How to think like a Roman
Valerius Maximus and the practical ethics of the Ancient Romans
In the early 1st century AD, a Roman writer named Valerius Maximus published a monumental collection of nearly 1,000 ‘true’ stories drawn from Roman history. This work — the Facta et dicta memorabilia, or the Memorable Deeds and Sayings — is the closest thing we possess to a handbook of Roman ethics.
Valerius furnishes us with a dizzying range of stories, categorised according to the virtue, vice, or idea he believed they exemplified. Through these daring deeds, noble self-sacrifices, strange customs, gruesome punishments, and great victories, we get to see the challenges and rewards of qualities like courage, chastity, luxury, lust, treachery, sedition, happiness, clemency, and severity in action.
If you want to understand what — and how — the Romans thought about morality then this is the place start.
First we’ll take a look at the difference between Greek and Roman approaches to ethics and then, below the paywall, we’ll look at the following:
What their practical system of morality tells us about the Roman psyche.
How to think about ethics, Roman-style.
What did it mean to be a good man in Rome?
Greeks think, Romans do
The Romans had an on-off relationship with philosophy.
Cato the Elder, a mid-2nd century BC icon of old-school Roman values was said to have despised philosophy as just another form of corrupting Greek effeminacy.
He said that Socrates was a mighty prattler … and made fun of the school of Isocrates, declaring that his pupils kept on studying with him till they were old men, as if they were to practise their arts and plead their cases before Minos in Hades.
Plutarch Life of Cato the Elder, 23
Later, an understanding of Greek philosophy became a status symbol and a common element of a young Roman’s education. But Greek philosophers were still periodically mocked, castigated, and even expelled from the city. The Roman view is summarised in Cicero’s frustrated description of Cato the Elder’s incorruptibly virtuous great-grand-son, Cato the Younger.
The fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool.
Cicero Ad Atticus, II.1
To the Roman mind, the Greeks were impressive but useless; highflown intellectual theorists, living in their ivory towers with no idea how to run a state in practice. That was why they — the practical, action-minded Romans — had been able to conquer them in the first place.
These are cultural stereotypes. But they’re also not entirely wrong.