ABSTRACT
The image of Livy as a creative compiler seems especially hard to shake because of the episodic nature of his narrative, even with the work of scholars such as Gary Miles, Jane Chaplin, or Andrew Feldherr. Based on the author belief that Livy would have been as affected by the civil wars as his contemporaries, he propose to read episodes from Livy’s book, the death of Remus, the war over the Sabine women and the duel of the Horatii and Curiatii, through the lens of civil war. The civil wars of the first century bce carried plenty of examples of ira and ferocitas: the proscriptions, Pompey’s Sullan threats and Octavian’s butchery at Perusia. Paul Jal has shown how stories reflect the contemporary concerns of Roman civil war in his magisterial book on civil war in Roman thought.
