Ideology and community in Caesar's "Bellum Civile".

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Recent scholarship consistently considered Caesar's Bellum Civile (BC) an unfinished work or propaganda, unworthy of being called "literature." This dissertation, "Ideology and Community in Caesar's Bellum Civile," reassesses its literary value and significance in the context of the late Republic.
Starting from a close reading of passages where charged vocabulary occurs, I examine the narrative strategies that Caesar deploys to present a seemingly objective reconstruction of the civil war and yet rewrite a partisan version of history according to his interests. Caesar's pure style engages the readers, creates a work of high literature and promotes a unitary ideology: Caesar represents the Roman state and Pompey its enemy; those who follow Caesar remain loyal to the ideal of the Republic, but those who follow Pompey destroy it. This literary and ideological value of the BC emerges upon close reading techniques developed for Latin poetry and oratory, like intertextual, semantic and narratological analysis.
The BC deploys complex language and ideas to participate in its broader cultural context, to redefine the nature of the State and what it means to be a Roman citizen. Caesar's work thus promotes a distinctively Caesarean understanding of community and takes its meaning vis-a-vis both Caesar's program of self-representation to his contemporaries and the political debate that animated the passage from the Roman Republic to the Empire.