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‘Moral idealism in pre-Christian Rome’ will strike many as an unpromising topic, and two preliminary doubts may well arise. Was there any moral idealism? And, if so, is it worth talking about? To the first of these questions the answer is an emphatic yes. For in the literature of the first century B.c. the proportion of moralizing is remarkable and perhaps unique. Historians such as Sallust and Livy moralized explicitly in their prefaces and implicitly on every other page. Cicero, whether as philosopher or politician, moralized at every opportunity. And poets for the most part accepted their traditional role as preachers with enthusiasm, Lucretius with his thundered message of hope through despair, Horace with his more sophisticated poetic sermons, and Virgil his monumental moral epic. Every branch of Roman literature had moralizing as an accepted part of its function. Now the ‘message’ differed in detail from author to author, and was in some cases highly individual: Lucretius, for instance, preached an ideal which bore little relation to that of any other writer and aroused as little reaction in the Roman public. But it remains true that numerous common features are discernible in the moral thinking of Rome's writers, and to these we may give the label ‘Roman morality’.
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References
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page 87 note 6 Ibid. 5. 41–56 (Regulus).
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