I am beginning to look at possible Master’s thesis topics... One of the aspects of Rome that I always found fascinating was the difference in how they viewed war compared to their contemporaries, at least in the early and mid-Republic era when they were a rising power and not the dominant one. They really did appear to view war as a life and death struggle... If they didn’t defeat their enemy early they would just keep coming until they did or were destroyed themselves. I’ve always found the Phyrric War the best example of this. However, my primary interest is Hannibal and the Second Punic War, and I’m considering trying to mold my thesis around the Roman view of war as a life and death struggle against the backdrop of this conflict. Something along the lines of... ‘Rome was ultimately successful against Hannibal due to their unconventional view of war as a struggle to the death, either they won or they were utterly decimated as a people and culture.’

However, while I have never come across any scholarly works that explicitly and centrally take this point of view, it seems such an obvious one that I think there must be. So my question is, has this frame of reference been done before and by whom?