From Hannibal to Sulla: The Logic of Civil War and the Moral Transformation of the Roman Republic (2018–2019 Research Framework)

This research note presents the conceptual framework of the project The Logic of Civil War in the Hannibalic and Social Wars, developed between October 2018 and May 2019 and later integrated into ongoing work on Roman political culture, emotion, and legitimacy.Originally submitted to the Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship 2019 (Irish Research Council, University College Dublin) and revised for a Humboldt Fellowship proposal at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, the project explored how external warfare, collective fear, and moral transgression progressively merged into the logic of internal conflict that would later define the first century BCE.By reinterpreting the Social War (91–87 BCE) as the first true bellum civile, the study traced the moral and emotional transformation of the Roman Republic from the Hannibalic War to Sulla’s dictatorship. This document is an archival record for scholarly transparency and citation purposes.