Echoes of Rome: How Ancient Virtues Can Save America, Part I – Duty

When we think of the states, kingdoms, and empires of old, ancient Rome stands alone as the civilization that immortalized itself in history. For centuries after its fall in the West, kings, emperors, and churches across Europe and Asia Minor have sought to make her legacy their own.

While claimants to the Roman Empire’s heirdom are now extinct, Rome’s philosophies and culture have left their mark on today’s constitutions, politics, law, and civic religion. Even our own Founding Fathers analogized themselves to the founders of the Roman Republic, debating the nature of a new nation under the pen names of tyrant-fellers such as Brutus and order-makers like Publius. 

I recently had the privilege of studying and living in Rome for three months. As I walked among her ruins, I found myself repeatedly asking two great questions: “What made these people and their civilization so great?” and “Can my country achieve this greatness too?” As I studied wisdom lifted from the original scrolls of Rome’s greatest figures, from Seneca to Cicero, I discovered that Rome owes its eternal life to four key virtues: pietas (piety and duty), constantia (perseverance), prudentia (wisdom and personal discretion), and disciplina (discipline). 

Drawing upon those primary sources, I will cover each virtue in a four-part series to truly answer the question of whether and how America can match, or even surpass, history’s greatest people.

Pietas: The Foremost Virtue

Rome’s foremost virtue was the civic idea of pietas, roughly translated as piety. Cicero, perhaps the greatest orator of all time, defined it as the virtue “which admonishes us to do our duty to our country or our parents or other blood relations.” Pietas is not just about faithfulness, but duty. The pious man “performed all his duties towards the deity and his fellow human beings fully and in every respect.” Rome’s heroes embodied no virtue more tenaciously, and Roman scholars, philosophers, and artists held no virtue more dear. 

Among those heroes is Rome’s mythical ancestor Aeneas, whose actions echo in eternity through Virgil’s Aeneid, and who continues to stand as the embodiment of the ideal Roman citizen. Of all Virgil’s literary epithets, “pius Aeneas” struck the Roman heart most deeply. Aeneas saw his duty and voyage to Italy not only as service to his fellow men, but as guided by divine auspices and will. It is this subordination to a higher power, in this case the Olympians, that framed his actions and forced him onto a path of morality and pietas. And even though Aeneas, often held back by his wrath, had his human flaws, his deviations were temporary and he always reverted to his path of destiny. As the progenitor of the Roman people, he passed down his honor and dutifulness to all Roman citizens. 

Cicero again emphasized pietas as the duty one has to their fellow countrymen and society in “The Dream of Scipio,” a book in his famous political dialogue De Re Publica. He describes a hypothetical dream of Aemilianus, the grandson of legendary commander Scipio Africanus. At this point, Aemelianus has lived his life in the shadow of Africanus’ victories against Hannibal’s Carthage decades before. As Aemilianus slumbers, his long-dead grandfather appears before him. Africanus exhorts his grandson to serve the Roman nation well when he returns from his campaigns and assumes political power. Cicero’s description of the dream, which puts everything through the perspective of the heavens above, serves as a dialogue on duty, good governance, and the fallacy of fame. Using Africanus’s words, he summarizes the idea of pietas perfectly: 

“For all who have preserved their fatherland, furthered it, enriched it, there is in heaven a sure and allotted abode, where they may enjoy an immortality of happiness.”

M. Tullius Cicero

Pietas frames all our actions under the auspices of duty and forms a civil religion to unite people’s minds and actions. 

American Pietas: What Is Our Duty?

Thousands of years have passed since the last vestiges of the Roman state collapsed and the Olympians’ final worshippers fell silent. Pietas, however, lives on in the founding of all just nations, and in the same manner Rome fell to decadence and the betrayal of this virtue, so too shall any nation that fails to preserve it. 

Americans are free to worship as they see fit, or not do so at all. While this is a blessing of human liberty enshrined in our Constitution, it provides a unique challenge when it comes to maintaining our version of pietas. Yet, at the same time, we are well aware that blind obedience to any state is dangerous. All this leaves the question: To what should we all, as Americans, be dutiful?

I believe the answer lies in America’s potential to perpetuate the ideas on which our nation was founded and our Constitution designed; the first of her shining moments in history. Our leadership in fights for freedom against the armies of evil, our life-changing innovations, and our commitment to civic justice have time and time again set us apart from other nations.

Our failures in these causes have led to a widely disproportionate blowback from modern politicians, educators, and media that squashes any blossoming of civil religion. Whereas the Romans shared the divine, we Americans have nothing. While it is right to acknowledge our shortcomings, attempts to revise our history and frame all our actions in a bad light only push this country toward division and nihilism. Hatred towards our identity, hand-in-hand with rampant, gratification-driven individualism and a lack of drive among citizens to better our country with more of those shining moments, is the start of a decay that parallels the fall of Rome.

Any worldly nation is doomed to make mistakes. People need not be loyal to the American state but to the shared American spirit. Without it, we are nothing; with it, we can form our own enduring and universal pietas.

* The views expressed in this article solely represent the views of the author, not the views of the Chicago Thinker.