1619) echoed Lucan’s construction: “…Whilst Kin their Kin, brother the brother foyles/ Like Ensignes all against like Ensignes band:/ Bowes against bowes,/ the Crowne against the/ crowne,/ whil’st all pretending right, all throwen down.” In the stormy prelude to the English civil wars, pitting the Puritan regicides against the crown, the English poet Samuel Daniel (d. chose metaphors of disaster to portray the Roman civil wars: “The rage of Caesar and Pompey, like a flood or fire, overran the city, Italy, tribes, nations and finally the whole empire…” The Roman historian Florus of the 2 nd Century C.E. The Roman poet Lucan of the 1st Century B.C.E.-a time ripped by civil wars from Dictator Sulla to Emperor Augustus – presented civil wars with a horror that sounds through twenty-one centuries: “…and of legality conferred on crime we sing, and of/ a mighty people/ attacking its own guts with victorious sword-hand/ of kin facing kin…” Observers during the 17 th Century English civil wars, or during the 18 th and 19 th century French and American civil wars, especially looked to the stories of the Roman civil wars in the 1st Century B.C.E in order to discover past narratives to describe present chaos. Importantly, signs of contemporary civil war around us are usually so difficult to fix and so dreadful to acknowledge that scholars have found it helpful to study historical civil wars for lessons learned. Armitage points toward the English poet John Milton who discerned “the poetry of civil war …with its own characteristics and recurrent figures of speech, images, and themes.”
How can you know that you are in a civil war?
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