Othering the internal: the boundaries of collective identity and social exclusion in Late Republican politics

In a meeting of the senate on 2 February 43 BCE the description and categorisation of relations between Marcus Antonius and the res publica was debated. Cicero, in response to the speech of Q. Fufius Calenus promoting peace and negotiation with Antonius, raised the question about the collective identity of the Roman citizen body (cives), chastising Calenus for wanting to protect those who, while cives by birth (natura), had demonstrated themselves to be hostes in their actions against the community. Cicero stressed, through a list of exempla for Tiberius Gracchus down to Clodius Pulcher, the necessary to fight against such citizens who threatened the res publica: being a civis was not enough; they had to meet Cicero’s definition of a bonus civis (Phil. 8.13-16).
The nature of internal war within a state needs to be understood in relation to the language used to describe the conflict in terms of scale, urgency, violence and social disruption, but also how the participants shaped themselves and their opponents within their narratives. The identities of the participants and indeed the boundaries of those identities form part of a political discourse and mediation of ‘otherness’ in civil and internal conflict. This contribution does not aim to understand why internal conflict and war arose within the Roman state, but rather to examine how language and iconography were used to shape a sense of community, in terms of who was included and who was excluded. This is to consider the nature of internal war from an internal perspective, through an examination of how contemporaries shaped themselves and their opponents in relation to a constructed sense of identity and community. This construction replied on a set of common norms and values that were central to the health and stability of a community, yet these values were themselves open to manipulation, re-interpretation and realignment.
This contribution examines episodes over the course of the first century BCE which are defined by the failure to meditate strife and conflict between members of the Roman state. In order to understand the construction of a collective identity within a Roman framework, the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies is examined to reveal how boundaries of identity, between the self and other, were debated and shaped through and in relation to socio-political power dynamics in Roman Italy and the co-dependent network of communities and alliance that sustained Roman power in the Mediterranean. The notion of meditating otherness is further examined in the civil conflicts that followed, where the negotiation of loyalties and friendships became evermore complex and where attempts to mediate, as the case of Calenus versus Cicero illustrates, could be construe as hostile or partisan. The very boundaries of what was internal, or indeed who was internal, was a fluid and open issue, as was who decided who was civis and who hostis.