From Hannibal to Sulla: The Logic of Civil War and the Moral Transformation of the Roman Republic (2018–2019 Research Framework)

1 From Hannibal to Sulla: The Logic of Civil War and the Moral Transformation of the Roman Republic (2018–2019 Project Framework) Carlos Heredia Chimeno Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - 0000-0003-2866-5883 Overview This research note presents the core arguments and conceptual architecture of a project developed between 2018 and 2019, forming the basis of later studies on civil war, emotion, and legitimacy in the late Roman Republic. This document records the conceptual foundations of a research project developed between October 2018 and May 2019, originally submitted to the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (Irish Research Council, University College Dublin) and later revised in May–June 2019 for a proposed Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. Entitled The Logic of Civil War in the Hannibalic and Social Wars, the project sought to reframe the origins of bellum civile in the Roman Republic by exploring how external warfare, collective fear, and moral transgression progressively merged into the logic of internal conflict that would later define the first century BCE. Rather than treating the Social War as a prelude to the Marian–Sullan conflicts, the project interpreted it as the first true Roman civil war — a psychological, moral, and constitutional rupture that redefined the meaning of Roman identity and political legitimacy. The Italian allies (socii) who rose against Rome were not foreign enemies but long-integrated partners of its imperial order. Their elites had fought side by side with Roman commanders, shared civic and religious institutions, and adopted Roman legal and linguistic frameworks. The war of 91–87 BCE was therefore not a rebellion of outsiders but the implosion of a shared political organism: a struggle within the same moral and cultural ecosystem that had sustained Rome’s Mediterranean hegemony. Research Premise From the Second Punic War to Sulla’s restoration, Roman politics was shaped by a growing dialectic between fear, legitimacy, and moral order. The Hannibalic War had forged an unprecedented military integration of Italy: Latin, Samnite, and Campanian soldiers shared arms, discipline, and the rhetoric of virtus and fides under Rome’s banners. Yet this common experience also introduced a paradoxical intimacy of violence. Italians and Romans learned to fight together—but also to imagine one another as potential traitors. This emotional residue, rooted in Hannibal’s invasion, constituted the first internal fracture of the Roman commonwealth. The defection of Capua, the loyalty of the Latins, and the brutal reprisals that followed created a moral geography of inclusion and exclusion that endured long after Carthage’s defeat. What had been metus hostilis—fear of the external enemy—slowly turned inward, becoming metus civilis, the fear of betrayal within. During the second century BCE, this latent civil logic was perpetuated by repeated Italian 2 mobilizations in Spain and the East. Military citizenship blurred with political exclusion: the socii carried Roman standards abroad but remained legally subordinate at home. Each campaign reinforced the contradiction of an empire fought and financed by men denied full participation in its polity. By the 90s BCE, Italy had become both Rome’s body and its mirror—a network of communities that had internalized Roman language, law, and discipline while nurturing a growing sense of moral grievance. At its core, the project argued that war itself reshaped moral categories. The Social War marked the moment when the distinction between hostes externi and hostes publici dissolved—when the “enemy” became one’s neighbour and kin. The Italian insurgents invoked the same gods, minted coins in Latin, and replicated Roman magistracies, not to destroy Rome but to claim its essence. The conflict thus represented the collapse of the Roman moral fiction of unity: a civil war fought in the name of citizenship. Core Hypotheses 1. Continuum of Fear: The metus hostilis that once unified Rome against Carthage gradually turned inward after 146 BCE, eroding civic trust and legitimizing preemptive coercion. 2. The Social War as Civil War: The Italian conflict (91–87 BCE) was the first bellum civile in moral and juridical terms, as Romans waged war upon their equals. 3. Transformation of the mos maiorum: Civil conflict produced a “moral mutation” that normalized violence, perjury, and proscription as political tools. 4. Normalization of Exception: The Cinnanum Tempus and Sulla’s dictatorship institutionalized transgression, framing it within the rhetoric of restitutio rei publicae and concordia. 5. Concordia Securitaria: Sulla’s restoration created a peace based on surveillance and obedience rather than shared virtue — the true birth of the Roman concept of civil war. Methodology The project combined philological, historical, and anthropological analysis to study how Romans conceptualized internal conflict. Drawing on primary sources (Cicero, Appian, Sallust, Velleius, Livy, Diodorus, Valerius Maximus) and comparative frameworks of civil war theory (Tilly 1975; Kalyvas 2006; Armitage 2017; Demmers 2017; Sheehan-Dean 2020), it adopted an interdisciplinary approach grounded in four complementary perspectives: • Emotional governance: the management of collective fear (metus) as a source of legitimacy. • Exemplarity and transgression: how acts once considered violations of the mos maiorum became new moral precedents. • Legal fictions of unity: the refusal to name internal violence as bellum civile until it was conceptually inescapable. 3 • The anthropology of concordia: the transformation of Roman peace into a securitarian discourse — harmony through control. Aims and Broader Significance The project aimed to contribute to the conceptual history of civil war by identifying the long antebellum (218–82 BCE) as the formative stage of Rome’s internal conflict. Its central thesis — that Rome invented the notion of civil war as a means of self-definition — bridges ancient historiography with modern social theory on trauma, legitimacy, and state formation. By placing emotion and morality at the core of Roman political evolution, the study sought to move beyond institutional narratives and illuminate how collective fear, rather than ideology, shaped the moral collapse of the Republic. Appendix I: Chronology of the Project (2018–2019) The project The Logic of Civil War in the Hannibalic and Social Wars was first designed in October 2018 and submitted shortly afterwards to the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (Irish Research Council, University College Dublin) under the mentorship of Dr Alexander Thein. The proposal (Project ID GOIPD/2019/17) remained under evaluation until April 2019, when it received official feedback from the Council. During May 2019, the project was further refined and adapted for consideration within the framework of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, exploring potential supervision at the Technische Universität Braunschweig. This period of revision marked the consolidation of its main hypotheses and structure, later integrated into ongoing research on Roman political culture, emotion, and the moral transformation of the Republic. Purpose of this Record This document serves as a public record of authorship and conceptual development for the ideas formulated during the 2018–2019 research cycle. It is not a preprint or a formal publication, but an archival note intended to ensure transparency, traceability, and accurate scholarly attribution of the project’s intellectual framework. It may be cited as: Heredia Chimeno, Carlos (2018–2019 / 2025). From Hannibal to Sulla: The Logic of Civil War and the Moral Transformation of the Roman Republic (2018–2019 Project Framework). 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