Excerpt from Roman Etiquette of the Late Republic as Revealed by the Correspondence of Cicero

The following thesis is based primarily on a study of Cicero's correspondence, with a view to discovering what society in that age considered the proper attitude and conduct of one individual towards another. The investigation has not dealt with the moral question whether a man's treatment of his fellow was just or unjust, but simply with what the social organization accepted as the customary or conventional act under given circumstances. We are concerned with manners, not morals, and these manners may seem good or bad according as they please or offend our own taste, but they are equally important in establishing a code of etiquette which may be said to belong to a certain age of society.

The purpose, then, of this paper is to illustrate through a collation of passages from Cicero, and from other writers of that period, the Roman idea of etiquette which prevailed during the closing years of the Republic. The term etiquette is used in its broadest sense, to include not only courtesy and good manners but the observance of conventional proprieties, whether they be loose or strict; not only social duties and their proper form, but also customs which fashion allowed, even if it did not endorse them. The letters of Cicero give one the impression that he and his contemporaries had a delicate sense of appreciation of the niceties of courtesy, and that while their standards do not measure up to what the twentieth century would consider correct, there did exist a certain amount of conventional decorum, and a more or less general regard for it in so-called polite society.

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