Even further beneath the positivist war horizon than intervention, reprisals and other measures short of war, in nineteenth-century legal doctrine, were civil wars. In Western thought, there was a long tradition of regarding civil conflict as fundamentally distinct from true war. To Plato, for example, the terms ‘war’ and ‘civil strife’ referred to ‘two different realities’. Similarly, in Roman law, the distinction between latrociniae (bandits, pirates and the like) and true enemies, or hostes, had been fundamental. Cicero stressed that enemies were bodies of people with whom a peace treaty could be concluded, thereby excluding brigands and such persons. Concretely, this meant that none of the rituals associated with war-making and war-waging was applicable to struggles against mere law-breakers. Nor did the rules on the conduct of war apply. In particular, faith did not have to be kept with bandits, as it did with true foreign enemies.