AN ANALYSIS OF ROMAN MUTINY NARRATIVES THROUGH MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

<p>This paper is concerned with the use of mutiny narratives in historical texts as a microcosm of the historians’ goal of the work as a whole. This study is built upon the recent trend in scholarship, where a particular feature of a text has been studied to provide an analysis on the author or the underlying purpose of his work. Mutinies and, more specifically, mutiny narrative patterns have not been studied to a great extent for this type of analysis. However, based upon their tradition delineation and explanation of events and their ubiquitous speeches, mutiny narratives are capable of providing a new avenue for this type of analysis. The first chapter will look at the mutiny of Scipio Africanus’ troops at Sucro in 206 B.C.E. as presented by the historians Polybius and Livy. Both attempted to organize their works upon particular moral and didactic lines, the results of which are clearly expressed in their construct of the mutiny. This intentional framework is also present in the poet Lucan’s historical epic the <em>Bellum Civile</em>, who shaped the mutiny of Caesar’s troops in 47 B.C.E. in order to express his own belief in the inherent cataclysm and paradox of civil war. Finally these same themes of chaos and contradiction are also present in my third chapter and its analysis of five mutinies found in Tacitus, two in 14 C.E. and three in 69 C.E. under Galba, Otho and Vocula. Tacitus deliberately engineered the earlier mutinies in order to create both thematic and linguistic echoes to the later seditions in order to prove that the same problems that caused the later civil war were present under the earliest emperors.</p>