Jonathan Slonim

Ancient Rome Midterm

Dr. Calvert

3/12/13

Rome’s Vision of Herself

In seeking to understand a historical culture, it is imperative that we

look at how that culture defined itself. With Ancient Rome, our work in that

regard is at once simple and surprisingly complex. On the one hand, our

knowledge of the history of the Republic is almost entirely founded on Roman

accounts. Thus, we know what the authors thought of their culture. However,

most of the accounts that we have are, in effect, secondary sources. Much of

our knowledge of the republic comes through Tacitus and Plutarch, both of

whom lived in the first and second centuries A.D. We can, therefore have

very little idea of what Republican Romans thought of themselves in their

own time, except through archeological records and more minor accounts.

The alternative is to look at how our sources in the first and second centuries

viewed their own history. We can then treat them as primary sources, giving

us a window into Rome’s idealized vision of her own history and a concrete

base from which to make historical claims.

With this method in mind, how did the Romans attempt to set

themselves apart from other cultures? What made them great? What were

the latent tendencies that gradually grew by the first century B.C. to allow

Julius Caesar and Augustus to finally abolish the Republican Constitution? A

survey of the history of the Republic shows a continual tension between the

Roman desire for republican virtue and their tendency to conquest and

imperialism. Both peaceful agriculturalism and aggressive expansionism

were considered—to some degree—virtues among the Ancient Romans. This

tension explains much of the Roman identity as found in the Imperial writers,

and (especially in their minds) presages the downfall of the Roman Republic.

Plutarch’s writings on Cato the Elder and on Sulla make excellent case

studies and can serve to aptly illustrate how many Romans defined their

cultural challenges.

Rome was largely a derivative republic. The Greeks preceded them in

thought, in mythology, and (to some degree) in political forms. This idea is

still almost as controversial among scholars of the ancient world as it was

among the Romans themselves. To what extent was Rome’s culture

“borrowed” from the Greeks, and to what extent was it peculiarly Roman? As

historians, we can never separate a culture’s mores from those that

preceded it, making this question almost impossible to answer. However, the

Romans’ own ideas of their origins provide a fascinating and almost

schizophrenic account of their relationship to the Ancient Greeks.

The Roman ideal of manhood, of virtue, and of citizenship derived from

the Greek ideal of καλοκαγαθία—goodness and beauty. This defines the aim of

Roman citizenship throughout the Republic and into Imperial times. The word

itself implies a balance between thought and action, between manly war and

peaceful cultivation of the land, and between politics and private life. The

fact that the Romans never felt that they had achieved this goal is indicative

of how significant it was to them. Had they been content with their situation,

we could assume that the Romans were perhaps not fully dedicated to the

pursuit of this ideal. Instead, we see orators, politicians, historians, and

generals consistently seeking to return the people to the more virtuous ways

of their forefathers.

This mythical ideal, enacted through the mos maiorum, or “way of the

elders,” is clearly demonstrated in their founding myths. The word “rex,” or

king, was almost unpronounceable after the Republic was first founded. The

Roman citizens saw themselves as just that: citizens who would not be

subject to a tyrant. Even their fear of tyranny was likely derivative of the

Greeks, who had themselves sought to avoid tyranny and placed a high

value on public participation in politics. “Man is by nature a political animal,”

Aristotle declared, and the Romans listened to him. i

In the founding myths of Ancient Rome, Romulus, the first king of

Rome, began many of the customs that continued until Rome was sacked in

410 by the Visigoths. He separated the Plebians from the Patricians,

recognizing that some were more suited to agricultural labor and others to

administration of the state. The Patricians, or nobles, were each responsible

for the welfare of a number of Plebian clients, who would in return provide

political, economic, and social support to their patrons. While Romans liked

to believe that this was a unique invention of their own, it was in fact very

similar to the patronage of the Ancient Greeks. There, a citizen would

support a Metic or foreigner, represent him in court, and generally be κύριος

(protector and lord) over him.ii While the Romans believed that they had

come up with this system, it was actually a modified Greek idea. However,

this system was one which the Romans believed made them unique, and it

continued to be an important part of their political life into the time of the

emperors.

Another important part of the Roman identity was their peculiar

constitution. According to legend, the Republic itself was founded in 509 by a

man named Brutus. He persuaded the Senate to elect two consuls to rule for

a year-long term rather than a king for life.iii Under this constitution, the

Senate held much of the legislative power, while the Consuls were dedicated

largely to administration and to war. As early as 445 B.C., the distinction

between Patricians and Plebians was breaking down. As old money became

insufficient to uphold some of the old Patrician families, it no longer made

political or economic sense to exclude wealthy Plebian families from public

office. 445 marked the first time that Plebians and Patricians could

intermarry. Thus, a plebian family, through a number of generations, could

eventually claim its own seats in the Senate. When this happened, most of

the new crop of Senators (“new men”) retained their Plebian roots as a mark

of pride—a sort of “rags to riches” story that demonstrated their superior

merit in overcoming such obstacles to reach high status. Cato the Elder

became perhaps the most well-known of these prominent Plebians.

Plutarch’s account of Cato the Elder demonstrates the importance that

the Romans placed on tradition, on virtue, and even on “Romanness” itself.

Cato “himself used to say that he was certainly new to honors and positions

of authority, but that as regards deeds of valor performed by his ancestors,

his name was as old as any.”iv There is a sort of double-standard in Plutarch’s

description of Cato. On the one hand, “his name is as old as any” in regards

to deeds of valor, as his father and grandfather had both fought bravely and

been recognized for their courage in war. However, the epithet “Cato” meant

that a man had particularly distinguished himself . There was a tense

balance between family honor and individual honor and recognition. While

family accomplishments were highly respected and extremely important to

Romans, Plutarch shows throughout his history that the individual acts of

Cato are what make him stand out. This tension between traditional mores

and individual action was part of what it meant to be Roman. Cato is

described as a man who “ever since his youth . . . had trained himself to

work with his hands, to serve as a soldier, and to follow a soldier mode of

living.” When he was not fighting as a citizen-soldier, Cato was a lawyer who

provided “his services in lawsuits without demanding a fee of any kind, [and]

he did not seem to regard the prestige acquired in these conflicts as the

principal object of his affairs.”v Cato was the quintessential Roman in many

ways, balancing an active public life with personal philanthropy and manly

martial valor.

Plutarch is even able to brush aside Cato’s flaws: “For my own part I

regard his conduct towards his slaves in treating them like beasts of burden

[and] exploiting them . . . as the mark of a thoroughly ungenerous nature,

which cannot recognize any bond between man and man but that of

necessity.” This is not so much of a mark against the statesman, however, as

it is an indication of his wholehearted devotion to law and justice, argues

Plutarch.vi The republican man is a man of action, and one whose life is

dedicated to public service and war. Here the Romans differed substantially

from the Greeks, who considered the contemplative life to be the truly good

life. Cato, we are told, never even studied Greek until he was an old man. He

was, like many traditional Romans, quite skeptical of Greek philosophy.

Philosophy was too likely to corrupt youth, and it had no value in actual

practice. For a civilization that saw warfare as the highest calling of each

citizen, this was simply not acceptable. Rhetoric was good insofar as it could

help the speaker to motivate an army or to speak in a meeting of the Senate

or Centurian Assembly. If it went beyond valuable applications, philosophical

rhetoric was highly suspect.

However, despite the skepticism with which Republican Rome viewed

Greece, they always maintained an appreciation for the influence Greek

culture had on their own. Plutarch writes of Cato, once he started studying

Greek, “he improved his oratory somewhat by the study of Thucydides . . .

his writings are often enriched by ideas and anecdotes borrowed from the

Greek, and many of his maxims and proverbs are literally translated from it.”

Greek was, we see, a valuable source of culture, learning, and practical

thought. On the other hand, in his description of Sulla, a later general,

Plutarch paints us a man who was impious toward the gods, sought after ill-

gotten gain, and had no respect for Ancient Greek traditions. “Rome did not

send me to study ancient history. My task is to subdue rebels,” he said to a

pair of diplomats sent to him by the Attic tyrant.vii He then went on to sack

both Athens and the Piraeus, destroying many famous buildings and

landmarks. While Cato was respectful of Greek history, he often scoffed at

certain aspects of their culture. “Greeks speak from the lips, but Romans

speak from the heart,”viii he said. The counter-examples of Cato and Sulla

show that respect for traditions of Hellenic derivation was certainly a virtue

to the Romans, even if they did not emulate all aspects of Greek society.

This relationship with Ancient Greek Culture was also indicative of a

broader Roman problem: that of what to do with conquered peoples.

Governors were put in place over them, and to some extent the conquered

people were assimilated into Rome’s imperial hegemony. As republicans, the

Romans always had an inconsistent relationship with imperialism. On the one

hand, the republican ideal required them to stay at home, like the famed

Cincinnatus, tilling the land. On the other, the fields of Mars were the proving

grounds of manhood, and they feared to stray too far from that ideal or

become too soft. This tension generally resolved itself in favor of

imperialism, but the Roman reasons for conquest were always based on an

idea of just war that implicitly had to be followed.

There are several modern theories for why the Romans chose to

expand, all of which provide slightly incomplete understandings of the

Roman self-consciousness. One is based on the idea of the bellum iustum, or

just war, which the Romans held. Each war the Republic entered on was

conceived as a response to a direct threat on Rome herself. Essentially, even

at the height of her empire, Republican Romans believed that their wars

were fought defensively, and every expansion was brought on by the

necessity of quelling a rebellion or defending against an invader. This view is,

however, incomplete, and many historians have supplemented it with the

view that Rome’s system was inherently warlike. In order to successfully be

elected, politicians had to be successful in war. While this is certainly true—a

good politician had to be proven in battle—it does not completely account for

the patterns of expansion seen in the Republic. The constructivist theory

assumes that the Romans had different categories for allies and enemies

than we do today. They seem, as a culture, to have regarded alliances more

as friendships between countries than as contracts. Thus, war was entered

into to assist a friend or to claim your just deserts from a wayward friend. ix

While these are all incomplete explanations for Rome’s imperialism,

they give a sense of the knife-edge on which the Republic balanced. Self-

defense was necessary, and every newly-gained province had to be

defended as adamantly as the older territories. This was the only way to

maintain order throughout the empire and to maintain a Republican virtue as

an empire. In fact, Rome saw herself as a benefactor to the nations she

conquered, and assimilated them into her fold. It was not enough to call

themselves benefactors, the Romans had to prove their beneficence through

actions and words. Thus, they made sure to punish bad provincial governors

extremely strictly. This served a double purpose of keeping locals happy and

maintaining good order within the empire. Bad governors could wreak havoc

on a large administrative state, and so incentives to careful regulation were

strong.

David Brand writes,

Throughout, we must observe the centrality to the Roman self-image of external relations and foreign commitments. Indeed, not only at Rome but in other instances and in the borad field of national identity, it has long been recognized that “self tends to be understood in terms of and by contrast with ‘other’” (e.g. Smith 1991). Of course, the Roman self-image entailed not simply the conquest of others, but also the rule of others for their own good and even their inclusion within the Roman self.x

The Romans, like any culture, could not define themselves without defining

who they were not. They were not barbarians, first and foremost. Instead,

they set themselves the mission of civilizing the barbarians whom they had

conquered. This presented a significant risk to the Romans themselves, as

any citizens who stayed abroad were liable to be influenced badly by their

absence from Rome. Not only could local cultures lead them astray from their

core Roman values, but other citizens might not be on their best behavior

when away from the capital. Here again, the Romans enacted a constant

balancing act between just war, imperialism, and republicanism.

The ideal of republicanism was fairly nebulous, but that never stopped

the Romans from striving to continuously improve its execution. In every

stage of its existence, from Republic to Principate, the Roman Empire’s

leaders were calling the people back to the virtues of their forbears.

Plutarch’s own writing can in many ways be seen as a jeremiad-like call to

remember the meaning of Romanism. He shows his audience in the

mythicized figure of Cato the Elder what it meant to be a true statesman.

Cato himself, in a speech quoted by Plutarch, calls on his fellow citizens to

leave their wrong ways: “how can we expect to save a city, where people are

prepared to pay more for a fish than for an ox?”xi In asking this, Cato both

reproves his contemporaries for their lack of foresight and suggests that

agriculture has more lasting value than commercial activity. A fish is a one-

time purchase, while an ox is necessary to any farm for hauling, breeding, or

meat. He was a man of tradition, and he called on his fellow-citizens to follow

him in the noble tradition of Romanness.

By the time of Sulla, Plutarch writes, the “age of pure and upright

manners had passed.”xii However, even Sulla’s contemporaries looked down

on him because of his excessively lavish living. “He was always organizing

parties of the most imprudently outspoken characters.”xiii Sulla was no longer

focused on his family roots, but was instead enamored with his own personal

success. He became too wealthy, forsaking the poverty out of which he had

grown, and which Plutarch says is just as bad as losing your family’s fortune.

The fall of Rome was brought about when Romans lost their sense of

balance, Plutarch implies. While Cato had always had a healthy distaste for

Greek culture, Sulla was filled with “some spirit of envious emulation which

drove him to fight” against the ancient city.xiv The fear of Greek culture which

had led the Romans to seek their own identity (their rhetoric was “from the

heart”) became dangerous when it led them to reject those parts of their

own heritage that were embedded in Greek civilization.

The Roman imperialism too, while necessary to their self-identity,

continually strayed from their ideal. “

Since Roman ideology privileged the past, writers of the late Republic would look at earlier Roman imperialism as more just than that of the present. Cicero’s judgment . . . was that Roman imperialism had once been more a patrocinium, a ‘patronage’: abuse had set in, he argued, when tyranny had set in at the center of power in Rome too, particularly in the aftermath of Sulla.xv

The narrative the Romans paint of their decline begins in the nobility and

virtue of the early Republic. By the second and first centuries B.C., that

virtue had all but disappeared. Men like Cato the Elder hearkened back to a

nobler day, and men like Sulla made republicans long for that day’s return.

But they were no longer living in the republican mean. In international

affairs, they had become too open to the outside. The constant balance of

beneficence and cautious separation had given way as citizenship was

offered to all of Italy, and eventually to Roman subjects throughout the

empire. Roman ideals were spread at the cost of their very Roman character.

When impiety, corruption, and lazy living were accepted among

Rome’s elite, Plutarch implicitly asks, how could the Republic not fall? As

Rome lost the very balance and ordered virtue that made them Roman, their

imperialistic tendencies ran away with them. The forms still existed. the

emperors still paid lip service to the Senate and to a Republican ideal. The

word “king” never returned to the lexicon, but the damage was done. Men

like Sulla achieved power and abused it for personal gain. Men like the

idealized Cato no longer existed. Thus, Plutarch, like Cato before him, called

on Romans to turn from their selfish ways. He called on them to remember

their past and return to it.

Perhaps what most made Rome Roman was the desire to emulate the

past—a past that had likely never truly existed, and which could certainly

never exist again, but to which every Roman, from Cato to Plutarch, under

the Republic and under the Principate, aspired. Republicanism was the ideal,

but as it turned inexorably to empire and coarse living, the Romans saw that

it would surely terminate in tyranny. This is the fate which Cato feared and

which Plutarch sought to undo. The Republic lost its balance and finally

plunged into servility.

Bibliography

Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a2, trans. Simpson, Peter, Raleigh: UNC Press, 1997.

Dyionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities iv, lxxxiv, 2-4, from LD,. In Roman Civilization; vol. 1, Lewis, Naphtali and Reinhold, Meyer, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian. London: Penguin Books, 1965.

Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Warner, Rex London: Penguin Books, 1958.

David Braund, “Cohors; the governor and his entourage in the self-image of the Roman Republic,” in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, eds. Laurence, Ray, and Berry, Joanne. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Endnotes

i Aristotle, Politics, I.1253a2, trans. Simpson, Peter, (Raleigh: UNC Press, 1997).ii Rahe, Paul, in-class lecture, November 2011.iii Dyionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities iv, lxxxiv, 2-4, from LD,. In Roman Civilization; vol. 1, Lewis, Naphtali and Reinhold, Meyer, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).iv Plutarch, Makers of Rome, trans. Scott-Kilvert, Ian (London: Penguin Books, 1965), 119.v Ibid. 120vi Ibid, 121vii Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic, trans. Warner, Rex (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 74.viii Plutarch, Makers, 133ix Weaire, Gavin, Lecture 3/5/13x David Braund, “Cohors; the governor and his entourage in the self-image of the Roman Republic,” in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, eds. Laurence, Ray, and Berry, Joanne (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16.xi Plutarch, Makers, 127xii Plutarch, Fall, 57xiii Ibid, 58. xiv Ibid, 78xv Braund, 11