Roman civil wars
Rawson pointed out that the piling up of atrocities in accounts of the Roman civil wars should not be discounted too quickly as literary invention: "Sceptical modern historians sometimes suffer from a happy failure of imagination in refusing to envisage the horrors which we all ought to know occur too often in civil war." Such gruesome catalogues are characteristic of Roman historians rather than their Greek models, she noted, and Sallust was the first to provide lists of concrete and "horrific "exempla"."