David Armitage > Quotes

“If these wars between Caesar and Pompey are “worse than civil,” it is because they were fought between two men who had been bound by marriage pact; in that sense, they were familial wars (“kin facing kin”), not merely between citizens.”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“For many Romans, civil war remained the war that dared not speak its name. The words bellum civile had to be weighed carefully and spoken sparingly, if ever at all, because of the harsh memories of major conflicts.”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“The wider the grant of Roman citizenship, the broader the scope of civil war. As Florus argues, “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or a fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire, so much so that it cannot rightly be called a civil war, nor even a social or an external war, but it was a war with something of all of these—and yet worse than war.”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“Rome’s earliest dissension arose from flawed human nature and its desires for freedom, glory, and power, but it was only after the fall of Carthage that such evils flourished to the point of driving plebeians and patricians into open conflict: “The way was clear for pursuing rivalries, [and] there arose a great many riots, insurrections, and in the end, civil wars.”43”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

“The pressure to define civil war is often inversely related to the political stakes for offering such a definition: the higher the pressure to be precise, the greater the chance that exactitude will itself be a source of political contention.”
― David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas