Wow! eBook
The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De Armis Romanis
Author(s): Alberico Gentili (Author), Benedict Kingsbury (Editor), Benjamin Straumann (Editor), David Lupher (Translator)
- Publisher: OUP Oxford
- Publication Date: 24 Feb. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 424 pages
- ISBN-10: 0199600511
- ISBN-13: 9780199600519
Book Description
Gentili’s polemic and highly engaging work helped pioneer the use of Roman law and just war theory in what became a leading international law approach to the enduring questions of the justice of empire. Writing in the wake of the first wave of European colonial expansion in the Americas, and relying on models of the controversy about Roman imperialism from Cicero to Lactantius and Augustine, Gentili developed the arguments which were to become pivotal in normative debates concerning imperialism. In this work Gentili, a consummate Roman law scholar, frames the moral and practical issues in a combination of Roman legal terminology and the language of natural law, a combination which was to prove highly influential in the literature from Grotius onward on natural law, the law of nations and what eventually became international law.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The editors are to be congratulated without reservation for their cardinal – and beautiful – accomplishment. ―
Andreas Wagner, European Journal of International Law, vol. 23 no. 3 The Wars of the Romans is a wonderful book, fills a long-standing lacuna in the study of Gentili, and should be a foundation text in all studies of this very influential thinker. After all, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes supported Gentili’s humanist doctrines, which now have a text that will make his work more accessible to all. ― Edmund P. Cueva, The Sixteenth Century JournalAbout the Author
Benjamin Straumann is Alberico Gentili Fellow at New York University. He is the author of
Hugo Grotius und die Antike: Römisches Recht und römische Ethik im frühneuzeitlichen Naturrecht (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2007) and co-editor (with Benedict Kingsbury) of The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (OUP, 2010).Professor David Lupher is the Chair of the Classics Department at the University of Paget Sound. He is the author of
Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (University of Michigan Press, 2003).
