The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

in the 1830s and early 1840s. The courageous three are supposed in 508 BCto have held off an entire Etruscan army at the Sublician Bridge to Rome bybeing permitted, according to Macaulay’s version, to challenge the enemythree at a time, sportingly:But at his haughty challengeA sullen murmur ran,Mingled of wrath, and shame, and dread,Along that glittering van. 17the good of courage 205The aristocratic conventions of the duel are imposed on the history. Maybethe aristocratic duel was real behavior in archaic societies carried intomore bourgeois city-states. More likely, Macaulay is simply using the fairplayconventions of the ruling class in nineteenth-century England.Macaulay’s source, Livy, writing in the first decades of the empire, fivecenturies after the alleged event, imagines the Etruscans throwing spears ina decidedly unsporting way “from every side.” 18 Even the beneficiariesof ancient freedom, in other words, were not Homeric heroes dueling oneon one.The citizen armies of the early Western city-states from the seventh centuryBC on were not highly trained duelers like Odysseus or Horatius—or,in that bizarre parody of aristocratic dueling, dating at Rome from the thirdcentury BC, gladiators. In a bench of rowers or a phalanx of hoplites theywere nonetheless disciplined—that is, temperate. The ideal citizen of thepolis was courageous and temperate—rather more temperate in fact thancourageous, the beginning of a long devaluation of battlefield courage inactual social behavior, if not in story. The oarsmen in Athens’ wooden wallwere paid, free citizens. They were not, as was typical of non-Greek fleets inthe Mediterranean for the three millennia of rowed warships, slaves or convicts.A significant exception to the servile propulsion of galleys was Venice,at least until 1571. Venice was the other republic holding the gorgeous Eastin fee.And ideally the landsmen, the volunteer hoplites—literally, “shieldsmen,”from the hoplon, Homeric “tool,” Attic “heavy shield,” the main toolof their kind of war—were small owners with something to lose in theirwheat fields from the depredations of invaders. As Victor Hanson haspointed out, though, unlike their wheat fields, their vines and olive treeswere too deep-rooted to destroy with fire—and even wheat, as a grassdescended from wild grasses in often-burned plains, would regrow