"The Romans harped endlessly on "morality," a cultural feature long ignored as a literary trope or misappreciated as a mere marker of elite status. This book shows how, instead, social norms of personal restraint was part of a habitus of foundational values that acted as meta-rules for the Roman aristocratic performative-competitive political system. The book investigates these norms and explicates their positive content in the republican framework and their resulting place in the Romans' habitual mental map. The book then examines how the social norms came into irreconcilable conflict, arguing that-far from Rome progressing from a pristine past moral state to a sad moral nadir-the same "morals" of personal self-control stabilized and destabilized the Republic at different points in time. The values eventually lost their prohibitory force to constrain action, but not because they were abandoned. Rather, disputes over the proper application and meaning of the norms in novel political and social circumstances grew into violent clashes as disputants presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the essential values and, accordingly, imagined their opponents as bent on the Republic's destruction, while no normatively acceptable third-party judge could exist to resolve the conflicts. Thus, the aristocracy's consensus formed and then cracked along axes over what constituted normative restraint behavior, which both accounts for the ubiquity of this cultural feature, and which automatically undermined a central pillar of the performative-competitive structure itself"--

The second century BCE was a time of prolonged debate at Rome about the changing nature of warfare. From the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 to Rome’s first civil war in 88 BCE, warfare shifted from the struggle against a great external enemy to a conflict against internal parties. This book argues that Rome’s Italian subjects were central to this development: having rebelled and defected to Hannibal at the end of the third century, the allies again rebelled in 91 BCE, with significant consequences for Roman thought about warfare as such. These "rebellions" constituted an Italian renewal of the war against their old conqueror, Rome, and an internal war within the polity. Accordingly, we need to add 'internal war' to the already well-established dichotomy of foreign and civil war. This fresh analysis of the second century demonstrates that the Roman experience of internal war during this period provided the natural stepping-stone in the invention of civil war as such. It conceives of the period from the Second Punic War onward as an 'antebellum' period to the later civil war(s) of the Late Republic, during which contemporary observers looked back at the last 'great war' against Hannibal in preparation for the next conflict.

This second edition examines all aspects of Roman history, and contains a new introduction, three new chapters and updated bibliographies.

Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.

Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.

One global leadership challenge is managing the complexity of the political and economic climate of a society. As the global environment changes, it is essential for global leaders to adapt and develop flexible strategies for resolving conflicts and achieving peace. Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding provides emerging research on a leader’s role in the international, national, and nongovernmental organization within post-conflict resolution and peaceful leadership. While highlighting topics, such as civil society organizations, leadership education, and social reconstruction, this book explores leadership theories and practice models to conceptualize the intersection of leadership within conflict management and resolution. This book is an important resource for leaders, scholar-practitioners, educators, and researchers seeking current research on the strategic and diplomatic methods of a peaceful global organization.

There is no other published book in English studying the constitution of the Roman Republic as a whole. Yet the Greek historian Polybius believed that the constitution was a fundamental cause of the exponential growth of Rome's empire. He regarded the Republic as unusual in two respects: first, because it functioned so well despite being a mix of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy; secondly, because the constitution was the product of natural evolution rather than the ideals of a lawgiver. Even if historians now seek more widely for the causes of Rome's rise to power, the importance and influence of her political institutions remains. The reasons for Rome's power are both complex, on account of the mix of elements, and flexible, inasmuch as they were not founded on written statutes but on unwritten traditions reinterpreted by successive generations. Knowledge of Rome's political institutions is essential both for ancient historians and for those who study the contribution of Rome to the republican tradition of political thought from the Middle Ages to the revolutions inspired by the Enlightenment.