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Mos maiorum: on the crucial importance of social norms
One of the first things I noticed after moving to the United States in the now very distant 1990 was just how litigious American society is. It seems that the answer to every problem is “I’ll sue you!” I’ll leave it to social psychologists and political scientists to figure out why this is the case, but I suspect one reason is the decreasing relevance in the United States of what the ancient Romans called the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors.
Arguably, the collapse of the mos maiorum was partly responsible for two catastrophes affecting ancient Rome: first the end of the Republic and the bloody civil war that led to the beginning of empire, circa 31 BCE, and then the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476. Also arguably, the collapse of the American mos maiorum is accelerating, and is at the root of Donald Trump’s Presidency and the riots of January 6, 2021. Let me explain.
“Way of the ancestors” is a more or less literal translation of mos maiorum, but it doesn’t really capture the scope of the concept. Mos means “way” or “custom” and maiorum means “greater” or “elder,” but the term refers to a complex set of unwritten social norms that regulated Roman society. Some of those norms would be justly repulsive to us moderns, like the notion of a pater familias, head of the household, with literal power of life and death over members of his family (not to mention his slaves). But many other aspects of ancient Roman norms have survived pretty much intact the more than two millennia that separate us from them, like the notion that a good person ought to be trustworthy and reliable.
So what I’m suggesting here is not a simple return to Republican Rome, which would be not just simplistic, but downright ridiculous. Rather, I’m putting forth the idea that there is something important captured by the concept of mos maiorum, something that we denizens of the 21st century need to pay attention to, lest we repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.
One crucial aspect of the mos maiorum is that it is independent of, and in a sense foundational to, the law. We tend to think of the law as providing the bedrock of our society, hence the nauseatingly frequent (and often legally and historically misinformed) references so many American politicians and members of the…
