This widely respected study of social conflicts between the patrician elite and the plebeians in the first centuries of the Roman republic has now been enhanced by a new chapter on material culture, updates to individual chapters, an updated bibliography, and a new introduction. Analyzes social conflicts between patricians and plebeians in early republican Rome Includes chapters by leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic illuminating social, economic, legal, religious, military, and political aspects as well as the reliability of historical sources Contributors have written addenda for the new edition, updating their chapters in light of recent scholarship

"The Romans harped endlessly on "morality," a cultural feature long ignored as a literary trope or misappreciated as a mere marker of elite status. This book shows how, instead, social norms of personal restraint was part of a habitus of foundational values that acted as meta-rules for the Roman aristocratic performative-competitive political system. The book investigates these norms and explicates their positive content in the republican framework and their resulting place in the Romans' habitual mental map. The book then examines how the social norms came into irreconcilable conflict, arguing that-far from Rome progressing from a pristine past moral state to a sad moral nadir-the same "morals" of personal self-control stabilized and destabilized the Republic at different points in time. The values eventually lost their prohibitory force to constrain action, but not because they were abandoned. Rather, disputes over the proper application and meaning of the norms in novel political and social circumstances grew into violent clashes as disputants presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the essential values and, accordingly, imagined their opponents as bent on the Republic's destruction, while no normatively acceptable third-party judge could exist to resolve the conflicts. Thus, the aristocracy's consensus formed and then cracked along axes over what constituted normative restraint behavior, which both accounts for the ubiquity of this cultural feature, and which automatically undermined a central pillar of the performative-competitive structure itself"--

Examining sites that are familiar to many modern tourists, Valerie Warrior avoids imposing a modern perspective on the topic by using the testimony of the ancient Romans to describe traditional Roman religion. The ancient testimony recreates the social and historical contexts in which Roman religion was practised. It shows, for example, how, when confronted with a foreign cult, official traditional religion accepted the new cult with suitable modifications. Basic difficulties, however, arose with regard to the monotheism of the Jews and Christianity. Carefully integrated with the text are visual representations of divination, prayer, and sacrifice as depicted on monuments, coins, and inscriptions from public buildings and homes throughout the Roman world. Also included are epitaphs and humble votive offerings that illustrate the piety of individuals, and that reveal the prevalence of magic and the occult in the spiritual lives of the ancient Romans.