Thematic Essay: Roman Political and Social Thought

Two distinct philosophies, Epicureanism and Stoicism, dominated Roman thought during both the Republic and the Principate. Epicureanism held that political activity was meaningless and counseled withdrawal from political life. The Epicureans equated happiness with absence of fear and avoidance of pain. Engagement in politics, they suggested, led only to conflicts and unhappiness. The influence of Epicureanism is evident in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), in which the Roman poet Lucretius explains that everything is composed of nothing more than atoms and void. There are no gods and there is no soul; therefore, there is no need to fear death, which is only the dissolution of atoms. Lucretius taught that people should remove themselves from all situations that might cause pain.

In contrast to the Epicureans, the Stoics looked to nature as a divine force and found there the moral obligation to improve society. For the Stoics of the republican period, virtue entailed political activity in order to benefit others. The negative aspects of political life were to be endured so that one might live in accordance with nature. Opportunities for political participation disappeared after the founding of the Principate, and Stoicism took on a different tone. The Stoics’ new standard of virtue demanded an ordering of the soul to accept whatever fate decreed. With virtue now a quality of the soul rather than of political action, women as well as men could be virtuous. Authors such as Seneca, a Roman philosopher who was active in the 1st century ad, urged women to show the same virtue as men. Such admonitions would have been impossible when Stoicism prescribed political participation, which was restricted to men. In the middle of the 2nd century ad, power in Rome fell to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. His principal philosophical work, Meditations, captures the Stoic commitment to service to others as well as a resignation that everything is ordered for the advantage of the whole universe.

During the reign of Augustus, Jesus Christ, the central figure of Christianity, was born in Judaea, a distant part of the empire. The spread of Christianity in the centuries that followed challenged the basic principles of the Roman state and drew its converts away from Roman gods and values. Whereas Romans had focused their devotion on the city of Rome, its many gods, and the expansion of the empire in all directions, Christianity urged complete devotion to a universal God. And where Roman law had established a rigid hierarchy of earthly authority figures, Christianity directed its adherents to regard Christ’s teaching as the highest authority.

In the 4th and 5th centuries ad Rome was unable to maintain full control over its large empire. In 410 the Visigoths, a Germanic people, invaded Rome, the first invasion of the city in eight centuries. Roman aristocrats blamed Rome’s weakness on the Christians’ refusal to pray to Roman gods and their desertion of the city. Likewise, the Christian focus on an afterlife turned Christians away from engagement in current affairs. Saint Augustine’s The City of God (413-426) responded to these accusations. Saint Augustine did not deny that Christians’ loyalty to their God surpassed their commitment to Rome. But he pointed to the iniquities of Rome and the flagrant immorality of her gods and then asked whether Rome and her gods were worth anyone’s concerns.

Adopting the political language of Rome, Augustine writes of a city of God, which he contrasts with an earthly city. The earthly city is not Rome but includes as its citizens all who love themselves above God. The citizens of the City of God love God above themselves. Augustine thus takes away any institutional focus from the concept of city and defines the city in terms of the quality of soul. He describes the citizens of the City of God as resident aliens who are patiently waiting for the Second Coming, enduring life in the present for the glorious kingdom of God of the future. In this massive work, Augustine rejects the regimes of the ancient world and turns Christians beyond them for their city and models of citizenship.

The western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in 476, but the eastern portion survived as the Byzantine Empire for another 1,000 years. Emperor Justinian I codified Roman law again at the beginning of the 6th century ad. The Justinian Code, Corpus Iuris Civilis, elaborated on and developed further the legal concepts of ancient Rome. The Justinian Code became the basis for civil law throughout Europe for centuries afterwards. Central concepts of the code include natural law (lex natura), which transcends place and time to provide a universal standard of right, and the law of nations (ius gentium), which applies beyond local boundaries to citizens of different nations or jurisdictions.

As an empire, Rome had shown the potential for rule by a central authority over vast territories. At the same time, Rome introduced the practice of federalism, in which a central authority allows a degree of local autonomy so that more than one authority may rule in particular localities. The history and constitution of the Republic became the basis for theories of republicanism during the Renaissance in Europe. Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli’s Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1513; trans. 1636) reflects on the rise of the Roman Republic and articulates republicanism as a model for political life. In the 18th century the framers of the Constitution of the United States, inspired by the Roman Republic, separated powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. They took names such as the Senate directly from the political legacy of the Romans.

About the author: Arlene W. Saxonhouse is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books on ancient and early modern political thought, including Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (1996).