ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the discourses and debates concerning negotiation and peace during the civil conflicts of the late Republic, focusing on the literary testimony of Cicero and Caesar. It argues for the importance of peace within the discussions of the crisis the Republic faced and the effect this had on the understanding and usage of the term itself. The language and terminology adopted by political actors in the late Republic, particularly in its final decades, was a means to orientate one's position in relation to the res publica, as well as to stress the threat posed to the state by one's opponents. The conflicts of the final decades of the late Republic cultivated the use of the language of war and peace in discourses on political stability, as a means to describe and articulate relations between political actors.
