Roman Amoralism Reconsidered: The Political Culture of the Roman Republic and Historians in an Era of Disillusionment

No ancient evidence supports the view that the political culture of the Roman Republic was amoral. Nevertheless, this view can be found in the works of many important twentieth-century historians who wrote about the Roman Republic. In making this assumption, they were following a way of writing history that was common during an “era of disillusionment,” roughly from the early 1900s to the 1980s, in which the quest for power and money were assumed to predominate in politics.