How to be a (Roman) man

What does it mean to be a man? In the early 21st century, masculinity is contested and fraught with anxiety; influencers offer models of manliness involving fast cars, sexual conquests, and building up muscle. Before the rise of feminism, they suggest, in some supposed Golden Age, everyone had a shared sense of what it meant to be a man – and being a man was unproblematically good. The Roman Empire, in their view, offers men today an inspirational example of power, hierarchy and achievement, which is why men think about it so much – unlike women, who are too immersed in their feelings…

Manliness certainly was celebrated in the works of Cicero, republican Rome’s most eloquent statesman. In the mid-1st century BCE, his persuasive powers in the law courts and the senate were second to none; his speeches went on to inspire would-be orators well into the 20th century. He is often seen as the very embodiment of the Roman republic. The political world in which he flourished was a self-consciously masculine one; to be accused of acting like a woman was, for a Roman man, a grievous insult. Yet in Cicero’s writing we can find other strains too.

For Roman men, anything labelled feminine was necessarily to be avoided, something to be ashamed of. But what exactly did it mean to act like a man? Ancient Rome in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE saw the rise of a succession of military leaders who were promoted as masculine role models. The great general Marius won a series of victories in Spain, North Africa and on Italy’s northern frontier. For several years in a row, he was elected consul, one of Rome’s two chief executive officers. Unlike many other Roman politicians, he didn’t have an aristocratic background. One Roman writer imagines Marius fending off accusations that he was coarse in his manners:

elegance is becoming to women but toil to men. All virtuous men ought to have more fame than riches. Arms, not fine trappings, bring glory.
– from The War Against Jugurtha by Sallust
(All translations are adapted from the Loeb Classical Library.)

Here was a model of manliness forged on the battlefield.

Given the military might of ancient Rome, it is surely unsurprising that Romans often associated masculinity with courage in battle. The word virtus, a term cognate with the Roman vir (meaning man as opposed to woman), clearly means ‘courage in war’ when it is first recorded in the mid-5th century BCE. Courage in battle could be taken as the foremost manifestation of Roman masculinity. The historian Sallust, writing in the 40s BCE, praises earlier generations of Romans for their pre-eminent manliness in war: ‘whenever their virtus repelled dangers, they rendered aid to their allies and friends.’ And yet, while Rome continued to boast ever more notable military successes in the middle and later republic (from the 3rd to the 1st century BCE), the battlefield was by no means the only arena in which Roman masculinity might be put to the test.

When Cicero was 16, like others of his social standing, his transition to adulthood was marked by a special ceremony, most likely at the feast of the Liberalia in 90 BCE. This was the moment when he first put on the toga of manhood, a cumbersome length of woollen fabric worn by Roman citizen men, a garment associated with civilian as opposed to military life. Years later, as consul in 63 BCE, Cicero played a leading role in uncovering and suppressing a conspiracy against the Roman state, and boasted that this was a victory won by ‘citizens in togas’. It was his speeches that had convinced his fellow senators and the Roman people of the dangers posed by Catiline’s conspiracy, leading to decisive action against those involved. Cicero had used his voice as consul to save Rome, he declared in a speech a few years later. Throughout his life, he insisted his victory was comparable to those of Rome’s greatest generals. Masculine achievements weren’t confined to the battlefield; rhetoric and oratory could also conquer.

By the time he secured the consulship, Cicero was regarded as Rome’s top orator. Public speaking was highly prized by members of Rome’s governing elite. Its end result mattered hugely – winning over one’s listeners. But the way Rome’s politicians spoke and even how they dressed could also serve to demonstrate their manliness. Codes of civilian masculinity governed behaviour in public spaces such as the Forum, the law-courts and the senate. Markers of manliness in this sphere were subject to relentless public scrutiny. As the later expert on oratory Quintilian put it, the orator’s dress needs to be ‘resplendent and manly: for when it comes to one’s toga and shoes and hair, excessive care as well as negligence are equally blameable’. The toga, for instance, must be correctly draped; he notes a little later, ‘throwing back the fold from its bottom onto the right shoulder is foppish and effeminate’.

Orators were alert to the niceties of their own – and one another’s – masculine self-fashioning. In the cacophonous world of the Roman republic, politicians, advocates and those aspiring to a public role exchanged no-holds-barred insults. Often, they cast aspersions on one another’s masculinity, with disparaging comments on an opponent’s way of speaking, his gestures, the way he wore his toga – as well as his sexual behaviour. Orators would be praised for speaking in a ‘manly’ way. And they were robustly attacked for any ‘effeminate’ deviations in their style and manner of speech. Some orators favoured a more elaborate style fashionable in the long-established rhetorical schools of the eastern Mediterranean, the zone the Romans called Asia. Contrasts were drawn between ‘Asian’ style and the plainer style associated with Athenian rhetorical tradition. The Asian style was regularly denigrated as ‘effeminate’. Yet too ‘unpolished’ a style could seem old-fashioned, even coarse. Moderation was itself celebrated as a quintessentially masculine quality. But where to draw the line?

Quintilian criticised rhetoric teachers who encourage their students to show off

In the late republic, attempts were made to codify guidance to aspiring orators. An anonymous treatise on rhetoric addressed To Herennius promises to help its reader present himself as a proper man through training in public speech. The author advises, for instance, against any sharp exclamation that ‘injures the voice and likewise jars the hearer, for it has about it something ignoble, suited rather to feminine outcry than to manly dignity in speaking.’ In On the Orator, Cicero has a character emphasise the importance of appropriate gestures in seeking to arouse particular emotions in one’s listeners: ‘all these emotions must be accompanied by gesture – … with this vigorous manly throwing out of the chest, borrowed not from the stage and the theatrical profession but from the parade ground or even from wrestling.’ The theatre had morally dubious associations; actors were often branded effeminate. Performer though he was, an orator would do well to cultivate a more military aura and disguise the degree to which his art drew on dramatic technique.

Writing a century after Cicero, Quintilian was a huge admirer of his work, regarding him as the ideal model for the aspiring public speaker. In Quintilian’s wide-ranging treatise on the education of the ideal orator, sound ethical character but also manliness are presented as essential qualifications: ‘I am training the consummate orator, a figure whose existence is predicated on his being a good man [vir bonus].’ Quintilian expresses his disapproval of speeches composed merely for display, a widespread practice in his day, criticising teachers of rhetoric who encourage their students to show off:

The teachers, I feel bound to say, have been guilty of the same offence as slave dealers who castrate boys to increase their attractions. As those dealers think there is no beauty in strength or in a muscular arm, and certainly not in a beard and the other natural endowments of the male, and so take what might, if left alone, have developed into sturdiness and soften its supposed hardness – so do we cover up the manly form of eloquence and the power of lean and vigorous speech with a delicate veneer of style, and think effectiveness of no importance, so long as everything is smooth and polished.

This simile – shocking in multiple ways to a modern reader – aligns the recommended mode of speech with the embodiment characteristic of the free, adult, bodily intact male. Indeed, the right kind of speech makes clear the laudable moral character and manliness of the speaker: ‘I decline to regard as eloquence in any sense something which shows no trace at all of a normal male, let alone of a man of weight and integrity,’ Quintilian continues.

But there was of course a paradox in all this effort focused on generating an impression of authentic masculinity, a paradox apparent in the advice in To Herennius to ‘make everything seem straight from the heart’. The artifice required to generate authentic-seeming masculinity was all too evident. We can see this as a symptom of the ongoing challenge of justifying male supremacy, through assertions of the ‘natural’ superiority of men to women (and indeed of free men to enslaved ones). What exactly was ‘masculine’ rhetorical style? Opinions could differ significantly. But masculinity itself was always a positive term. And giving effective speeches in Rome’s public spaces was an ideal way to communicate one’s specifically masculine virtue.

What happened, though, when a member of Rome’s elite, once renowned for his eloquence, found himself cut off from the Forum and the senate? Cicero’s role in the punishment of those who had conspired with Catiline was controversial; Roman citizens had been executed without trial – a breach of the rights of the Roman people. In 58 BCE, following the manoeuvrings of his political enemy Clodius, Cicero was unceremoniously exiled. He languished far from Rome for 16 months, often fearing for his life, separated from family and friends – but also from access to the public arena where he’d held his own for so long. His letters home are full of lamentation. To his old friend Atticus, Cicero communicates his utter misery and despair. He often wishes he were dead. Reflecting on his losses felt like tearing open a wound: ‘I mourn the loss not only of the things and persons that were mine but of my very self. What am I now?’

Cicero was criticised by his contemporaries (and by later commentators) for his emotional reaction to exile. Should he have adopted a Stoic stiff upper lip, perhaps? To have been unaffected by this experience would have been inhuman rather than manly, he asserts in a speech given after his return in 57 BCE:

I could not now describe my action as praiseworthy or say that I was the source of any benefit to the republic, if I had but abandoned, for the republic’s sake, what I felt no pang at losing; I should hold that such mental apathy, like the physical apathy which does not feel the sting of fire, was brute insensibility rather than bravery [virtus].

In his own way, he claimed, even his retreat into exile, and even his frequent complaints, had shown bravery – manliness.

Cicero, eloquent exponent of Roman republican values, struggled to articulate his political disappointment

Back in Rome, however, Cicero remained anxious. Generals in command of large armies – Julius Caesar, above all – asserted their dominance over the state. Rome’s senate felt increasingly powerless. ‘The republic is an empty husk,’ Cicero lamented in a letter to Atticus in 54 BCE. Another celebrated general, Pompey, eventually led the challenge to bring Caesar under control. Yet, even if this was an attempt to shore up traditional modes of government where the senate exercised greatest authority, it ended in failure – and there were also doubts about Pompey’s intentions. Was he too, perhaps, aiming at one-man rule? Following a bitter civil war lasting from 49 to 45 BCE, a victorious Julius Caesar ruled the Roman world as dictator. Cicero, Rome’s foremost orator and long at the centre of its political life, was in despair. Throughout his career, he had championed a traditional political order in which Rome’s elite competed against one another in elections and took collective decisions in the senate. This was above all a culture of robust debate, in which persuasive speech played a critical role. But now the Forum was silent. In the senate, no one dared speak against Caesar.

Cicero, most eloquent exponent of Roman republican values, struggled to articulate his profound political disappointment. This was an experience compounded by devastating personal bereavement. In 45 BCE, shortly after giving birth to a little boy, Cicero’s daughter Tullia died. He was knocked sideways. Friends wrote letters of consolation. A long letter from one, Servius Sulpicius Rufus, observed that at least Tullia, dying when she did, avoided witnessing the end of the republic. In an equally lengthy reply, Cicero acknowledged his friend’s kindness – but disputed the claim that any comfort might be found in the timing of Tullia’s death. He contrasted his own situation with that of earlier Roman public figures, who had managed to avoid giving in to personal griefs by devoting themselves to public service: ‘the high standing they derived from public life soothed their mourning’. In current political circumstances, Cicero no longer had a part in public life. He couldn’t bear even the sight of the senate – the scene of his former triumphs. In these wretched political times, it was Tullia who had been Cicero’s one source of comfort. She was ‘a haven of refuge and repose, one in whose conversation and sweet ways I put aside all cares and sorrows.’ And now she was gone.

The collapse of the Roman state in its traditional form was something Cicero had been lamenting, at least on and off, for some years. He often used the language of death, bereavement and mourning in relation to the political situation. ‘For a long time it has been my part to mourn our liberties,’ he wrote to his old friend Atticus. Just a short while before Tullia’s death, he wrote to another friend: ‘I have already grieved for the state more deeply and longer than any mother for her only child.’ It is impossible to disentangle Cicero’s devastation at the loss of his daughter from his feelings of loss at the drastic transformation of Rome’s political landscape. The one loss intensified his grief at the other. And as Cicero’s words comparing himself to a bereaved mother suggest, he experienced both the loss and the intense grief it provoked as profoundly emasculating. He could no longer be the man he once was.

And yet perhaps another sphere of activity might offer scope for a new kind of self-actualisation, a new way for a man of Cicero’s extraordinary talents to win fame through service to the state and his fellow Romans. Even before Tullia’s death, Cicero had been increasingly immersing himself in philosophy. In 46 BCE, he had written to Sulpicius of his retreat from public-speaking: ‘seeing there is no further place in the Senate House or Forum for the craft which I have studied, I have devoted all my time and attention to philosophy.’ In changed political circumstances, with the dictator Caesar as Rome’s sole ruler, philosophy felt like a kind of salvation.

Cicero’s focus in his writings of these years was on a range of mainly ethical issues, particularly the nature of virtus – now taken in a sense much closer to the English term ‘virtue’ or ‘moral excellence’. A particular concern was the management of emotions in the pursuit of spiritual wellbeing. This was an issue of pressing personal significance to Cicero following his family bereavement but also of broader relevance to those who mourned the political changes in Rome.

It is about what it means to be a man and how manhood can be forged in – and by – challenging circumstances

Cicero (and other Roman writers), influenced by Greek philosophical explorations of virtue, might sometimes attribute to women virtue of a more generalised kind. But the Latin term virtus never completely lost its association with masculinity. Noting the word’s derivation, Cicero observes in his treatise on the management of emotions, the Tusculan Disputations:

the proper virtue of a man is above all courage, whose particular functions are contempt for death and pain. We must exercise these qualities if we wish to be virtuous, indeed if we wish to be men.

Closely concerned with philosophical approaches to dealing with grief and the fear of death, this treatise is also about what it means to be a man and how manhood can be forged in – and by – challenging circumstances. ‘For surely virtue [virtus] gives sufficient to make us live bravely; if bravely, sufficient too to make us high-souled and in fact never appalled by any event and always undefeated,’ he asserts. Similar concerns surface in other works he wrote around this time: in On Ends, he stresses the importance of self-control – which he defines as avoiding behaviour that’s ‘unmanly’ – parum virile.

Cicero’s philosophical writings were themselves an act of public service, he insisted. Through setting out philosophical ideas in Latin, he was offering a way for his fellow citizens to encounter the highest kind of learning. It was a particular comfort for Cicero in a time of deep political crisis, he declared, that this moment might see the birth of philosophy in Latin.

Cicero did return, albeit briefly, to the public arena in the last year of his life. Following Caesar’s assassination, his erstwhile deputy Mark Antony manoeuvred to take over Caesar’s following and resources. Cicero thought he too was aiming at dictatorship, and gave a series of speeches, attempting to rally his fellow senators behind the ‘liberators’ and against Antony. These speeches, known as the Philippics, were a dazzling return to form.

In the second Philippic, Cicero insisted at length and in colourful detail on the ways in which Antony was a slave to bodily pleasures – a man with no capacity for self-control. Cicero dredged up a story from years previously alleging Antony had had a homosexual affair with another Roman elite man, Curio, a relationship in which Antony willingly played a ‘passive’ role: ‘No slave boy bought to satisfy lust was ever so completely in his master’s power as you were in Curio’s,’ he fulminated. The lust here is implicitly Curio’s, not Antony’s – but this willingness to subordinate himself revealed Antony’s ‘slavish’ disposition. Such sexual ‘passivity’ in an elite male – taking what was seen as a ‘feminine’, receptive sexual role – was deeply shocking for Romans. It is notable that in his swansong Cicero does his utmost to paint Antony as a man of ‘unmanly’ sexual habits, addicted to pleasure and with no sense of masculine moderation. Cicero, ever the rhetorician out to win the argument, was quite prepared to exploit his audience’s masculinist prejudices to demean an enemy.

With these speeches, Cicero managed to rally his fellow senators, at least for a time, but, in the end, the power of those who commanded the legions was unstoppable. In 43 BCE, Antony eventually joined forces with Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, Octavian. They rapidly gained control of the Roman Empire – and engineered the deaths of prominent opponents, among them Cicero. When a posse of legionaries finally caught up with him, Cicero is said to have offered them his neck, meeting his end with great bravery.

Military might prevailed for the time being, underpinning the regime of Rome’s emperors which was established a few years after Cicero’s death. Yet long after the Roman empire had fallen, his writings and reflections on the nature of educated masculinity would continue to influence European elites. While masculinity in Cicero’s world – and that of many of his later readers – is always a positive term, it’s also clear that its precise significance was just as contested then, albeit in different ways, and within different limits, as it is in the early 21st century. And just occasionally Cicero himself reveals the conscious effort involved in putting on a performance of authentic manliness.