The following paper proposes that Sallust offers a conceptualization of civil conflict more in line with the Greek paradigm of stasis than with its Roman counterpart bellum ciuile. In doing so, it argues for the actual coexistence of these two differentiated conceptual strands in the political thought of the Late Republic. To this end, Sallust's corpus is analysed to identify the main threads that articulate civil strife in its multifarious manifestations: how it arises and who its protagonists are or, conversely, how it is kept in check, how it is connected to the human passions that drive ideology, and the violence that stems from the clash between political and familial spheres of influence. The article shows how the pathos of familial drama is what characterizes civil conflict for Sallust, rather than the struggle for legitimacy found in Cicero's narrative.

This article argues that Virgil's First Eclogue naturalises the power discourse of the future Augustan Principate. Throughout the poem, Virgil not only presents the iuvenis as a libertas-restoring benefactor who is treated as a god by his beneficiaries, but even imagines his elevated status as crucial to maintaining social cohesion and civic stability, and idealises the beneficiaries’ dependence on his efficacious authority. The poem thus produces the grammar of the discourse of authoritarianism, subtly articulating what will eventually become the central tenets of Augustan ideology. I suggest that it is precisely this process of naturalisation which has led readers since antiquity to identify the iuvenis of Virgil's First Eclogue as the future Augustus. However, in this paper I am interested in transcending this question of individual identification to focus instead on how Virgil's poetic anonymisation is no simple pastoral obfuscation, but rather does the hard graft of ‘soft launching’ a new political system.

This article examines Seneca's theory of monarchy in De clementia. It focuses in particular on Seneca's appropriation and redefinition of some key terms within Roman political thought in order to present his theory as an account of the restitution of liberty to the res publica under the government of the virtuous princeps. By relocating the Roman body politic to a Stoic moral universe, Seneca is able to draw upon parts of his philosophical inheritance in order to substantiate his claim in some depth.