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ROMAN MANLINESS: VIRTUS AND THE ROMAN REPUBLIC By MYLES MCDONNELL. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. 481.
ROMAN MANLINESS is a study of the manifold and changing significance of the term virtus over the last centuries of the Roman republic. By using the term "manliness" in his tide and throughout the book as his primary translation for virtus, McDonnell emphasises the term's association with what it meant to "be a man" in Roman society. His eschewal of the term "masculinity," enmeshed as it is in gender studies, is also significant: this work is defiandy "not about cultural studies, but rather history informed by philology" (xiv) - in other words, the hard stuff of classics untainted by fashionable theory. In fact, the book might be better described as "philology followed by history," since it falls into two distinct parts which employ distinct methodologies: the philology is found in the close study of early Roman literature of Chapters One to Three, while the history - largely an old-style narrative account of some great moments in the story of virtus - in Chapters Seven to Ten. Meanwhile, the shorter intervening chapters contain some aspects of social history that provide context for the transformations that unfold in the historical chapters; Chapter Four examines the visual representation of virtus, while Chapters Five and Six outline the broader structures of Roman society within which the Roman concept of virtus was constituted.
McDonnell's thesis is that in pre-classical Latin virtus denoted not a generic moral excellence ("virtue"), or a complex of virtues, or even the specific virtue of courage, but rather a less "ethical" (in his terms) quality: the attribute of the only role to which many young Roman men could aspire, characterised by physical endurance, aggression and prowess on the battlefield. The first chapters establish that this overwhelmingly martial meaning of virtus is predominant in texts from the third and second centuries with exhaustive analysis of passages from...