian reform of Tiberius Gracchus in modern historiography. The first episode ended after the enactment in 111 B.C. of the lex agraria, when a large amount of public land was brought into private hands by its Roman possessors. A further part of the ager publicus populi Romani was still public and remained in hands of the socii. The logic of historical process, the economic changes of the second century B.C. which led Rome from Republic to Principate, demanded the formation of a new class of landowners. The latter would be the basis of the political system of the Roman Empire instead of the nobilitas; its political power would be based on private ownership of land. This was impossible without the full privatization of public land, and it is logical that the struggle for the ager publicus populi Romani was not ended in 111 B.C. Only after privatization of that land, which was possessed by the allies, the agrarian question in Rome could be fully resolved. The latter problem is of crucial importance for the further history of Rome, because it not only caused the Social War but also radically changed both the social structure and the political balance within Roman society during the last decades of the Republic.

Review: Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

Review: Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

Ethics, Interpretive Social Science and War

Abstract This chapter explores radical interpretivism as an approach to understanding contemporary war and the implications that flow from its application to questions about what ought to be done in contemporary asymmetrical wars. It argues that the currently dominant version of the relationship between just war theory and the world to which it is to be applied is misguided. It is widely held that policymakers facing ethical decisions about war and peace, have first to ascertain the empirical state of affairs in which they find themselves, and then, in a second step, consider what it would be ethical to do, given the circumstances. On this view, questions about the justice of going to war arise only after the completion of an empirical analysis about how things stand in the world. Radical interpretivism denies the possibility of determining a given “state of affairs” in social relations in purely empirical terms that do not involve engaging with ethical considerations from the outset. A central strand of the argument is that in the analyses of the circumstances that precede wars, what must be understood are the histories of actions and reactions of the parties involved. These, as is the case with all actions, can only be understood within the social practices in which the actors are participating. Such understandings involve an ethical engagement at every point. This interpretive approach is particularly important for a proper understanding of asymmetrical wars.

2Reflecting on Positionality: Archaeological Heritage Praxis in Quintana Roo, Mexico

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue for a renewed engagement with the concept of positionality in archaeology. I provide a brief history of thinking about the idea of subject position in archaeology, focusing specifically on researcher subjectivity rather than that of past persons. The discussion highlights some of the strands of archaeological thinking where positionality has figured prominently in investigative and interpretative strategies: namely, intersectional, relational, and community‐based archaeologies. I then offer three examples from research in Quintana Roo, Mexico that speak to the ways that grappling with positionality has influenced my and my collaborators’ agendas and goals related to the commemoration of the heritage of the Maya Social War (Caste War of Yucatan).

Wild and tame zones in times of disharmony: Muslim boys and belonging in a primary school in Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper features stories about disharmony and social cohesion collected via interviews and focus groups conducted with teachers, school leaders, students, parents and the principal in a multicultural primary school located in a suburb on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. This school is located in a low-SES, historically white and working class area that is now home to large communities of immigrants, many of whom are Muslims. These changes have caused considerable anxieties at this school and in the school community. This primary school faces significant challenges in times defined by social disharmony, war and violence, extremism and terrorism, and adversarial public politics. Some Muslims in these communities have been accused of not doing enough to fit in, sticking too steadfast to their values, religion and culture. We argue, following Giroux, that schools must embrace the challenging conversations that can occur when difficult problems are confronted.

The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar

The Great Texas Social Studies Textbook War of 1961–1962 by Allan O. Kownslar

(Re-)founding Italy

The Social War (91-88 BCE) is one of the most significant episodes in Roman history: from this war, in which Rome fought against her Italic allies, emerged the elite that would lead the Republic in the last decades of its existence and that would provide the senatorial aristocracy of the early imperial age. The Italic rebels were defeated militarily, yet they achieved their political aims. As such, this war – and its elaboration and memorialization in Roman cultural memory – provides a very interesting case study about how "victory" and "defeat" are constructed discursively after a disruptive war, and how its narration is "functionalized" for a re-foundation of the civic body.

English

That peace and justice is the solution to the flux and insecurity in the church and in the state cannot be denied. In fact, it is exigent to ask this question thus: can there be peace and justice in the religious institution in the first instance, without religious liberty and of course, civil liberty untwisted? There is no gain-saying the fact that sacred and secular histories have tended to answer this question in a clear and precise illumination. In answering the aforementioned question as a stimulus to conversation and discussion on this topic we have to remind ourselves that this is a question that had been tinkered about and had received rigorous and provoking thoughts in the evolution of mankind. Religious bigotry is a global flux and spike leading to social, ethnic, racist, political and religious wars of which the insecurity in the religious institution and among nation-states are effects. Global insight into what we have called Adamic crisis or flux must begin with appreciation of the historicist and phenomenological trajectory of its essence as well as the ontology and theodicy of its origin. In this essay religious liberty as far as insecurity, injustice and instability in the religious institution and in the state are concerned, is a prime liberty among civil liberties, and as far as religion has become interlaced with social and political generation and development, religious liberty must not be compromised. Key words: Existential phenomenology, religious liberty, security, religion, politics.

"Vicinitas": Neighbourhoods, Networks and Identities in Ciceronian Italy

Roman Italy was a highly interconnected region. The social elites of both Rome and other communities were linked by a dense web of connections which played an important role in influencing social, economic and political behaviour and shaping cultural identities. This paper explores the importance of neighbourhood networks in the period after the social war, using the works of Cicero and his contemporaries, as well as modern analytical approaches. It examines how vicinitas is defined and what social and political significance it had in this pivotal period of Roman history.