Historians of Roman political culture have examined in detail how the performance of military and civic virtues contributed to elite competition for honores in the Republic, and how the terms of this competition evolved in the Principate to accommodate the authority of the emperor. In Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire, Charles Goldberg frames these debates productively in terms of gender, arguing that the personal qualities associated with the vir bonus coalesced into an aristocratic ideal of manliness that balanced dominance and aggression with more cooperative virtues, particularly ‘willing subordination of one's interests to the greater public good, and at times to other men’ (29). G. terms this ideal ‘republican masculinity’ and tracks its evolution from the middle Republic, when (he argues in ch. 2) it functioned as a safeguard of senatorial privilege, through the challenges of late Republican electioneering (ch. 3). G. questions whether the transition to an autocratic system of government entailed a ‘crisis of masculinity,’ a thesis explored most recently by M. Racette-Campbell (The Crisis of Masculinity in the Age of Augustus, 2023). He makes a convincing case that ‘republican masculinity’ remained a touchstone for elite self-fashioning under the Principate (ch. 4), including among emperors themselves (ch. 5).
One of the book's most strongly articulated objectives is to broaden a scholarly understanding of Roman manliness that ‘revolved almost completely around the exercise of power over various societal “Others”, for example slaves, freedmen, legal minors, and women’ (14). Goldberg succeeds in presenting a more balanced view than one finds, for example, in Myles McDonnell's Roman Manliness (2006), which was criticised early on for its equation of ‘native’ virtus with military courage prior to the influence of Greek values. G.'s initial chapters read in part as an extended response to McDonnell (e.g. 4, 37, 79–81), insofar as G. builds checks on militaristic aggression into the definition of the vir bonus, while drawing out the homosocial character of institutions like the salutatio and highlighting the regulatory function of the censorship.
To be fair, not all studies of Roman masculinity have concentrated myopically on the domination of others. Since Maud Gleason's groundbreaking work on Favorinus (Making Men, 1995), scholars of Roman gender have attended to individuals who played with or subverted the normative binaries of active/passive, male/female. Moreover, to cite Craig Williams, ‘masculinity meant being in control, both of oneself and of others’ (Roman Homosexuality, 1999, 151; my emphasis). While G. acknowledges that ‘control of the self, both in and outside of sex, was imperative’ (16), he does not fully integrate this aspect of the communis opinio into his critique, which is aimed at a model of Roman manliness based solely on ‘martial and political aggression’ (19). In fact, many of the examples he proffers to illustrate the vir bonus or malus boil down to questions of self-control. Scipio Africanus and the Elder Cato were praised for various forms of restraint (47–50), whereas Catiline and Clodius were impugned as effeminate on the basis of their perceived lust for power (22–3). This overlap between the familiar prerogative of self-mastery and G.'s ‘republican masculinity’ obscures, though by no means vitiates, the distinctiveness of the latter.
Considering the performance of masculinity by people other than male aristocrats would also have helped G. identify precisely what, if anything, was characteristically ‘manly’ about the subordination of personal interests to the public good. For instance, G. depicts poor urban voters as a body that ‘cared only for action, and for active men, not the finer points of republican principle’ (88); but the populus regularly overrode the senate on matters of principle, as well as for material gains (R. Morstein-Marx in C. Steel and H. van der Blom, eds, Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome (2013), 29–47). Roman historians have become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which women leveraged their wealth, religious authority and social networks to intervene in political life (for a recent survey, L. Webb in R. M. Frolov and C. Burden-Stevens, eds, Leadership and Initiative in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome (2022), 151–88). While demonstrations of civic virtue by women tended to be coded as masculine, one wonders how G. would account for a text like Cornelia's letter to C. Gracchus, whether authentic or not, in which a matron urges her son to follow her lead in prioritising the public good over personal vengeance. Likewise, if Thrasea Paetus exemplifies for G. ‘an imperial dissident motivated by the vir's traditional drive toward gloria’ (117), could the same not be said of his mother-in-law, Arria Maior, whose suicide Pliny describes as driven by gloria et aeternitas (Ep. 3.16; R. Langlands, Eugesta 4 (2014), 214–37)?
By raising these questions, I do not mean to undervalue G.'s ambitious attempt to bring the insights of masculinity studies to bear on 500 years of Roman history. Any reader interested in the role of gender norms in Roman political life will benefit from engaging with his wide-ranging and lucid discussion.
