Julius Caesar and the Roman stasis

Thucydides was perhaps the most influential historian in antiquity; his work inspired countless subsequent authors. In the past decade, interest in the connection between Julius Caesar’s commentaries and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War has grown, and linguistic and other links between the works have been noted. In this paper I will show, following Powell 2009, connections between Caesar’s civil war commentaries and Thucydides’ analysis of stasis. Caesar redeploys the different characteristics of stasis and then employs them to highlight the Pompeians as the true villains and culprits of the civil war, using the work of the famed Greek historian as his modello codice.