Performing honour and the politics of popularity (in a popular state)

This chapter focuses on performing honour. To be honourable one must be accepted as such by other men of honour. In nearly all the scenes and speeches analysed in the previous chapter, honour is being performed by one or other of the characters before an audience of his peers and that is because, in the absence of a single source of honour or title, of the sort provided in a monarchy by the prince, honour must be continually asserted and conferred on the members of the honour community by that community itself. On this account, opinion becomes the final court of appeal in deciding just who and what is honourable in republican Rome. This goes a good way to explaining why the play's versions of Roman republican honour and virtue are so performative, indeed theatrical.