Roman Amoralism Reconsidered

198 Pages·2017·1.59 MB·English

by  Stefanie Kletke

Roman Amoralism
Reconsidered
The Political Culture of the Roman Republic
and Historians in an Era of Disillusionment

Michael C. Alexander
Roman Amoralism
Reconsidered
The Political Culture of the Roman Republic
and Historians in an Era of Disillusionment

Michael C. Alexander
Roman amoralism reconsidered : the political culture of the Roman
Republic and historians in an era of disillusionment / Michael C.
Alexander
Copyright © 2018 by Michael C. Alexander.
This book is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND
license. It can be freely duplicated and shared, in whole or in part,
without altering the work, as long as the title of the work and the
name of the author of the work are stated. Duplication and sharing
are permitted only for non-commercial uses.
Please consult the blog to obtain a printable file of this book, and for
information on ordering a soft-cover bound copy.
http://romanamoralismreconsidered.com/
First edition, 2018
Online ISBN 978-0-692-06643-0
Print ISBN 978-0-692-06642-3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FORWARD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: “It’s politics” .................................................................... 1
Précis ................................................................................................................. 1
Definition of amoralism .................................................................................. 3
Examples of political cultures characterized by amoralism ......................... 6
CHAPTER TWO
Ancient evidence for amoralism .......................................................... 12
Historical sources .......................................................................................... 14
Philosophical and rhetorical treatises ..........................................................2 9
The Commentariolum Petitionis .................................................................... 53
CHAPTER THREE
Amoralism and the historiography on Roman Republican politics .... 57
Prosopographical historiography: from Gelzer to Gruen .......................... 58
Roman Republic vs. Roman Empire ............................................................ 82
Amoralism in the Commentariolum Petitionis ............................................ 84
The effect of amoralism on the historical interpretation of the
Commentariolum Petitionis ...........................................................................9 4
The fading of amoralism in the historiography of the Roman Republic .... 95
Etic versus emic .............................................................................................. 97
CHAPTER FOUR
Amoralism and the writing of history in an era of disillusionment .. 108
From etic to emic, and debunking as an etic approach .............................. 111
The influence of disillusionment on twentieth-century thought ............... 125
CHAPTER FIVE
Conclusion .......................................................................................... 136
One theme and two sub-themes .................................................................. 136
Amoralism: is it dead? ................................................................................. 139
APPENDIX ONE
Scholarly reaction to the Ironic Interpretation of the Commentariolum
Petitionis ............................................................................................. 142
APPENDIX TWO
The philosophical basis of Alterum est tamen boni viri, alterum boni
petitoris .............................................................................................. 149
i
APPENDIX THREE
The importance of asking whether Roman Republican political culture
was amoral .......................................................................................... 157
WORKS CITED ................................................................................... 165
INDEX ................................................................................................ 184
INDEX LOCORUM ............................................................................ 188
Forward and Acknowledgments
I presented aspects of this book in talks before the Illinois
Classical Conference (October 2006), the Association of Ancient
Historians (April 2010), the University of Pisa (November 2014), and
the Classical Association of the Midwest and South (April 2017). This
book has also benefitted from assistance given to me by Greg
Anderson, Asha Bhandary, Kai Brodersen, John D’Emilio, Arthur
Eckstein, Richard Fried, Richard John, Constance Meinwald, D. Mark
Possanza, and John Ramsey. I particularly wish to thank Jed Atkins
for reading my section on Latin philosophical sources and offering me
guidance that helped me avoid significant errors. My acknowledgment
of the help provided by these scholars should not be interpreted as
implying their agreement with the views that I express here, or even
that they have read all or part of the manuscript.
I wish to express my gratitude for the benefits that I received as a
member of the Department of History at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. I also wish to express my gratitude for the advice and
services offered to me by Sandra De Groote, Scholarly
Communications Librarian of the University Library of the University
of Illinois at Chicago. I am also grateful to the Department of Classics
of the University of Pittsburgh for having provided me with access to
the libraries of the University of Pittsburgh. Finally, it is a pleasure to
express my gratitude to Stefanie Kletke for her work in copy-editing
the manuscript and formatting it into a book.
For those who are interested, I have established a monitored blog
where comments related to this book can be posted, at:
RomanAmoralismReconsidered.com.
Michael C. Alexander
Pittsburgh, PA, United States, August 2017
iii
Chapter One
Introduction: “It’s politics”
Précis
In this book, I will challenge a commonly held modern belief about
the Roman attitude toward their own political system during the
Republic, namely that the Romans thought their own morality did not
apply to politicians when those politicians were engaged in political
activity within the domestic Roman political system. Herein, I refer to
this attitude as “amoralism.”
In the three central chapters (Chapters Two through Four), I
present three propositions:
1. Chapter Two. No extant ancient evidence exists for amoralism in
the political culture of the Roman Republic either from:
a) contemporary historical sources, or b) contemporary
philosophical or rhetorical treatises composed by Marcus Tullius
Cicero. In fact, these treatises counter amoralism. The lack of
ancient evidence for Roman Republican amoralism is the core
contention of this book. (This book treats Roman political culture
solely insofar as it relates to amoralism.)
2. Chapter Three. An unstated belief in Roman amoralism
permeated much of the historical scholarship about Roman
Republican politics that was written from roughly the early 1900s
to the mid-1980s; this belief coincided with a commonly held
negative view of ancient Rome. Though many Roman historians
have since abandoned amoralism in general, in part because of a
change in the way Roman history was/is written from an “etic”
approach (i.e., as an outside observer) to an “emic” approach (i.e.,
as a subject), its presence in Roman Republican political culture
has heretofore never been refuted. In appendices to Chapter
Three (Appendices One and Two), I further argue that: a) belief in
Roman amoralism is revealed by most historians’ willingness to
treat the Commentariolum Petitionis (herein abbreviated as
Comm. Pet.) as a straightforward account of how to run an
election campaign, and b) amoralism better explains the
philosophical basis on which this work ostensibly recommends
1
Roman Amoralism Reconsidered
that candidates for office violate traditional morality than an
“accommodation of circumstantial necessity.”
3. Chapter Four. In the absence of ancient evidence, historians’
assumption of amoralism in the political culture of the Roman
Republican is primarily a reflection of the kind of political history
that was frequently written during what I refer to as an “era of
disillusionment,” roughly from the early 1900s to the 1980s,
during which the quest for, and perpetuation of, power, along with
money, were assumed to be key components of politics.
Contemporary disillusionment with politics and government left a
mark on the writing of history, leading historians to explain
human conduct in terms of low motives (power and wealth) rather
than high motives (such as displaying good character or
promoting the common good through beneficial public policies).
Historians at this time were therefore inclined to accept as
plausible those explanations of political conduct that were based
on the premise that politicians were granted a dispensation from
the morality which otherwise applied within a society. Events of
this era encouraged these attitudes among historians.
I wish to stress each of the three central chapters combine to make
one basic point, even though Chapter Four travels far from the history
of Rome, either in terms of what happened in ancient Rome, or how
the history of what happened at Rome has been written. While in
Chapter Two I attempt to present and discuss all relevant ancient
sources, and in Chapter Three I provide representative samples from
books and articles about Roman Republican history to show that they
were imbued with amoralism, in Chapter Four I do not try to “cover” a
subject, in the sense of presenting an exhaustive account of either
historical writing about the Republic during the era of disillusionment
or historical events during that era, but rather to illustrate a salient
historiographical trend that helps us understand why many Roman
historians of the twentieth century wrote the way that they did, and
why toward the end of the century they turned to a new approach. I
explain the amoralist tendency of much twentieth-century
historiography by tying it to some historical events and developments
of the era of disillusionment. Chapter Four describes important events
and developments that help explain amoralist assumptions that held
for much of the twentieth century and subsequent historical factors
2
Introduction: “It’s politics”
that shed light on a change in outlook over approximately the last
thirty years. Throughout I try to clarify along the way exactly what I
am claiming and not claiming, and I deal with objections to the steps
in the argument that I am making, either objections that I anticipate or
those that I have in fact encountered.
In my conclusion (Chapter Five), I show what this book has
accomplished by looking for amoralism in the history-writing on
Roman Republican politics, as practiced in the twentieth century. In
an appendix to this conclusion (Appendix Three), I survey the
trajectory of political thought during my lifetime in order to apply to
my thinking the same sort of scrutiny about the relationship between
intellectual environment and historiography that I have applied to
previous Roman historians.
Definition of amoralism
For the purposes of this discussion, “morality” means ethics in any
of the various ways that right and wrong were conceptualized by the
Romans, whether in terms of a principle, a set of principles, a code of
rules, or a kind of personal character, that is, virtue; a statement or
belief can be considered as “moral” if it makes any kind of moral claim,
even if it is not necessarily a moral claim that any ancient Roman
thought was valid, including the person making the claim. Morality is
seen as whatever the Romans thought it was, not necessarily what we
think morality is today, either in general terms (“What does ‘moral’
mean?”) or in terms of specific principles or rules; of course, “Roman
morality” need not connote one single entity, as individual Romans
likely held different ideas about morality.
“Amoralism” is then the belief that, under certain circumstances,
no obligation exists to obey morality, even though morality does exist.1
Since this discussion is on amoralism in political culture, the term is
here used to signify the belief that, although morality should be
followed in general, morality does not need to be obeyed specifically
within political life. Therefore, if we say that Roman Republican
political culture was characterized by amoralism as I have defined it,

1 Shafer-Landau (2015) 166, 317. Amoralism is different from moral skepticism, which is
the denial that moral standards exist (Shafer-Landau [2015] 291).
3
Roman Amoralism Reconsidered
we mean that the Romans of that period did not disapprove of the
conduct of Roman politicians and voters even when those politicians
or voters violated some aspects of ethics that applied to Romans in
areas of life other than domestic politics. In other words, under this
definition, if the Romans accepted political amoralism, they believed
“all is fair in politics.” Finally, for Roman political culture to be
characterized as amoral in historical terms, amorality needs to be a
distinctive feature of that political culture, and not just a manifestation
of a universal rule.2
Amoralism could include a disregard for legal rules against
corruption (e.g., the purchase of votes) to the extent that these rules
possess a moral as well as legal force, but it is not limited to this
sphere since it could also cover disregard for the violation of social
strictures (e.g., strictures against flattery or making insincere promises
in the process of campaigning). As this discussion is about internal
politics, however, I will be discussing a disregard for morality only
within the domestic politics of the Roman Republic, meaning the
actions of politicians when they function solely as politicians (e.g.,
campaigning for office, helping other politicians in their campaigns,
and promoting or opposing legislation before the Roman People and
in the Senate). I will not be examining moral/immoral conduct of
politicians outside of domestic political activity (e.g., within the
domus, in military campaigns, or in provincial government), nor
Roman attitudes toward the treatment of females, slaves, or foreigners
who lived in their midst, or toward the treatment of the empire they
had created, the non-Roman inhabitants of that empire, or Roman
citizens living outside of Italy. Finally, as no one would claim that
Roman amoralism was so complete that Roman political culture
permitted politicians to do absolutely anything, I am not considering a
blanket amoralism within domestic politics, but a partial amoralism —
that is, a dispensation from some, but not all, contraventions of
morality, not, for example, from rules against assassination or
systemic bribery.
The specific question that I am raising is: What attitude did
Roman citizens, politicians, and ordinary voters alike hold toward

2 See below, pp. 56, 139.
4