Racing Roman Republican Warfare

Despite the efforts of a few scholars in the early 2000s (Dee 2003; Isaac 2005; McCoskey 2012), applications of critical approaches to race to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity have been few and far between. Recent work has drawn attention to the significance of this absence. Medievalist have shown that race does, in fact, offer a valuable heuristic of historical analysis for premodern periods (Heng 2018). Additionally, classicists of color have shown that the rejection of race as a critical tool speaks to a discomfort with abandoning white-centric notions of the field (Haley 2009; Padilla Peralta 2021).

This paper takes its impetus from these interventions. To that end, it applies insights from Critical Race Theory and Black Studies to provide a new way of understanding a vexed problem in the study of Roman history: the nature of Roman imperial expansion during the Republic. Using Roman enmity towards the Gauls as a case study, this paper shows how the use of critical approaches towards race can refine and deepen our understanding of the socio-historical mechanisms that animated Roman warfare in the Republic.

The first part of the paper draws on the theories of “racial formation” (Omi and Winant 2014) to analyze depictions of Gauls during the Republic. Through a close study of Celtomachy scenes on Southern Italic and Etruscan funerary urns and the various narratives of the Gallic sack of Rome, I highlight the processes by which perceived physical, social, and religious differences between Gauls and Italians came to be essentialized and incorporated within the discourse of warfare and violence over the third and second centuries BCE. Texts from the first century BCE like Cicero’s de Provincibus Consularibus and Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, on the other hand, bear witness to specific historical moments in which these essentialized differences were used to justify military endeavors against the Gauls. These works show how the insidious ways that difference could be constructed, erased, and reconstructed to rationalize specific military interventions long after the Gauls ceased to be a threat to the Roman state (cf. Nguyen 2021).

The second part of the paper situates Roman relations with the Gauls within the context of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). Mbembe’s work not only draws explicit connections between race and state-sponsored violence, but articulates the mechanisms through which racially-driven violence proceeds. According to Mbembe, the state relies on reference to “exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of an enemy” to engender the “right to kill” (Mbembe 2019: 70). Mbembe’s insights clarify two wartime rituals from the Middle Republic that have long confounded scholars: the tumultus Gallicus and the live burial of Gauls in times of war. While modern scholars have tended to see these practices either as indicative of real Roman fears about state safety or as arcane religious rituals (Várhelyi 2007), Mbembe’s analysis highlights how the state not only justified its right to kill but also provided the impetus for the citizen soldier to do the same through affective racial rhetoric (Ahmed 2004).