UC Santa Barbara

Our modern attempts to understand the aristocratic values of the Roman Republic have long held that military achievement was the most important sources of political prestige. Based largely upon middle-republican evidence, surveys of the aristocratic ethos often focus upon military activity at every stage of the senatorial career: aristocrats were expected to serve for long periods in the army as youths and then, upon obtaining political office, distinguish themselves as commanders. In discussions of aristocratic values, therefore, non-martial pursuits are frequently relegated to secondary importance. This model, however, reconciles poorly with the evidence we have from the Republic’s best-attested period, the Late Republic. In the Republic’s final generation we see clearly a number of sure signs that the aristocracy was increasingly spurning military activity in favor of non-martial political action. To name a few prominent examples: youthful military service was in decline, praetors and consul rejected traditionally-coveted command positions, and the frequency of triumphs fell precipitously.

These changes are part of a larger cultural renegotiation of the importance of military achievement that was taking place during the last decades of the Republic, and this dissertation aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the extent of this shift in aristocratic values and the implications it had for the period. The middle-republican evidence does seem to suggest an elite preoccupation with military service, but the influence of this evidence has clouded our view of the ideological changes of the first century BCE. Rather than a monolithic system of aristocratic values, what we see in the Late Republic is competition between different views on what kind of actions should form the basis of aristocratic legitimacy, and disagreement often centered upon the role of military achievement. This project approaches the topic in three different ways: Chapter 1 examines how common youthful military service was among the Roman elite. Chapter 2 takes a closer look at a problem we have some evidence for in the first century: inexperience among military commanders. And the final chapter provides a new, values-focused reading of the epistolary exchange between Cicero and Cato about Cicero’s pursuit of triumph. A better understanding of this cultural shift will also have some major implications for many of the main historical narratives regarding the Late Republic.