Exemplarity in the Bellum Africum

Aislinn A. Melchior (University of Puget Sound)

This paper leaves aside issues of authorship (the focus of most interest) to explore the rhetorical strategies of the Bellum Africum. I will argue that the Bellum Africum moves beyond simple vilification of the Pompeians to portray them as having a failed relationship with exemplarity. The Pompeians are able neither to interpret the exemplary behavior of the Caesarians correctly, nor to live up to their own heroic models. In contrast, Caesar functions in the Bellum Africum to correct Curio's negative example of failure (described in Bellum Civile Book 2). Curio's defeat and massacre are written over by positive examples of Roman (i.e. Caesarian) courage, loyalty, and military success.

Shortly after Caesar's arrival in Africa, he is faced with a situation that parallels that of Curio: he is surrounded on a plain by superior forces, his horses wounded and exhausted. The author highlights these parallels with the phrase "Curionis exemplo" (BA 19). Believing that Caesar will conform to the model of Curio, the Pompeian Labienus wrongly anticipates that Caesar will be slaughtered by the Numidian cavalry just as Curio had been. In another scene, when Scipio offers the chance to some captured Caesarians to switch sides, one officer stoutly maintains his allegiance to Caesar, warning: "If you were inexperienced before whose men you are fighting, now you know" (BA 44). He offers to fight to the death, claiming that, "From our virtue you will understand what you ought to expect from your own troops." Exemplary tableaux like these present the Pompeians as failed readers of exemplary behavior making them, in an important sense, less Roman than Caesar's troops.

While Caesar and his men overturn negative precedents, the Pompeians prove unable to live up to even their own positive exemplars. Inspired by Cato's exhortation to imitate his father, Gnaeus Pompeius sets out only to be barred from the first town he approaches in a scene marked by alliteration (prostratos perterritosque Pompeianos BA 22). Such scenes show the hortatory nature of positive exemplarity in action (Roller 2004, Chaplin 2000), but on the Pompeian side, even Pompeius' son is unable to mimic his namesake and proves himself adulescentulus rather than magnus (BA 23). I will show how the author of the Bellum Africum rewrites Book 2 of the Bellum Civile, minting new exempla - of Caesarian loyalty and courage, and Pompeian cruelty and cowardice - for Caesar's partisans.