Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (review)

Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones. By Carlin A. Barton (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001) 266 pp. $47.50

A significant item on the recent research agenda in Roman social history is the problem of understanding how the matrix of core values informed social behavior, honor being high on the list of the values concerned. Barton's book is another attempt at an explication of this knotty problem. Those who have read her first monograph on Roman values, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans (Princeton, 1992), a work that exploits the extremes offered by dwarfs and gladiators, will find themselves on familiar terrain. Those who have not might have to steel themselves for an idiosyncratic method. Readers of a traditional scholarly disposition may prefer to consult other recent works, such as Ted Lendon's more orthodox approach to the same subject, Empire of Honour (Oxford, 1997). Nor is the matter without other current resonances in the field. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in their massive anti-Braudellian essay—The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000)—have designated honor as one of the touchstone values of Mediterranean antiquity.

A thorough investigation of the Roman species of honor should therefore contribute to a better understanding not only of Roman behavior but also of its place in current debates about "Mediterranean values" in Graeco-Roman antiquity. These objectives might be difficult to attain with this book in hand. The reason is not for any lack of scholarship or interdisciplinarity, or of plentiful data. There is much evidence on display in this work to show that the author has read profusely and widely, and often far beyond the "normal limits" of Roman history. The core difficulty, rather, lies in the method, which might be described as personal and highly eclectic. Everything from Cher's diet and exercise regimen, as reported in People magazine, to Cal Ripken's obduracy and the rose of Saint-Exupéry's "Prince" is arraigned in support. The author pursues this path self-consciously, deliberately eschewing what she describes as analyses that are linear in nature or causal descriptions that are sequential in kind (289). When married to the desire to let the Romans speak for themselves (15), the consequence is that the argument not infrequently slips into long pastiches of quotations (142-143 provides as good an example as any).

Despite all the pushing of envelopes, the lasting impression is that the book does not have much new to offer. The author subscribes to the same general view expounded over the past three decades (at least) by Veyne—that the dominant values of the Roman elite in the republic were those of warrior aristocracy whereas during the principate, these values were subverted to the tamer values of a service class (13, 277, 281-82)—a process which, to Barton, betokens an "infantilization" of Roman culture (278).¹ This view might be true if, as Barton asserts, Roman society was fundamentally a "contest culture" (67, 86, 99-102, among repeated claims), or one essentially characterized by recourse to vendetta (18, 22). Although evidence for these claims can be found, the hard question is whether "contest" or "vendetta" were as determinant and as centrally defining as is asserted. Is it really true, for example, that "no study of Roman laws and institutions can tell us as much about how the Romans governed themselves as can a study of their mechanisms of shame and honor" (19)?

This reviewer dissents. Julius Caesar in his literary memoir on The Gallic War does highlight personal honor as a motivating force for individual Roman soldiers faced with desperate battlefield situations and also, in the end, for the generalissimo himself (53-54). But from this same narrative, it is manifest that the mundane organizational forces of logistics and material support provided his soldiers, his ideologically showcased heroes, with the essential framework of their heroic and honorable actions. It also affirms...