Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Somewhat rubbed jacket, otherwise very good and clean. / Etwas beriebener Umschlag, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Contents: Introduction: The Problem of Limits on Aristocratic Competition -- 1. Military Failure, Political Success -- 2. Defeat and the Pax Deorum -- 3. Defeat and the Virtus Militum -- 4. The Aristocratic Ethos and the Preservation of Status -- 5. Conclusions and Implications. - Roman politics in the middle and late Republic were characterized by an intense competition among aristocrats seeking public office, prestige, and personal power. Given the pervasiveness and ferocity of such rivalry, one might expect that it would soon have undermined the cohesiveness of the ruling class or endangered the state. But as Rosenstein adeptly shows, competition was surprisingly limited, in ways that curtailed the possible destructive effects of all-out contests between individuals. Imperatores Victi examines one particularly striking case of the limitation of aristocratic competition. Military success at all times represented an abundant source of prestige and political strength at Rome. Generals who led armies to victory enjoyed a much-better-than-average chance of securing higher office upon their return from the field. On the other hand, scholars have usually assumed that a lost battle spelled trouble in court or constituted a serious liability at the polls for the individual in command. Yet Rosenstein demonstrates that defeated generals were not barred from public office and in fact went on to win the Republic's most highly coveted and hotly contested offices in numbers virtually identical with those of their undefeated peers. Rosenstein explores how this state of affairs could be sustained in an otherwise deeply competitive political culture, reviewing beliefs about the religious origins of defeat, assumptions about the common soldiers' duties in battle, and definitions of honorable behavior for an aristocrat during a crisis. These Roman perspectives created ways of shifting the onus of failure away from a general and offered him strategies for winning glory and respect among the voters even in defeat and for silencing potential critics among his peers Limits to aristocratic competition had an important impact on the larger problems of the Republic's political stability and coherence among its ruling elite. - Nathan S. Rosenstein is Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University. ISBN 9780520069398