Barton Carlin A. Roman Honor. The Fire in the Bones

University of California Press, 2001. — xiii, 326 p. — ISBN: 0-520-22525-2.This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being, to what the young Marx called immediate sensuous consciousness.” It deals with what, for the Romans, was the life that mattered, the life of matter—and the life of matter was honor.
If my previous work concerned the icy mineral opacity of Roman violence and cruelty, this is a book about the airy white flame that was always, as it were, in the marrow. And so, in this book, I attempt to give as much attention to the radiant as to the frost-hardened aspects of Roman emotional life. This book addresses Roman emotional life through its volatile equilibrations, its daring homeopathic and homeostatic adjustments, its points of stress and dizziness and collapse, its radical realignments. It deals with a set of patterns of sentiment and the ways these patterns are in fl ected or inverted in the course of Roman history.
With this book, finally, I offer to the broadest audience I can reach the most complex understanding of the spiritual and emotional life of the ancient Romans I can articulate. I hope that it will convey to the reader some small part of the joy and yearning that went into its writing and the love that its author feels for a dead race.A Sort of Prelude: The Tao of the Romans.
The moment of truth in ancient Rome: Honor and embodiment in a contest culture.
Light and Fire.
Stone and Ice: The Remedies of Dishonor.
Confession and the roman soul.
The Spirit Speaking.
Confession and the Remedies of Defeat.
On the wire: The experience of shame in ancient Rome.
The Poise of Shame.
The Poison of Shame—and Its Antidotes.
Conclusions: Choosing Life.
Philosophical Coda: The Sentiment and the Symbol.