Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire

by Teresa Morgan

Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.

396 pages, Hardcover

First published August 9, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

The Reverend Dr Teresa Morgan is an English historian and cleric. She earned a M.A. from both Cambridge and Oxford and Ph.D. from Cambridge.

Her research interests are the study of popular ethics in antiquity and contemporary historiography.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Amy HC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I use this book all the time - it is honestly one of the best references I have for popular ethics, fables, exemplar, and everything else in this category for the early Roman Empire. The title really does say it all.

I'm currently doing my honours thesis this year and I think if I didn't have Morgan's work to (heavily) lean on for support, I'd already be ugly crying in the corner at the folly of my own subject choice. My copy of this book is ridiculously stuffed with tabbed notes from how many times I've used it in assignments leading up to this point and now for the thesis itself.

Despite my very narrow use case (but extremely deep gratitude) for this work, the book holds a wide variety of topics within the various mediums that morality was taught, coded, and integrated into Roman life. Morgan's work captures this in one place with excellence and allows the reader to really see into the lives of these people through their stories that shed so much light on them beyond the tales themselves.

This book better be loved in the broader Roman scholarly world, because if it's not, something is deeply wrong. Thank you so much for all the effort you put in to making it. It is honestly one of my favourite reference texts I own.