Conflit Propagandiste Entre Octavien et Marc Antoine

By blaming each other for obscure and degrading origins, cruelty, cowardice, oratorical and literary incompetence, debaucheries, luxury, drunkenness and other slanders, Octavian and Mark Antony, between 44-30 BC, endeavoured to destroy their respective political foe's reputation in the eyes of various publics. Unfortunately, until now, invectives have not yet benefitted from the academic attention they deserve, which is doubly regrettable as the rhetorical genre of ?uituperatio? is a perfect illustration for the use of propaganda in Antiquity and helps to contest the traditional focus put on coinage and poetry. Through its tripartite structure, the present book offers, for the first time, an encompassing view of the ?uituperatio? of this period, analysed in turn according to the rhetorical themes of the invectives, the public concerned, and the forms and supports by which it is conveyed. It demonstrates that, by its srenuous and fierce expression, the ?uituperatio? not only became a tool of war, but also prefigured the ideological basis of the Augustan Principate.