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Chapter 3

Empire and the Laws of War

Alberico Gentili’s extraordinary work De armis Romanis takes the form of a pair of speeches, the first an indictment of the injustices committed by the Romans in war, the second a speech of defense, on the justice of those same actions. The work lacks an introduction or conclusion in propria persona; the reader is thus left without guidance as to how to award the palm of victory. That said, Gentili did not write in a spirit of postmodern indeterminacy. His concerns were rather source-critical: “it is necessary,” his first speaker insists, “that I consider their own histories suspect. For they openly admit that they were hostile to all those who stood forth as enemies of the Romans” (De armis bk. 1, chap. 1, in David Lupher’s fine translation).¹ How can one trust Roman claims to have adhered to the laws of war—to have fought, in their terms, only wars that were just—when they can be shown to have lied about fundamental issues in their past? And what might one conclude about war and imperialism in general, when that most paradeigmatic of empires felt such shame, even before itself?