The "Moment of Truth" in Ancient Rome:
Honor and Embodiment in a Contest Culture ¹

I like a look of agony because I know it's true.

Emily Dickinson

On the morning of June 6, 1989, a riveting photograph appeared on the front page of the Daily Republican in Greenfield, Massachusetts; it was of a young Chinese man in a white shirt, casually blocking with his body the advance of a line of tanks into Tienanmen Square. It was a photograph that appeared on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America. It was a playful, almost whimsical gesture for this man to make: to saunter out in front of the lead tank, to move a little left, to move a little right—to gamble everything in one heart-stopping and almost frivolously theatrical moment. Perhaps it was that juxtaposition of terror and whimsy that transfixed us, terror and grief for the stark fragility of that one human life and a thrilling admiration for the person who would spite that frailty.

This was the Roman discrimen, the "Moment of Truth," the equivocal and ardent moment when, before the eyes of others, you gambled what you were. This was the agon, the contest when truth was not so much revealed as created, realized, willed in the most intense and visceral way, the truth of one's being, the truth of being.

The Romans of the early and middle Republic lived in a small face-to-face culture with an acute sensitivity to the bonds (religiones, obligationes, moenia and munera) that defined them. Community was conceived of and expressed as a product of the bond. At the same time, boundaries were not stable: all Roman boundaries were highly-charged but also restless, irritable, and permeable membranes—more like rings of fire than walls of adamant. Every wall was a wager, every bond a risk. The vow and the oath, the Romans' most sacred forms of contract, were wagers or bets in which one staked one's head, one's eyes, one's reputation.

Undergoing the ordeal (labor, periculum, discrimen, certamen, contentio, agon) was the act of defining one's boundaries, of determining one's share or portion. It was necessary for a sense of one's being. And because, in a contest culture, one's part was not fixed, the discrimen established, momentarily, one's position. It located one in a field, in a "pecking-order." One gambled what one was.

The Crucible of the Contest

As gold is proven by fire, so are we by ordeals.

Minucius Felix, Octavius 36.9

Virtus and the honores won in the contest were shining and volatile; competition produced a heightened sense of vividness, a brilliant, gleaming, resplendent existence. The man of honor was speciosus, illustris, clarus, nobilis, splendidus; the woman of honor was, in addition, casta, pura, candida. At the same time, to produce this exalted state, the good competition obeyed restrictions; it needed to be: a) circumscribed in time and space; b) governed by rules known and accepted by the rival parties; c) strenuous (requiring an equal or greater-than-equal opponent); d) witnessed.

To have a glowing spirit one needed to expend one's energy in a continuous series of ordeals. Labor, industria and disciplina were, for the Romans, the strenuous exertions that one made in undergoing the trial and in shouldering the heavy burden. In labores and pericula one demonstrated effective energy, virtus. There was no virtus, in the republic, without the demonstration of will. The absence of energy (inertia, desidia, ignavia, socordia) was non-being. In inactivity the spirit froze.

As Cicero remarks, the desire for honor and glory set men on fire (Tusculanae disputationes 1.2.4). "By nature we yearn and hunger for honor, and once we have glimpsed, as it were, some part of its radiance, there is nothing we are not prepared to bear and suffer in order to secure it" (2.24.58). Sallust describes the emotions that the Romans associated with the challenge presented by their ancestors' wax images:

I have often been told that Quintus Fabius Maximus and Publius Scipio Africanus, and other illustrious men were wont to say: 'When they beheld the images of their ancestors, their spirits were violently inflamed to virtue' (Bellum Iugurthinum 4.5).

Here it is important to point out that in Roman culture, as in very many cultures, a male (mas) was not necessarily a man (vir); a man was not a natural being. In the words of David Gilmore, "manhood...is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds....[M]anhood is problematic, a critical threshold that boys must pass through testing."²   It is with the words, "If you are men," that Lucretia challenges Brutus and Collatinus to revenge her violation (Livy 1.58.7). Tullius incites the Volsci saying, "Rome has declared war on you, and she will be sorry for it—if you are men" (Livy 2.38.5). "Who," Seneca asks, "—only let him be a man, and intent upon honor—is not eager for the honorable ordeal and prompt to assume perilous duties? To what energetic person is not idleness a punishment?" (Seneca, De providentia 2.2). A male was transformed into a man by the willful expenditure of energy. Above all, a man willed himself to be expendable.

The more extreme the ordeal, the greater its annealing, its defining power. "The greater the torment the greater the glory," asserts Seneca (De providentia 3.9). "He has won without glory who has won without peril" (3.4). Fortune, he believed, sought out the great soul to be challenged. "Mucius was tested by fire, Fabricius by poverty, Rutilius by exile, Regulus by torture, Socrates by poison, Cato by death. One cannot find a great exemplum except in misfortune" (3.4). The 2nd-century Christian Minucius Felix admonished the Romans: "Your men of power, whom you commend as moral examples, flourished through their tribulations" (Octavius 36.8). As for us, he asserts, "God tries and examines each one through adversity; he weighs the spirits of individuals through perils, exploring the will of a man up to the extreme moment of death" (36.9). "Without an adversary," Seneca asserts, "virtus shrivels. We see how great and how viable virtus is when, by endurance, it shows what it is capable of" (De providentia 2.4).

At perhaps the shining moment of all Livy's Roman history, the messengers arrived at the city with news of the devastating defeat of the Romans at Cannae at the hands of Hannibal in 216 BCE. Fifty thousand were dead on the field. "No other nation in the world," according to Livy, "could have suffered so tremendous a series of disasters and not been overwhelmed" (22.54.10). And the great soul, the magnus animus of the Romans was revealed in their unwillingness even to mention peace after Cannae or to ransom back the survivors. "The Romans had a greater spirit after the terrible disaster of Cannae than they would ever have in success" (De officiis 3.11.47). The willingness to expend everything (up to and including the state) was, paradoxically, the final insurance of the continued existence of both the state and of the spirit. Sulla, anticipating a fight with the enemy Iugurtha, admonished his small force: "You will be the safer the less you spare yourself" (Bellum Igurthinum 107.1). Or, as Seneca succinctly puts it, "Who scorns his own life is lord of yours" (Epistulae 4.8).

Verginius wins the contest of wills between himself and the vastly more powerful Appius Claudius by slaughtering his beloved daughter. In the Romans' potlatch mentality, Verginius' willingness to sacrifice what he loved most in the world was his trump card. Like Seneca's and Euripides' Medea or the mother of the Second and Fourth Maccabees or the Passio Perpetuae, men and women of honor made very unnatural parents.

Hannibal's will was broken, his animus fractus, according to Cicero, when he received news that the Romans were "discarding" their soldiers at the moment when they were most in need of them (De officiis 3.32.114). The defeated Romans not only refused to ransom their own soldiers, but ordained by law that soldiers must vanquish or die, so that, according to Polybius, there might not be any hope of survival in case of defeat (Polybius 6.58.11). In the words of the Belle of Amherst, "All is the price of all."

Making Faces
As a mortal, what one risked in the contest was one's "face," or to be more exact, one's persona, one's mask. The persona, and the role expressed by that mask, the professio were the very boundary and definition of one's being, the sine qua non of existence. For the Romans of the Republic there was no depth without surface.

The persona was composed of the reputation (existimatio, fama, and nomen), supported by effective energy (virtus) and enforced by a sensitivity to shame (pudor). The persona guaranteed the existence of the will, the driving vitality at the core: the animus. The face was also a provocation; whatever persona you publicly professed was a line drawn in the sand. "I am a Roman. My name is Mucius. I have come to kill you," Livy's captive hero proclaims (2.12.8). Marcus, the son of Cato Uticensis, died at the battle of Phillipi. When the army was retreating, he stood his ground and shouted his name and that of his famous father (Brutus 49.9-10).

We have the notion that you can save your soul even if you have lost your face. But the Romans lost their souls when they lost their faces. The penetrable, false or broken persona enclosed only emptiness; the exposed Roman was vanus, inanis, cassus. The discrimen disclosed, for example, that there was nothing any longer but cowardice beneath the reputation for great valor of the Helvetii (Tacitus, Historia 1.68). Metellus, the general sent out by the Romans against the defiant Numidian Jugurtha was, according to Marius, a man of regal arrogance but, as the course of the war had shown, an homo inanis (Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 64.5).

The Moment of Truth
A Roman's hyper-consciousness of his or her "face," produced a keen sense of embodiment. The person who underwent surveillance or a contest, who risked death or humiliation, lived critically in the moment, like a deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car. For the Roman "on the spot," "up against the wall," the world was sharp, immediate, visceral. As in archaic Greek thought and much of Japanese thought—and for similar reasons—the Romans tended to physicalize everything, to make everything present. Reality was immanent; it was spectatus, expertus, probatus, argutus, manufestus. It hit you in the face or you could smack it with your hand. How literally this could be in Roman culture can be observed in the following scene from Plautus. In the Amphitryon the slave Sosia is confronted by his mirror image, the god Mercury; Mercury (the street tough) challenges the mortal:

Mercury: Where do you think you're going?
Sosia: What's it to you?
Mercury: Are you free or slave?
Sosia: I'm whatever I want to be.
Mercury: Oh yeah?
Sosia: Yeah!
Mercury: You're a whipped slave!
Sosia: You lie!
Mercury: I'll make you say that I'm telling the truth (341-345).

Because unmediated embodiment was shocking, the man or woman in the spotlight had difficulty "being himself" or "being herself," and tended to lapse into confusion and stupefaction. For that reason, the Romans tended to frame contests as formalized and scripted dramas or games (whether it be the decorum of daily intercourse, or the etiquette of the games, the law courts, or senatorial debates). The Romans relied on ritualization for the preservation of the self, of the citizen's animus. The formalized "game'' was employed in those situations where the desire to preserve the community was stronger than the desire to break the spirit of the opponent. Precisely because it alleviated shock, it was especially at moments of grief and terror that games were most effective. The gladiatorial games and the decursiones funebres were, for instance, services to the dead, funeral games. As the ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt points out, "the more ritualized the behavior, the more easily it is released." ³

When the Roman soldiers first ascertained that they were surrounded and trapped in the Caudine Forks, they came abruptly to a halt, a stupor and a sort of torpor having seized their limbs. For a long time the soldiers stood in silence, immobilized, observing one another, each imagining the other to be more in command of his senses (Livy 9.2.1011). Suddenly, and without having been given any orders, they launched into the Roman soldier's daily and arduous ordeal of building a walled camp. The enemy mocked them and they mocked themselves, knowing full well the inanity of building a fortress within a cage (Livy 9.2.12-14). Still, the automatic and formalized behavior provided a relief from stupor. It allowed them to move and to show energy.

Closely related to the shock-relieving function of rituals was the shock-relieving function of roles. The Latin persona was not only the mask but also the part associated with that mask. Latin professio aside from being an open avowal, was the affirmation of the role or part presented by the persona—and the challenge presented by that affirmation.

It was the discipline and training, the habituation to a particular role or roles that gave one the ability to endure the "Moment of Truth." How is it that stalwart gladiators endure the blows? How is it they offer their necks without flinching? "They are well trained" (bene instituti sunt), Cicero explains. "Such is the power of exercise, of practice, of habit!" (Tusculanae disiputationes 2.27.40-41). And so the good parent, out of love for the child, acted as a trainer, endlessly manufacturing trials for the child (Seneca, De providentia 2.5). The Elder Cato, good father that he was, subjected his frail son to the extremes of heat and cold and made him swim the wildest and most swiftly flowing stretches of the Tiber (Plutarch, Cato Maior 20.4).

Do you imagine that the Spartans hate their children whose spirits they test by the administration of public whippings? Their own fathers exhort them to bravely endure the blows of the lash and call upon them, lacerated and half dead, to keep offering their wounds for wounding (De providentia 4.11).

Stone and Ice

Victory is fleeting, but losing is forever.

Billy Jean King

Being was ephemeral but non-being was absolute. Valor was glass and fire, but humiliation was stone and ice. Honor was evanescent but degradation had no end. According to Josephus, the captured Jewish generals were displayed on the triumphal floats of Titus and Vespasian, frozen in the postures in which they were captured (Bellum Iudaicum 7.139147). Ovid's prostrate and defeated Phineus was turned to stone in the act of begging for his life by the victorious Persius (Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.214-235). The exhibition of the slave's defeat was perpetual. As Reginald Haynes Barrow expressed it, "To enslave an enemy rather than to slay him was a device to reap his labor, but it was also a way of enjoying a perpetual triumph over him."

The Bad Contest
Where the rules of the game were arbitrary or unknown, where there were no limits in scope or intensity of the contest, where the contestants were unequally matched, the contest turned caustic and brutal; rather than anneal, it charred and calcinated. There had always been destructive and unequal competitions in Rome: between a master and a slave, an adult and a child, a patron and a client. But it was, above all, in the period of the collapse of the republic and the civil wars that the Romans increasingly came to recognize and describe the bad or destructive contest. By the early empire the game had degenerated to a ludibrium, a farce:

A gladiator...against whom Caligula was fencing with a wooden sword deliberately fell to the ground; whereupon Caligula drew an iron dagger, stabbed him to death, and ran about waving the palm-branch of victory (Suetonius, Gaius 32.2).

Nero inaugurated the Neronia, a festival of competition in music, gymnastics, and horsemanship....At the prize-giving Nero descended to the orchestra stalls where the senators sat, to accept the laurel wreath for Latin oratory and verse which had been reserved for him by the unanimous vote of all the distinguished competitors (Suetonius, Nero 12.3).

Commodus descended into the arena and cut down all the domestic animals that approached him and some that were led up to him or that were brought to him in nets (Dio 73;19.1).

The Hide

Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will you produce? If a man listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?

Arrian, Elpicteti Discorsi 1.25

As a result of the collapse of the rules of the game, it was increasingly difficult to alleviate the shock of embodiment. Immobility and stupor were almost as frequently depicted as violence in the literature of the great heterogeneous Roman Empire. The absence of clear rules and common ground inhibited speech and action. When the competition was insupportable, paralysis, the desire to hide, and the desire to be insensitive and autonomous became widespread cultural phenomena. With the loss of the good contest and the rules that framed it, callous, brazen shamelessness became a cure for shame. Servius Sulpicius reminds Cicero, inconsolable at the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, of their far greater losses. Having lost patria, honestas, dignitas, honores, "what spirit, trained in these times, ought not to become insensitive?" (Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares 4.5.2 [45 BCE]). Cicero himself, in the same baleful year, remarks to his friend Atticus: "What could be more dishonorable? But now we harden ourselves to these humiliations and shed our humanity" (Ad Atticum 13.2 [May 45 BCE]). Even earlier Cicero had written to Caelius, "Your letter would have caused me great grief if reason itself had not already dispelled all burdensome thoughts, and had not my spirit, from lasting despair, hardened itself against any new sorrows" (Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares 2.16.1 [May 49 BCE]).

When the Romans begin to talk about saving things; when they begin to talk about salvation, the stone—once the image of callousness and stupidity—became an ideal. It was a desperate strategy to preserve both life and honor.

The face became a facade. The persona went from being primarily expressive to primarily defensive. The Romans donned, as it were, the armor of hypocrisy, to borrow a phrase from Samuel Dill. As it was for Livy's Brutus under Tarquinius or Suetonius' Claudius under Caligula, the mask, even a dishonorable one—or I should say especially a dishonorable one—was a relief and an assuagement for embarrassment and humiliation, a defense against an unbearable "now" that would crush you. When Tacitus' Nero poisons his rival Britannicus, Octavia looks upon the death throes of her brother with a brazen face that hides her anguish and protects her life (Annales 13.16). The "thick-skinned" would survive.

Shamelessness as a Relief from Shame
The reaction against unbearable humiliation often took the form of disengagement. The hardened skin is the disposable skin; it could be put on and off like armor or makeup. The subject, like the dependent, delighted in being callidus, wily as well as hard; he or she enjoyed being a versipellis, a protean creature who changed his or her skin to suit the moment. Tacitus' aristocrats often adopted the survival strategy of Plautus' slaves: metamorphosis. It is important to add, moreover, that if being an itinerant trickster made one like a the slaves in Plautus or Petronius, it also made one like a god. Jupiter was, of course, the ultimate versipellis (Plautus, Amphitryon 123). The slave, like the god, was unattached to his face.

The loss of the good contest also helps to explain the reception in Rome of the Cynic and Stoic ideal of inviolate independence, autarkeia:

Surround yourself with philosophy, an impregnable wall; though fortune assault it with her many engines, she cannot breach it. The spirit that abandons external things stands on unassailable ground; it vindicates itself in its fortress; every weapon hurled against it falls short of its mark (Seneca, Eipistulae 82.5).

Peaceful Non-Existence

To struggle in vain and to obtain, by exhausting oneself, nothing but loathing, is an act of insanity

Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 3.3

If you do not wish to fight, you are permitted to flee.

Seneca, De Providentia 6.7

Children, when things do not please them, say, 'I will not play anymore'; so, when things seem to you to reach that point just say, 'I will not play anymore,' and so depart, instead of staying to make moan.

Arrian, Epicteti Discorsi 1.24

Otium, vacatio, immunitas—withdrawal, leisure, became values in Roman society at the moment when it became impossible to maintain one's being by contest, and when the isolation of withdrawal was less painful than the humiliation that came with societal bonds. "Otium begins to be a necessity for us because that thing we would prefer to otium nowhere exists" (De otio 8.3). Virtus, while remaining the active principle par excellence, began to be used to describe passivity, endurance, resistance; it began to be used for internal qualities, even those unseen or unacknowledged. It looks more and more like our "virtue." But it was a revolution in Roman values to entertain the idea that one could have virtus in otium, that one could have virtue without the contest, without the rules, without the witnesses.

An Abstract Life
Honor, in ancient Rome, had always been "sightliness;" dishonor had ever been "unsightly," a dehonestamentum (something that disfigured), a dedecus (a blemish). But when one could not defend one's honor, visibility, embodiment, became enervating, crippling, isolating. When one could not resist the injury, when one could not have integrity, one was tempted to remove an "essential being" from the social/physical world, to sheath it, as it were, in asbestos. The excruciating sense of an unbearable immediacy unrelieved by effective rules and rituals resulted in an intense desire to remove the animus from the contest,, to "break the spell" of embodiment. One is tempted to say: "This is not real; this is not really happening to me." The divorce of the animus from the body, the "mind/body split," and the notion that the body was an unsightly prison gained ground simultaneously in ancient Rome with the notion that the contest had become impossible. It was as if, in this period, the ugliness of dishonor was relegated to the visible and palpable which one could then slough off and discard. The withdrawal the self into an abstract or transcendental Reality is a way of saying, "I am not my face. I am not what I see in your eyes" This is both a relief from the problem of face and an abandonment of face.

The abstract thinker is "shameless," autonomous, in that he or she does not submit his or her truth to common consent; ratio was a way of creating a reality over which one was totally sovereign. The abstract thinker can have a reality without others, a being without others. Veritas, in Rome, was the symptom of cultural collapse.

As the rules got easier to break and there was less and less guilt associated with breaking them, the harder it was for Romans to sacrifice or risk their lives to uphold them. As a result death lost its life-affirming value. And, as Seneca points out to Lucilius, no one is willing to die for a syllogism (Enistulae 82.22-24). When death lost its value, life became an abstraction, what Clifford Geertz calls a "bloodless universal." A "virtuous" and absolute god arose, but it was an abstract god over a naked rock.

Conclusions
How reluctant the Romans were to give up being fragile, ephemeral men even to become gods of adamant is made ever so poignantly clear in the writings of men like Cicero and Sallust. Even while they praise withdrawal from an untenable public life, they dreaded lest they appear to others as inactive and inert. The ideals of peaceful autonomy and hardness remained ever poor seconds to the contest. As Cicero explains, he wrote philosophy because it was necessary. If the Roman Stoic wanted to be a rock, he longed to be a flame.

In the third book of Seneca's De ira the tutor and sometimes vicar of the Emperor Nero tells the story of the tyrant Cambyses and his friend and adviser Praexaspes. It is a story designed by Seneca to demonstrate that confrontation could be avoided, the most violent emotions can be suppressed, and that one can protect oneself with an impenetrable mask of apathy. In the story Praexaspes admonishes Cambyses that drunkenness is a disgrace in a king, a man who "is followed by the eyes and ears of all" (omnium oculi auresque sequentur). Cambyses, bristling, fastens on the words of his adviser as a challenge. He declares that he will demonstrate that he is ever in control of his hands and eyes. Defying the pleas of his adviser, he continues to drink bidding Praexaspes introduce his son into the room. Cambyses draws his bow and, calling out his intended mark, shoots the son of Praexaspes in the chest. Tearing open the breast of the corpse, the tyrant reveals to the father that the arrow had penetrated the heart. Turning to his adviser he asks, "Is my hand not sufficiently steady?" Praexaspes calmly replies, "Apollo himself could not have made a more unerring shot."

Seneca's Praexaspes was meant to be the hero of this tale, another wise man like Stilbo who, when his fatherland had been conquered and his daughters had been raped by the soldiers of Demetrius Poliorcetes, was able, through his imperturbable indifference to deny the victory to the mighty Demetrius (De constantia 5.7). But even the Stoic author, finally, cannot bear the consequences of his own philosophy. He cries out: "May the gods damn him—a slave more in his soul than in his condition!" (Dii illum male perdant animo magis quam condicione mancipium! [3.14.3]). Praexaspes ought to have challenged the king into giving still another demonstration of his skill upon the person of the father! Seneca sedately concludes: "The point under discussion is clear—that it is possible to suppress anger" (3.14.4).

From this anguished and telling story several things can be seen: first, that it is not an equal contest. Cambyses shoots the son of Praexaspes as casually as Commodus shoots the animals led to him for slaughter; there is no challenging the king and living (the tanks would roll right over you). Secondly, that Seneca continues to see even these unequal contests as basic tests of the quality of one's being. Even while teaching his listeners how to preserve their being by withdrawing from the contest behind an impenetrable mask of indifference, he is also teaching them that the mask of indifference is never impenetrable enough; the arrow of contempt always hits its mark.

Not so paradoxically, it is from the pen of the Stoic philosopher Seneca that we get the most beautiful Moment of Truth in all of Roman literature. In Seneca's Agamemnon the gods strike the Achaean soldiers returning home from the Trojan War with a cataclysmic storm. One ship founders upon another. The sailors can do nothing to calm the storm or save themselves. The living envy the dead. The prayers of those who beseech the gods—insatiate of evil—are cut short by death. In the darkening night only Ajax continues to fight:"solus invictus malis luctatur Ajax" (532-533). He is glanced first by one and then struck by another bolt of lightning aimed at him with deliberate malice by Athena. The goddess is affronted by the resistance of the lone mortal:

Still Ajax struggles. Scorched, but unmoved, Ajax stands out from the deep, like a sheer rock, cleaving the wild sea and breaking the waves on his chest. Clasping his ship in his hand he draws the flames behind him. And Ajax is illuminated. He causes all the sea to shine (539-543).

Carlin A. Barton

Notes

(1)  This essay is an abridged version of two chapters in my forthcoming book, Fire in the Bones; the Emotions of Honor in Ancient Rome.

(2)  David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making; Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990) 11.

(3) Irenäus Eibel-Eibesfeldt, "Ritual and Ritualization from a Biological Perspective," Human Ethology; Claims and Limits of a New Discipline, eds. M. von Cranach, K. Foppa, W. Lepenies and D. Ploog (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 15.