Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Strongly held values can stabilize a society. They can also splinter it. Paul Belonick explores the moral paradoxes of republican Rome and describes how aristocrats engaged in "performative politics," aggressively seeking self-advancement with a competitiveness that fueled the expansion of an empire. At the same time, Roman orators and authors emphasized the need for self-control, moderation and temperance. Scholars have long suggested that this moral obsession with self-control was merely a social marker of aristocratic status, but Belonick argues that the Roman focus on self-control was responsible for solidifying their peculiarly competitive, semi-formal government. As conflicts arose in Rome over how to apply these cultural values to novel circumstances, competitors saw each other as desecrating republican principles and therefore as targets to be eradicated. Belonick presents a fresh perspective on the republic’s collapse, by illustrating both sides of this Roman paradox: how values of self-control legit