American Times, Roman Morals
Traditional Roman moralism remains popular in today’s America, mostly but not entirely on the political right. Ever hear that the good old days were just a whole lot more virtuous? Feel like you’re living through the decadent tail end of a culture in terminal decline? Or maybe the rising generation just doesn’t have what it takes? The Romans felt that way too, and they’d taken up that belief long before they even had an empire. The Romans felt like they were on the brink of cultural doom for several times longer than we’ve even been around.
Roman ideas tend to crop up whenever we discuss the rise and fall of the country’s overall fortunes, the treatment of minorities and noncitizens, gender roles, and family life. Anxieties about declining testosterone levels and declining birth rates, anxieties about immigration, anxieties about race and about LGBT issues—all of these have roots in the moralized social thought of ancient Rome. As in Rome, today’s traditional moralists warn that if we stray too far from the virtues that founded us, we’ll grow physically weak and morally corrupt, and we may even be overrun by foreigners.1
Yet a fuller picture of Roman moral and social thought would repel many who admire Rome today. The Romans were much less like us than we probably imagine. Their deeply inegalitarian and militaristic values, forged in the service of long-dead institutions, stand at odds with the society that we Americans have rather successfully become: a commercial, individualist, democratic, and highly egalitarian republic. Rightly understood, traditional Roman morality points us away from American liberal and democratic success.
The Romans termed their traditional moral code the mos maiorum, the “ways of the elders.” They blamed nearly all of the eventual ills of the Empire on wealth, outside influences, and the loss of the traditional ways. Yet it was the mos maiorum itself, and not foreigners or money, that produced the problems of which the Romans complained. We would do well to avoid their example.
Hierarchy Everywhere
Citizens of the Roman Republic thought they knew where polities came from. The building blocks of a polity weren’t individuals, as we moderns usually say; rather, polities were built from households, and each household was like a polity writ small. A republic was a pact among the fathers of the households, and the patriarchs’ adult male children would fight to defend the whole setup, hoping one day to become patriarchs themselves. A Roman pater familias held almost totally unchecked dominion at home, plus what we’d probably call a small measure of political liberty as a citizen of the republic (notably, there was no general protection of the freedom of speech, not even for citizens). The Republic was not a guarantor of citizens’ or anyone else’s equal or universal rights; instead, it was little more than a tool for keeping and growing the Roman patriarchs’ lordship over everyone else.
In all of its phases, ancient Roman society was much more hierarchical than our own. Citizens were legally and socially above noncitizens. Men were above women. Children, said men, must always be subservient to their fathers, even into adulthood. Freedmen were ranked by law above slaves, but freedmen still legally fell below those who had never been enslaved at all. Within the citizenry there were many further distinctions of rank and pedigree, and these differences shaped how Roman law and society treated someone in almost every interaction. Status set one’s right to own property, to join in assemblies, to be tried by relatively humane methods, to live in different places, and even to wear different types of clothing.
Indeed, the idea of an egalitarian society was basically alien to ancient Rome, where one’s status in both the family and polity was always a matter of fine but fiercely defended differences. Even a legally independent pater familias was often a client to a still greater authority figure—a general perhaps, or in time an emperor.
To this way of thinking, the good citizen had to be willing and able to rule others. Liberty was not a natural or God-given attribute of humanity; rather, Roman libertas was what happened when you, as a Roman, stood at the top of a hierarchy of domination: Libertas consisted of the capacity for active political participation in the dominant power structure, and that capacity was only available for those at the top. Libertas, to the Romans, wasn’t about the freedom to be let alone; libertas had much more to do with rulership itself, a fact that Benjamin Constant rightly noted in his essay “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.”
The consensus view seems to have been that slavery and mastery were both merely natural; each was but an outcome of human conflict, which was also natural, and the real questions were not about whether slavery was morally good or bad, but only about whether one happened to be a slave or a master, and to whom. (Freedmen, who held a middle position, were always problematic in Roman legal thought, and they were often a source of civic unrest. Freedmen were economically unbound and were often skilled craftsmen, and so they made the Roman economy work in many ways, but Roman philosophers and jurists never quite figured out what to make of them.)
Non-Romans, whether learned Greeks or illiterate barbarians, were held to be the rightful subjects of conquest. Conquering them proved the Romans’ greatness. Thus Tacitus boasted of how his uncle Agricola, then the Roman governor of Britain, sent foreign troops into battle ahead of the Roman legions: “victory would be vastly more glorious if it cost no Roman blood,” wrote Tacitus. It would seem that the power to command others mattered even more than personal courage—quite unlike what we find in ancient Greek sources.
The whole system all but begged for constant warfare to keep it going, and the Romans were among the most warlike of all ancient peoples. Historian Walter Scheidel writes that, “for no fewer than 425 years, Rome was engaged in war well over 90 percent of the time. The sixteen years devoid of major conflict between the end of the Tacfarinas war in North Africa in 24 CE and risings in Morocco in 40 CE … were without precedent in known Roman history.”2 China, which had an empire of similar size to Rome’s, recorded 127 years of peace, or one in four, during the same era.3 To the extent that it existed at all, the pax romana was a strictly internal affair.
During the era of Rome’s growth, mobilization rates in Italy were extraordinarily high, often above 25% of all eligible men. Rome often fielded armies larger than the Habsburgs or the Bourbons centuries later—and Rome had a smaller population. Scheidel likens Roman warfare to a “pyramid scheme” in which “Success in turning former enemies into fellow citizens or allies depended … on Rome’s ability to access new resources to reward those who had just been robbed.”4 If you’ve ever heard the idea that a republic needs to fight a war once in a while to keep itself strong, that idea that came to you from classical Rome. We Americans would do well to recall that it began as a rationalization for an ongoing horror.
Attrition was constant. That’s why, in both the Republic and the Empire, foreigners of any ethnicity could and did earn citizenship, especially if they fought on Rome’s side in its many wars. Adding new citizens was all but a necessity; it repopulated the polity, spread Roman ideals, and opened up new lands to warfare. Rome needed those new lands in part because its new citizens were usually eager to start climbing the hierarchy themselves. And doing that always meant ruling someone else.
At the bottom of the hierarchy, Roman slaves in most eras had no legal rights whatsoever; they could be bought and sold just like slaves in the Old South, and their testimony in court was reckoned worthless. A slave, it was thought, would just say whatever his master had told him to say—unless of course he were tortured first, which might prompt some independence. Torture came often in Roman legal proceedings, and it sparked outrage generally only when turned against citizens.
But we would err if we thought that Roman notions of hierarchy rested merely on claims of superior blood, as those of the Old South did. In this, Rome’s inegalitarianism differed a good deal from the kinds we tend to find in our own society. The mos maiorum amounted to a kind of “ethical nostalgia,” a longing for a past, supposedly better ethical state, one enjoyed by the Romans of the earliest republican times. It didn’t necessarily matter that one’s own biological ancestors hadn’t been present at the founding. Thus even a “new man” like Cicero, who lacked illustrious ancestors, could become an illustrious Roman himself. (Of course, having illustrious ancestors never hurt, but their value lay not in what we’d term genetics, but in the examples of their deeds.)
Yet such ethical nostalgia may too easily turn to ethnic nostalgia in America: An American mos maoirum, although inspired by Roman examples, looks back and finds race-based slavery prominent among the ways of its own elders. Rome tells us we must revere our ancestors’ ways, and it counsels us that owning slaves can’t have been all that bad. After all, our honored ancestors did it.
Just as in the Old South, slaves were also understood to be sexually available to their masters. To a Roman patriarch, the chief shame in having sex with a slave of nearly any age or gender would have been if he had allowed himself to be penetrated, an act that would have shown the master’s effeminacy. Rumors that Julius Caesar himself had played the passive role with a foreign king were both fodder for his political enemies and the subject of lewd jokes by his own soldiers. Sex in Rome was also about social hierarchy, and in ways we may find all too familiar. One’s proclivities in this area, whatever they may have been, were read as though they were indicators of social hierarchy. Just like almost everything else, we might say.
All in the Familia
Sex and family are of course connected, but the Roman familia wasn’t much like today’s families. In our society, family members are usually reckoned only by blood relation, marriage, and adoption. A Roman familia included slaves as well, and it might be better to use the term “household,” or even “plantation” to name it. That’s anachronistic, and it suggests a racial dimension that we’ve already rejected. Still, in English we lack a word for familia that doesn’t somehow mislead, and “plantation” does get a key part of it right—the familia was an economic institution, and it forced slaves to work the land.
Here we need to sidestep a modern error, one that says, “Oh look, they treated their slaves like family.” Far from it; we should say instead that many members of Roman “families” could be bought, sold, raped, or worked to death, all under the perverse blessing of the Roman laws and morals. Slaves faced appalling working conditions in the mines, galleys, and building sites of ancient Rome, and they were counted among the instrumenta—the tools or equipment—of a business, never the employees. The cruelty of Roman slavery is well attested, and it matched that of slavery in the modern era. The slave-as-family has always been a cover story.
The familia took the shape that it did chiefly because of Roman militarism. Constant war demanded a constant supply of soldiers who were athletic, inured to hardship, disciplined, and used to following orders in a hierarchy. The traditional Roman familia served up young male citizens who fit all those criteria, who had never known anything else, and whose main goal was to become patriarchs themselves. Slaves would take the young men’s places in the fields, and the men would go out to capture more slaves so that the system could grind on.
All good Roman households were said to be strictly patriarchal, both owned and ruled over in all particulars by the oldest adult male citizen. Adult male Roman citizens could not own property or start an independent familia until after their own father had died; before that, they had to subsist on an allowance from their patriarch, termed a peliculum. (Slaves sometimes got one too.) Adult female children were the wards of their fathers; on marriage, they became the wards of their husbands. The pater familias even held the legal power of life and death over all the other members of the familia. In practice this right was seldom exercised, but for one case: infants whom the father deemed unfit were routinely exposed to the elements. Exposure let families dispose of any children who couldn’t fight later in life, saving resources for those who could. It also made a continuous surplus of men over women, one only leveled, conveniently, by war.
To the Romans, public order meant keeping the familia in the ways that the elders had before them, and so it was taken for granted that any fall in the father’s authority would spell ruin for the republic. To keep the polity going, families needed both to reproduce themselves biologically and to model proper family and gender roles for their children, who would one day maintain the social order in turn. Another thing we get from Rome: Proper family and gender roles were not thought to be either a private affair or an instinctive one; they were, rather, the proper subjects for social and perhaps political intervention. Failure was always possible, and one of the first duties of the familia was the fraught task of raising the youth to do as they should. If it did not, the state would punish the failures.
We’ve already outlined the life prospects of Roman men, but of course that’s only half of society. Women, who played much less of a role in public life, did not leave us many written records, but even girls had a part to play in the Roman pyramid scheme: The mos maiorum said girls should grow up to be fertile and faithful, willing to obey their husbands in all particulars, to administer the household when necessary, and—above all—to make lots of children by the father. Families made other families so that the state could fight other states.
The probably fictitious story of the founding of the Republic shows the role that tradition said women should play. In 508 BCE, Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, a Roman citizen, was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, then king of Rome. Famed for her virtue, Lucretia chose to kill herself following her rape. Before she died, she made her husband and his family swear that they would rid Rome of its kings, which they quickly did. Lucretia became a model for feminine chastity and passivity. Women like her needed men like Collatinus to protect them, or so the thinking went.
Whether women should be controlled or free seems never to have been at issue; this was a fight about two different kinds of control: one kind state-based and unmediated, such that kings had sexual access to whomever they pleased—and another kind in which husbands and fathers held direct control over the women of a familia instead, through the blessing of the newly founded republic.5
It’s no surprise, then, that gender was everywhere in Roman moral thought; it is the paradigm case of a dominance relationship, on which other forms of dominance were often patterned. That’s why in men, effeminacy was said to be a primary vice, one that was strongly linked with money, luxury, commerce, and decadence. (Also, of course, with being sexually penetrated.) So the strength of the state was said to depend on men avoiding womanly vices and practicing manly virtues. All of which is a refrain we Americans have heard before.
What did the Romans think would happen if they left their ancient morals? As Romans of the Republic had it, they might be conquered by an empire, with servile rituals, luxurious softness, rampant effeminacy, and the men held in thrall. Any failure to keep to the mos maiorum would soon lead to rule by foreigners. In short, and for most people, Roman liberty meant something like being dominated by Roman men, and not by those less-manly outsiders.
Cato’s Morals
Even his contemporaries liked to hold up Cato the Elder as an exemplar of the mos maiorum, and with good reason. As a lawyer, soldier, and administrator, Cato had a reputation for probity, courage, and thrift. His later biographer Plutarch opened his biography of Cato with an account of Cato’s ancestors’ valor:
[Cato] himself praises his father Marcus, as a worthy man and a brave soldier, and Cato, his great grandfather too, as one who had often obtained military prizes, and who, having lost five horses under him, received, on the account of his valor, the worth of them out of the public exchequer.6
A man with a family like that would of course learn martial virtues, as Roman thinking demanded. Cato was a fine soldier. “He gained, in early life, a good habit of body by working with his own hands, and living temperately, and serving in war; and seemed to have an equal proportion both of health and strength,” wrote Plutarch.
And how did he keep such virtues? By rejecting luxury:
The little country house of Manius Curius, who had been thrice carried in triumph, happened to be near [Cato’s] farm; so that often going thither, and contemplating the small compass of the place, and plainness of the dwelling, he formed an idea of the mind of the person, who, being one of the greatest of the Romans, and having subdued the most warlike nations, nay, had driven Pyrrhus out of Italy, now, after three triumphs, was contented to dig in so small a piece of ground, and live in such a cottage. Here it was that the ambassadors of the Samnites, finding him boiling turnips in the chimney corner, offered him a present of gold; but he sent them away with this saying; that he, who was content with such a supper, had no need of gold; and that he thought it more honorable to conquer those who possessed the gold, than to possess the gold itself. Cato, after reflecting upon these things, used to return, and reviewing his own farm, his servants, and housekeeping, increase his labor, and retrench all superfluous expenses.
Better to conquer those who held the gold than even to hold it oneself, says Plutarch. It was a common attitude. To a Roman, possession without conquest would say one of several bad things. Perhaps you—a slave—had received a gift from your master; stories of wealthy slaves scandalized the empire. Or maybe you’d simply embezzled it from the public funds.
Or, finally, you might have participated in the inherently disreputable act of buying and selling. Traditional Roman morality was starkly anti-commercial, and the man who took wealth through conquest, but disdained it, was always thought much better than anyone who had made a fortune in the market. Later Romans would agree; Cicero deemed money “a thing which has at all times been scorned by every honorable and illustrious man.” He may well have been thinking of Cato.
Cato was quick to use his frugality against his political rivals, charging that Scipio the Great had spent extravagantly from public funds. In what looks like one of history’s earliest culture wars, Cato also faulted Scipio for choosing Greek dress and the decadent Greek practice of shaving. Scipio effectively rebutted the charges of luxury and foreignness by besting Hannibal anyway, winning himself the name “Africanus.” Cato grumbled that his terms were too lenient. Shaving, like so much else in Greek culture, became common in Rome.
While at Athens, Cato seems to have kept up an elaborate pretense: “[H]e dealt with Athenians through an interpreter,” wrote Plutarch. But it was all a ruse: “He could have spoken to them directly, but he always clung to his native ways, and mocked at those who were lost in admiration of anything that was Greek,” wrote Plutarch.
Cato had a successful military career, but his best-known public office was that of censor, which involved scrutinizing the lives and morals of other citizens. As Plutarch described the office, “Its creators thought that no one should be left to his own devices and desires, without inspection and review, either in his marriage, or in the begetting of his children, or in the ordering of his daily life, or in the entertainment of his friends … [so] that no one should turn aside to wantonness and forsake his native and customary mode of life.” Plutarch described Cato’s work as “[to] cut and sear to some purpose the hydra-like luxury and effeminacy of the time.” And this was long before the Empire; complaining about the decay of morals was, to a Roman, a practice about as old as the morals themselves.
“One would hesitate to call Cato a fraud,” wrote twentieth century historian Chester Starr, but “many of his famous aphorisms were filched from the Greek.” And indeed Plutarch both recorded a famous moralistic complaint of Cato’s—“All other men rule their wives; we rule all other men, and our wives rule us”—and noted that Cato had borrowed it from Themistocles. But the line only works if you buy into the gender and other dominance hierarchies that the Romans thought were the keys to their own success: It was wrong, by this way of thinking, for wives ever to rule anybody, and Rome should stop reversing the natural hierarchy. Cato’s guilt trip may have been borrowed, but it worked; his example helped teach the mos maiorum to the Romans for centuries thereafter.
Cato Vanishes
The great paradox of traditional Roman social thought is that, on its own terms, it worked. Strict, militaristic family life made Rome the master of the ancient western world. Soldiers could hope for a mix of public military glory, private rule over a familia, and extracted wealth in the form of land and slaves if they won. Unfortunately, this system only transformed Rome into the very thing that it professed to hate: an extractive slave empire with a decadent, corrupted elite.
But the problem wasn’t with foreign cultural contamination; against many an ancient historian, the soft ways of the East didn’t ruin Rome. Rome’s own traditions did that. Abandoning republican government and settling on one-man rule was an obvious solution once a large population had bought into the idea that a strict hierarchy was the only way to run a society. The family was bound to the authority of the father, from the eldest son to the youngest slave; as we’ve noted, families were like polities writ small. Little is lacking but a permanent father for the entire country, one with supreme authority over everyone. Such a conclusion all but suggests itself, and Rome needed no foreign help to turn itself into a society with many slaves at the bottom and, in time, a god-king on top.
Nowhere is this paradox clearer than in Suetonius’s The Lives of the Caesars. Suetonius could hardly stop himself from praising Augustus, who had restored so many Roman traditions that were already ancient in his time: “[Augustus] also revived . . . obsolescent rites and appointments; the augury of the Goddess of Safety, the office of Flamen Dialis, the Lupercalian Festival, the Saecular Games, and the Cross-Roads Festival.… Augustus most honored the memory of those citizens who had raised the Roman people from small beginnings to their present glory; which was why he restored many public buildings erected by men of this calibre, complete with their original dedicatory inscriptions, and raised statues to them.”7 Following the ways of the ancients was just how Romans thought cultural knowledge should be preserved, and Suetonius could only applaud.
Yet Augustus made nostalgic propaganda even as he transformed the Roman state, and there is a lesson here in how populist rulers tend to work. “His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses,” wrote Suetonius. The more things change, we might say. “[Augustus] was therefore obliged to withdraw or amend certain penalties exacted for a failure to marry; to increase the rewards he offered for large families; and to allow a widow, or a widower, three years’ grace before having to marry again.”
There was much red meat here for a Roman traditionalist. But all the games, monuments, and laws couldn’t bring back the rustic farmer-soldier-citizen. In the context of a far-flung empire, the ancient examples instead supported a network of domination and submission that stretched from every Roman familia all the way up to the emperor, from Spain to the Black Sea, and from Britain to Africa. Domination at long last stood perfectly unbroken—hence the one brief moment of peace—but Rome had met the enemy, and it was them.
The Senate eventually gave Augustus the title pater patriae, or Father of the Country, which only figures. That title had been around for a long time, but it had only been offered to three previous men—and one of them was his adoptive father and immediate predecessor, Julius Caesar. From the time of Augustus onward, the Senate liked to give it to the longer-serving emperors who didn’t trouble them too much. The Senate’s role would from then on tend to be merely cosmetic, a fact of which the Senators were all too aware.
The Roman Empire was highly successful by European territorial standards. This, at least, the mos maiorum could deliver, even with Europe’s tricky geography standing in its way. One might even say that the Roman Empire, by dint of its oppressive morals, managed for a few centuries to equal the size of a more or less typical Chinese dynasty. But it did not outdo China in imperial stability or peace, and Rome’s morals could lead only so far in terms of civilizational advance.
The problem with the strain of thought we have been discussing is that it reduces all human relationships to domination. Classical Roman morality’s disdain for all social inferiors, its inability to check the power of the pater familias, its pervasive violence, often sexualized—these things are drawbacks, not just in the modern world, but in the ancient one too. Defenders of Roman morality still like to point to the Republic as a model, but the morals that founded the Republic also led directly to the need for constant warfare—and that brought rapid decline of the republic’s institutions as that polity expanded. Augustus’s restorations were often ineffective, or if they endured, they were showpieces, not viable polycentric sources of authority as a republic would need—a fact demonstrated by the greatly weakened imperial Senate.
Roman political ideas don’t scale well; the narrow, approximate, and political equality of one Roman patriarch with another vanishes over distance, as the whole polity starts to look like just another extractive empire. Such empires have been common, all too common, in human history, and Roman political thinking thus does not reflect what made the West culturally distinctive in later eras, namely the contested and contestable legal orders that encouraged trade, science, and the notion of individual rights. Such institutions require more than a mere unidirectional dominance hierarchy as their foundation, and they would begin their slow ascent only in the medieval era.
Rome’s Shadow
Yet much about Roman social thought never really went away. In later ages, the school of thought that grew from and valorized the Republic would be dubbed classical republicanism. Niccolo Machiavelli and other Renaissance humanists were its champions. From them, the ideal of the rustic farmer-solder-citizen spread to the English-speaking world and took a place in our own conventional wisdom. Historians like J.G.A. Pocock have emphasized that an unbroken line of influence runs from the Roman historian Livy to Machiavelli, to English Civil War republicans like James Harrington, to American agrarians like Thomas Jefferson. They didn’t all think exactly alike, of course, but the family resemblance is hard to deny.
Nowadays we may read The Prince in college, but we don’t as often read Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, where he writes about the founding and maintenance of a republic. What makes a republic run, for Machiavelli, is not some clever art of the ruler, but martial virtue: “If one looks for the cause of [the Romans’] fortune, it should be easy to find… [T]he fortune which Rome had in these matters, all rulers would have who … should be imbued with the same virtue.”8 Rome’s virtue was worldly and even bloody, and Machiavelli conceded that it stood at odds with Christianity:
[Roman] ceremonies lacked neither pomp nor magnificence, but, conjoined with this, were sacrificial acts in which there was much shedding of blood and much ferocity; and in them great numbers of animals were killed. Such spectacles, because terrible, caused men to become like them…. [T]he old religion did not beatify men unless they were replete with worldly glory … And, if our religion demands that in you there be strength, what it asks for is strength to suffer rather than strength to do bold things… [T]hough it looks as if the world were become effeminate and as if heaven were powerless, this undoubtedly is due rather to the pusillanimity of those who have interpreted our religion in terms of laissez faire [l’ozio] not in terms of virtù.9
Machiavelli’s criticism of Christianity does a lot to explain his later reputation, but he might have changed his mind had he seen the frequently militant Christianity of our own time. (Even our Christians, one might say, are Romans nowadays.) In any case, other thinkers very much agreed with Machiavelli that the Roman concern for preserving manly virtue was appropriate, and they imported the Roman disdain for effeminate men and assertive women. As Michel Foucault noted in his essay “Governmentality,” early modern political thinkers tended to see self-governance as the first stage of statecraft; family governance—that is, control over women—came second, and only properly self-governing men could do well at it; and finally, to govern a state meant having well-governed men governing well-governed families in a way akin to a family.10 All of which is very Roman indeed.
In the United States, this tendency found new life in Thomas Jefferson’s well-known and politically consequential esteem for the smallholding farmer. Jefferson had read deeply in the Latin originals and in the later classical republican tradition, and he understood himself to be setting policies that would shape the United States for generations to come. He organized the Northwest Territory, which initially comprised about a third of the new nation’s land area, so as to deliver as much land as possible to small-time farmers rather than speculators or already wealthy planters. Slavery was made illegal in the Territory chiefly to encourage such settlement—in preference to large plantations, and in keeping with what the Romans had at least claimed that they wanted. Jefferson also hoped that a population of relatively humble and virtuous farmers would form a counterweight to the burgeoning commercial cities of the east coast; their wealth, always disreputable, could easily bring decadence.
It might be tempting to glance at present-day politics and say that his plan worked, but that would be wrong. Hardly any smallholding farmers remain in the United States; the farmland of the midwest is mostly owned by large agricultural corporations, and it has been for decades. Nor is it obvious why the voice of the people should always come from rural areas—unless we’ve uncritically swallowed the old Roman ideals, which here happen to dovetail, as noted, with much later notions of white supremacy.
Yet even our word for virtue derives from the Roman word vir, for man. In Roman times, to be virtuous was simply to be manly, and to show those qualities that were thought excellent about men in particular. Manliness of a type was necessary for warfare in the ancient style; and warfare—lots of it—was necessary to the pyramid scheme that was the Roman polity. Such was how many in the early modern era thought as well, and how many Americans still think today. The state motto of Maryland, where I now live, runs Fatti maschii, parole femine. It’s Italian for “Manly deeds, womanly words.” At least it admits that women are good for something besides having babies, but it’s still an embarrassment, and now you know where it—and so much else—came from.
Cycles of History
Classical republican thinking about virtue and governance also had a theory of how history tends to progress. It portrays history as a series of stages driven by the rise and fall of virtue. It’s also a theory common in our own day, which has captured it in a slogan: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” You’ve likely heard it before.
We’ve already seen how the Romans loved the idea that the rustic life gives a virtue that can’t otherwise be had. But, like so many things, they borrowed that too from the Greeks. Writes one modern commentator, “By the time of Julius Caesar’s writing in the 1st century B.C., the trope of hard-fighting barbarians whose ascetic way of life made them both morally and martially superior was firmly set enough that Caesar could lean on it as a shorthand to build up his own military accomplishments.”
We Americans have done likewise, and we often describe our more rustic enemies as having a greater martial virtue—and thus as posing a greater threat than they really do. An al-Qaeda spokesman played on that tendency to great effect when he quipped: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, but we love death.” Decadence like ours just can’t win against rustic martial virtue—and we should feel terrified. Our enemy has taken the full measure of our commercialism and our luxury, and he knows that we are weak and worthless. Be afraid!
As a theory, this account is both stadial—history moves by stages—and cyclical: The key phases of history repeat like the seasons. Rustic martial virtue makes a victorious army; a victorious army makes a society wealthy and decadent; decadence ruins martial virtue, and a ruined martial virtue leads to defeat. Cyclical histories may be mankind’s oldest, and they were everywhere in the ancient world, from India to the Americas. Circularity is found in seasons, tides, and many biological and astronomical phenomena. Yet circularity has been written perhaps too quickly onto human events, and it doesn’t take much analysis to show it.
Empirically speaking, hard times do not make strong men. Individually, physical strength comes from the practice of correct techniques under favorable conditions; socially, strength comes from having institutions that are resilient to change while incentivizing voluntary and mutual economic betterment—and disincentivizing domination. Even in the special case of the military, hard times don’t make strong soldiers. We’ve learned much since Rome, and what is missing is sometimes only the courage to admit it.
Nor do the other parts of the cycle hold up too well. Strong men don’t make good times; strong men, if left unchecked, make domination, and domination makes servility. It’s not good to concentrate power, not good for a society to arrange all of its lines of obligation so they point toward a single focus. When domination and servility are honored, science and commerce decay. There’s a lesson in how the English word “strongman” has become just another name for a tyrant.
And good times don’t make weak men; good times make science and technology, art and culture. Good times are a sound basis for new ideas and further growth. Human beings today are healthier, richer, more literate, more informed, and less violent than they have ever been. We have been the beneficiaries of a virtuous cycle of commerce, science, and technological innovation that has, since the late eighteenth century, led to the mass enrichment of humanity. It’s a fact so important that the historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey has dubbed it “the Great Fact.” We who live in the world of the Great Fact should have no ethical nostalgia for the domination and submission that we find in ancient Rome.
Finally, do weak men make hard times? It must be flattering to think so if you fancy yourself strong. But this part of the theory has a barb to it: LGBT folks? Look out, you’ve been cast as the weak men of history, and anything that you say or do is liable to destroy the republic, most likely by corrupting the youth.
The cycle of virtue may have a lot of moving parts, but it’s basically an argument for stasis. What, we might ask, is best in this cycle? It is best, definitionally, to live in the good times—but tragically, good times make weak men. The thing to do in the good times, then, is to tolerate no changes. Any change is presumably the product of weak men and their corrupted morals.
The Romans’ obsession with their own illustrious ancestors, their ethical nostalgia—these were about trying to stick to the good times, which had arrived for them; they ruled the known world. Their ideology told them that only decadence could do them in—and so they too little appreciated that they were on a treadmill, and that they had to keep expanding or die. The latter, and not decadence, is what actually killed their society.
We Americans have our own illustrious predecessors. American conservatism of almost every kind looks back on the Founding Fathers in much the same way that the Romans looked back on their own founders. When we are conservative, we do it in Roman style. And yet we, even the conservatives, live in a different moral, economic, and social universe from the founders. The universe we inhabit began with two great deeds that were unthinkable to Rome, and that were only just barely conceivable at the founding—the abolition of slavery and the full political emancipation of women. These two acts place the American founders and nearly any figure from ancient Rome on one side of a deep divide. Nearly everyone reading this essay stands on the other.
Yet we live and think in the shadow of Rome, and what we take to be merely natural in politics, gender, or family life, still often turns out to be the inherited “wisdom” of barely civilized warmongers who lived and died without knowing a single day of peace. We, who hope not to live in that sort of polity, should choose other values and role models for our own.
But didn’t Rome actually get overrun by foreigners? Yes and no. From the earliest days, Rome was always shot through with foreign influences. Early and chief among them were the Greeks, whom traditional Romans mistrusted, but there were always many others. The overextended Empire had been assimilating new groups to full Roman citizenship for centuries before it fell, for reasons we will discuss below. Commonly these groups didn’t want to defeat Rome; rather, they hoped to join it. They usually just disagreed—as the Romans themselves had also been doing for centuries—about precisely who should be the emperor, or about what other setup should prevail at the top. In many respects, Rome didn’t fall; it just fell apart.
Walter Scheidel. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. p 81.
Scheidel, 82.
Scheidel, 73.
I’ve written on this setup as one of the organizing principles of western governance in “Politics as an Extension of the Harem,” Reason Papers 41(1), (Summer 2019): 90-119, available at https://reasonpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/rp_411_7.pdf.
All translations of Plutarch are from Plutarch, Lives (Dryden trans.) vol. 2. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1906, available at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/clough-plutarch-s-lives-dryden-trans-vol-2.
All translations of Suetonius are from Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (Graves trans) New York: Penguin Books, 1989, pp 54-112.
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy book 2. Bernard Crick, ed, Leslie J. Walker, S.J., trans. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p 272-273.
Ibid, p 278. The term laissez-faire here has nothing to do with free-market economics; the Italian l’ozio is more closely related to the French oisive, or “idle.”
Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp 87-104.