This chapter explores key episodes of extreme violence in the context of wars between Greek-speaking groups in the Hellenistic period. Case studies explore the phenomenon of destruction of Hellenistic cities and interrogate whether such destruction in warfare should be counted as genocide. The chapter identifies and compares conditions for extreme violence in the Hellenistic period, which was marked by continual warfare. It argues that competing discourses about justice, together with different emotional regimes related to justice, including anger, pity, and shame, serve both to moderate and intensify violence throughout this period. Where violence is taken to be just, views of justice as legitimate punishment and vengeance can ground acts of extreme violence, while view of justice as reasonable, equitable and gentle may moderate violence but could also be activated to justify extreme violence, if it is taken to be responding to extraordinary provocations or ethical and religious violations. These traditions of justice and emotional norms in the context of warfare in turn sit within a range of other cultural and political commitments which may both moderate and provoke extreme violence, including the development and maintenance of civic identity, legal and religious norms, and considerations of economic and political power.

Livy’s History is very interested in the way that societies are maintained by belief in a host of shared fictions. The Roman citizenship is Livy’s prime example of this process, as Rome keeps recreating the model of citizenship as more and more new people come into the Roman sphere. The fictive power of the citizenship allows it to be redescribed from generation to generation. The citizenship is not a matter of shared blood or of a shared place of birth; it is a corporate fiction that can in theory accommodate anyone as a member.

This chapter looks at cases where those subject to Roman hegemony attempted to throw off Roman control and also where the power of individuals within the state became so contested that it threatened the constitutional integrity of the republic.In the first half coin evidence is used to look at South Italian communities that sided with Hannibal during the Second Punic War, uprisings of enslaved peoples and Roman responses, and the failed attempt by Rome’s former Italian allies to set up a rival federal state.The second half examines what numismatic evidence can tell us about the autocratic ambitions of Marius, Sulla, and Pompey and ends with a close look at how Sulla’s memory was used during the period of Pompey’s ascendency.