Beyond this, there are a number of distinctions to be made: there is the Roman Monarchy, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire. The empire is further divided into a western half and an eastern half. A different type of distinction can be made between the government and society of Rome proper, contrasted with the outlying territories, provinces, and colonies. A third set of distinctions would revolve around social, economic, and political classes. Generalization about Romans as 'good guys' or 'bad guys' are in danger of being oversimplified and hence wrong. Professor Anthony Esolen explains:
In some ways ancient Rome, especially during the centuries of the Republic, was as politically incorrect a place as you can imagine. Our feminists, who consistently uphold the demands of a minority of well-heeled women against the common good, the family, and every freedom recognized our Bill of Rights, would hate the patriarchy of ancient Rome, and not the least because that patriarchy worked. Nowadays, gripped in our great national passion of envy, we demand all sorts of equality: economic, social, and political. We'll destroy the family to attain this equality, and never mind the prisons that result. The Romans instead first sought the good of the family and the city. For the most part, they found that good not in leveling distinctions but in revering them.To be sure, Professor Esolen's presentation is a bit fiery, but let's focus on Rome instead of his passing comments about modern American society. On the one hand, Esolen makes a good point, namely that the social and governmental structures of the Republic worked: they endured nearly five hundred years, and managed to do so with a reasonable facsimile of justice. Rather than naively chasing after the idealistic notion of pure justice and total freedom, the Romans pragmatically realized that a society which is 'mostly' just is capable of surviving much longer than a utopian attempt to attain perfect equality. Sometimes is it necessary to take a chunk out of the individual's liberty in order to keep society as a whole, or social structures like the family, intact. Keeping society intact, in turn, is what prevents government from having an excuse to overpower society and thus taking a much bigger chunk out of individual liberty.
On the other hand, Professor Esolen's view of the Republican Romans might be just a bit too rosy. Were they so altruistic that they thought first of family and city? Maybe some were. Others were simply calculating their own best interests, and realized that the survival of family and city were the necessary preconditions for a chance at a reasonable amount of personal freedom.
