Restraint, Conflict, and the Fall of the Roman Republic

Book excerpt: "The Romans harped endlessly on "morality," a cultural feature long ignored as a literary trope or misappreciated as a mere marker of elite status. This book shows how, instead, social norms of personal restraint was part of a habitus of foundational values that acted as meta-rules for the Roman aristocratic performative-competitive political system. The book investigates these norms and explicates their positive content in the republican framework and their resulting place in the Romans' habitual mental map. The book then examines how the social norms came into irreconcilable conflict, arguing that-far from Rome progressing from a pristine past moral state to a sad moral nadir-the same "morals" of personal self-control stabilized and destabilized the Republic at different points in time. The values eventually lost their prohibitory force to constrain action, but not because they were abandoned. Rather, disputes over the proper application and meaning of the norms in novel political and social circumstances grew into violent clashes as disputants presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the essential values and, accordingly, imagined their opponents as bent on the Republic's destruction, while no normatively acceptable third-party judge could exist to resolve the conflicts. Thus, the aristocracy's consensus formed and then cracked along axes over what constituted normative restraint behavior, which both accounts for the ubiquity of this cultural feature, and which automatically undermined a central pillar of the performative-competitive structure itself"--