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This chapter is concerned with the beginning of the conflict between Cicero and Mark Antony, which was sparked by the orator’s performance of the Philippics and ended with his death in 43 BCE. This starting point has been the subject of much debate among many scholars, including Ramsey (2003), Manuwald (2007), and Usher (2010). Based on Cicero’s intent with and Antony’s interpretation of the speeches, the content of the speeches, and the political climate of 44-43 BCE Rome, they have argued convincingly in favor of either Philippic One or Philippic Three as the conflict’s beginning. This chapter adds to their analyses by taking a Social Constructionist approach to the texts, considering the subtle ways in which Cicero constructs Antony’s identity in Philippics One and Three through his use of language. Taking the three dimensions of identity construction suggested by Bamberg (e.g. 2011a) - sameness/difference, agency, and diachronic identity navigation - as a starting point, it investigates the linguistic devices that contribute to ingroup/outgroup formation. Based on an analysis of phenomena such as category-bound activities, footing-shifts, agency expression, and dissociative demonstratives, it concludes that the conflict between Cicero and Antony started with Philippic Three.

In battle, warriors should act, not speak or think. This, in any case, is the impression we get from Latin narratives about battle, in which speech and thought tend to be less frequent than in other types of episodes. The preference of narrators for actions over words in the thick of battle is a reason to give all the more significance to the speeches and thoughts that they do present in their battle episodes. Therefore, the topic of this article is formed by the speeches and thoughts in Livy’s episode about the battle of Cannae, in contrast to those in the episode about the battle of Zama.

Lemmata Linguistica Latina consists of two volumes: Words and Sounds (Volume 1) and Clause and Discourse (Volume 2). The volumes bring together contributions presented at the XIXth International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, held in Munich in 2017, and embrace essential topics of Latin linguistics with various theoretical and methodological approaches. This second volume contains papers which focus on the levels of clause and discourse. On the one hand, they address clause-internal questions of syntax and semantics; on the other hand, they investigate linguistic phenomena that particularly pertain to the level of the discourse, such as tense and discourse-linguistic phenomena of politeness and identity.

In accordance with the commonly acknowledged semantic value of the Latin present tense of ‘simultaneity with the moment of speech’, scholars have tended to formulate the main function of the historic present tense in terms of the addition of a certain vividness or dramatization to the narrative: by artificially transferring the deictic center of the speech event (the ‘discourse now’) to the reference time of the characters in the narrated world (the ‘story now’), the speaker/writer creates a form of narration with the features of an eye-witness account, in which the addressee/reader, on account of a pretended unmediated access to the recounted events, may feel maximally immersed.This ‘vividness’ explanation of the historic present has, however, also been criticized for both its vagueness and its restricted applicability. In this article we will show that in a selected narrative corpus ̶ book 22 of Livy’s historiographical work Ab Urbe Condita ̶ , only very few instances of the historic present might actually be accounted for in terms of an effect of immersion or vividness. On the basis of a mixed discourse-linguistic, cognitive-linguistic and narratological instrument of analysis, we will argue that the vast majority of instances of the historic present tense in Livy book 22 are used quite differently, and that the present’s inherent feature of ‘epistemic immediacy’ is used predominantly for strategic structuring of the text rather than for the effect of a vivid eye-witness account. By discussing a number of examples, we will illustrate the subtle ways in which Livy exploits the cognitive and functional potential of the present tense as established in our analysis – viz. indicating the common ground status of the information referred to ̶ for smoothly and unobtrusively taking the audience along in the construction process of his complex narrative.