Cicero's Manly Virtue Was Self-Control, Not Domination
Cicero's ideal of manly virtue was something a man performed on himself. As the historian Catharine Edwards puts it in an essay for Aeon, that ideal stressed self-control and bravery rather than boastful egotism and domination — the proof being what you restrained, not what you commanded.
The framing is deliberately counterintuitive: virtue as something you do to yourself rather than something you do to others. It also makes manliness a matter of daily discipline rather than spectacular achievement, which is a harder thing to advertise and a harder thing to fake.
It leaves an awkward question hanging. If the mark of a man is the government of his own appetites, what does a political culture that rewards the government of other people do with that standard — keep it as an aspiration, or quietly retire it as inconvenient?
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Self-control as the core of manliness makes the audience for your virtue yourself. That is a strange kind of test, because nobody can verify it for you.
It is also a very convenient ethic to hold up, since restraint is mostly invisible while domination is not. Edwards is describing the ideal Cicero argued for, not necessarily the behaviour it produced.
Which is the interesting fork: is restraint valued for itself, or for the reputation it buys in a room full of people who claim to have it?