A few years ago the internet decided that men think about the Roman Empire far more than anyone suspected. Fair enough. But the Rome worth thinking about is not the one of legions and conquest. It is Cicero’s.
Cicero’s Rome treated masculinity as a public performance. A man’s voice, clothes, gestures and composure were all judged in the Forum. Courage in battle mattered, but so did the ability to speak persuasively, govern oneself and serve the republic in civilian life.
That world was deeply unjust to women and anxious about anything it labelled feminine. Still, its better demand is worth separating from its prejudices. Public responsibility, Cicero argued, required more than force. It required character, proportion, and the ability to use words for a common purpose.
His own exile tested the ideal. Banished in 58 BCE, he spent sixteen months away from Rome, and his letters home are full of despair. Contemporaries criticised him for it. Back in Rome, he answered them: to have lost so much and felt no pang would have been “brute insensibility rather than bravery”.
I saw the same silence in my father’s generation. He and men like him left home, and left behind parents, family and friends. Complaining would have been weakness; even speaking of it was frowned upon. That silence shaped their own families too, keeping even those closest to them behind a barrier you couldn’t see but always felt.
Cicero had the better of the argument. Feeling the loss is not the failure. Pretending not to is.
Dignity has room for grief.
Prompted by Catharine Edwards, “How to be a (Roman) man”, in Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/the-politics-of-masculinity-at-the-end-of-the-roman-republic