Where did the Roman sense of modesty come from?

[MonkeySage]

My friend and I were talkin about this and it got me wondering: Roman culture was very modest, especially compared to the Gallic, Celtic, and Greek cultures surrounding them.
Celts were said to fight in the nude and Greeks performed games and sports the same way.

Meanwhile there were quite a few Romans who hated silk because it was too thin and immodest.

Where did this come from?

[Recherché]

Huh? Roman men regularly conducted business naked in the baths. And those Greek games and sports were male only because of the nudity.

Meanwhile Greek women wore veils when out of doors and were never nude in mixed sex environments. Roman women were actually less modest in that they didn't wear veils.

Both cultures allowed for male nudity in all male situations and were very iffy on their women being immodest.

Also the Roman objection to silk was as much a thing about luxury, decadence and excess as about modesty exactly. And the Roman's had a thing about wool where it was considered a sign of virtue in their culture.

[Vinyadan]

As usual when comparing different cultures, you have many different levels or aspects of what we call with an umbrella term (in this case, modesty).

The Greeks began practising sport naked in imitation of the Spartans. Previously, they had been clothed. When the Spartans began showing up nude, the others chose to follow the same standard. So, in origin, the Greeks had mostly been like the Roman in this respect.

The Athenians would not have considered Roman women modest. A good Athenian woman was the one whose name was never heard spoken. If they came from a rich enough family, they spent all of their lives in segregation, only going outside for a few religious festivals. This was of course not possible for poorer women, who had to go buy stuff themselves, but the ideal standard was the one followed by the segregated ones.

Roman women had a lot more freedom. Not just that, they also had a lot of rights, like the right to marry in such a way, that the children would belong to the mother's family, instead of to the father's.

Etruscan women apparently did whatever they wanted, and joined banquets with men, which left the Romans very surprised.

Spartan women also were very free. They were just supposed to stay healthy, and were to compete in sports to achieve this. Since the men were bound more to their syssithia than to their families, women had a lot less to care about.

Curiously, in certain areas in Northern Greece, women were supposed to only go around completely wrapped in veils and cloaks.

Women did join panhellenic sport festivals. These were called Hereas. Only very young, unmarried women were allowed to join, and they did not partecipate naked. A way for a grown or married woman to join the Olympics and other festivals was to own horses and have them run there. The winner was not the driver, nor were the horses: it was the owner, instead. So we have two big examples, one being a Spartan princess, the other one Berenix of Egypt.

Another detail on modesty: actors and musicians were respected in Greece. They were prized citizens. Sophocles, who had been an actor as well as playwright, had the honour of being the host of a god's statue, as it spent the night in his home during a ceremonial travel. The same man might have covered important political roles in the last years of his life. In Rome, however, showing yourself upon the stage was a sign of infamy, not just in a metaphorical sense: you would immediately lose citizenship.

I agree on that silk was looked at disdainfully as a sign of excessive luxury. Very often we find laws to limit luxury (leges sumptuariae) across ages and places. For example, in Athens laws were put in place to limit the size of tombs. Rome had laws about the amount of gold a woman could carry.

Romans not fighting in the nude was probably a result of having received the hoplitical revolution of equipment, which may not have expanded itself beyond the Mediterranean and is said to have originated in Argos.

The use of clothing was seen as necessary for the dignity of a person. Nudity was bound to figures such as slaves being sold, and the defeated being stripped. Renouncing clothing was renouncing this dignity, if it happened outside intimacy. There were a few ritual situations, however, in which this was admitted, although reactions could be contradictory.

In general, even in Greece, nudity wasn't always heroic, and the hero wasn't always portrayed nude. It's a very, very long subject, with many apparent contradictions because of how the reception and feelings caused by nudity changed based on the situation in which nudity manifested itself.

[Honest Tiefling]

I believe that the chest plate style where it is molded to look like a man's chest was developed because as Vinyadan said, nudity was associated with slaves. Therefore, a proper Roman man wouldn't be shown naked, not because of fear of his wing-wang being seen, but because people might mistake his wing-wang to be that of a slave's! I also believe that the Romans might have inherited the Ancient Greek ideal that every man keeps himself fit and able to fight, so being covered up also wasn't an option. Therefore, you got impractical chest armor to look like muscles.

Also remember that Rome...Isn't a singular culture. They conquered a bunch of people, stole their gods and customs, and lasted for some time. Quite a few Roman Emperors probably weren't even of Italian/European descent. Ancient Greece was made up of different cultures who only really united when someone not speaking Greek showed up on their doorstep with an army, and even then they didn't always band togther.

Stupid sexy Spartans!

[Wristlet Eater]

I believe that the chest plate style where it is molded to look like a man's chest was developed because as Vinyadan said, nudity was associated with slaves. Therefore, a proper Roman man wouldn't be shown naked, not because of fear of his wing-wang being seen, but because people might mistake his wing-wang to be that of a slave's! I also believe that the Romans might have inherited the Ancient Greek ideal that every man keeps himself fit and able to fight, so being covered up also wasn't an option. Therefore, you got impractical chest armor to look like muscles.

Good information but what does chest armor have to do with penises? This is a little confusing to me.

[Honest Tiefling]

Good information but what does chest armor have to do with penises? This is a little confusing to me.

Not much, but wing-wang is funnier to say. The idea is that if the man is overly naked, he's lower class, hence the strange military uniform you often see on statues.

[Aedilred]

I'm pretty sure the muscle cuirass predates Rome - or at least that it was created elsewhere and imported to Rome, rather than being created there as a sop to Roman modesty.

Roman identity could be a bit strange, and was often negatively defined. They also had a tendency to lionise "traditional values" that weren't necessarily actually that old. If I remember rightly, a lot of said "traditional values" were effectively invented by Cato the Elder, the resident grumpy old man of Rome. Anything foreign, he was opposed to, and because he went on about it enough, that was then taken as a touchstone by other people who wanted to hark back to Roman-ness. But the extent to which this was actually reflective of reality is debatable. By the time of Caesar and Pompey, you had Cato the Younger, going on at length about the destruction of the Roman constitution. But the constitution he was banging on about preserving was younger than he was, having been established by Sulla only a couple of decades previously.

And of course Rome was around for a long time. Things changed. What was completely infra dig during the mid-Republic might have been all the rage during the Empire, or vice versa, and so forth.

[Misereor]

Where did this come from?

Rape. Sort of. Maybe.

Rome was not built by Romulus and Remus, but by the people who migrated there.
Since Rome was at the first place upriver on the Tiber where a bridge could be built, it quickly became a natural trade hub for all of central Italy, and attracted immigrants from all the nearby tribes, Both Italic and non-Italic. Some very notable Roman families were descended from Samnite and Etruscan blood.

Roman norms for modesty were no different from any other society, in that they came from the circumstances surrounding the birth and growth of their society.
The rape of the Sabine women may be a culturally relevant parable, in that there was a deficit of women in early Rome. As of yet it was a frontier town consisting of fortune hunters and renegades (and a bunch of local land holders that would later become Patricians) and not a metropolis. So the Romans were a bastard people without any prospects but what they could make for themselves. As in any emergent society, the family was a pillar of stability, and customs and culture arose around it.

The mark of a real Roman man became his ability to govern himself and others, and for whatever reason a "one-man woman" became a the most highly desirable type of Roman female.
These became the ideals of Virtus and Pudicitia (virtue and modesty respectively), and entire criminal laws were formed on their basis. Whatever social forces were behind these phenomena must have been very powerful indeed, for there is ample evidence of them up to this day and age. It's not all that long ago that a proper Italian male was expected to be very jealous about the women partners and family. Until females became a little more liberated, it was considered a virtue. Literally so, although probably not intentionally.

[Vinyadan]

To be fair, giving too much importance to the Rape of the Sabines in forming the Roman mindset is like giving too much importance to the rape of Irish slaves by the Norse to explain modern Icelandic mindset. It's also true that cultures aren't impregnable, and that concepts can come from outside, even without being forced, if they have enough prestige.
It does however mean that Romans weren't interested into enforcing endogamy. Athens for example had myths from the age of kings that were meant to discourage exogamy, especially towards barbarians (Philomela being the prime example).

[Misereor]

To be fair, giving too much importance to the Rape of the Sabines in forming the Roman mindset is like giving too much importance to the rape of Irish slaves by the Norse to explain modern Icelandic mindset. It's also true that cultures aren't impregnable, and that concepts can come from outside, even without being forced, if they have enough prestige.
It does however mean that Romans weren't interested into enforcing endogamy. Athens for example had myths from the age of kings that were meant to discourage exogamy, especially towards barbarians (Philomela being the prime example).

You make an interesting point. There is a lot of stuf in Norse mythology that has more to do with Celtic than Germanic culture.
Sacred kettles for instance was more of a Celtic thing than a Germanic one. The fey are all Celtic too, but also exist in Norse mythology. There must have been considerable "cultural appropriation", some of it probably from prisoners of war.

The Vikings didn't have stories about raping their slaves though (none that have survived anyway). Their stories focused on the things they considered important, like blood feuds, stratagems, and feats of strength. Nor did it form their mindset, it was the other way around. The mindset formed the basis of stories they considered worth teling. Like the early Romans, I suppose.

[snowblizz]

When someone says Romans I for one don't immediately think "modesty".

They had public toilets where people conducted business meetings. Imagine that today.

From Pompey and similar places we have ample evidence of a culture rather fond of the lascivious. There's a Secret Museum in Naples of stuff so graphic it has an X rating on it with all the stuff deemed to indicent for our morals for liek 2 centuries. It was finally re-opened in 2000. Some things the Romans thought of rather reprehenisble is today no big deal (not necessarily universally, say homosexuality) whereas things Romans had less issue with (though not necessarily universally acclaimed) is widely condemned today like pederasty.

It's not for nothing much of the early Christian identity is formed from condemning their indulgent contemporaries.

That's not to say there wasn't modesty in some things, virtue and modesty were things Romans took seriously, but probably not in ways we understand them now. Like women had certain freedoms and rights, yet they were still legally property of a man, a woman's husband or whoever was pater familias of the family. So were children, even adult ones until they had their own familia basically. It's a lot more complicated than that and changes over time, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's a rather complicated messy social construct fairly often at odds with itself.

It reminds me of our penchant for clean, white, stoic, democratic Greek marble on public buildings and statues. Which is in marked contrast to how they actually looked. Which we know, but do our best to pretend not to because it doesn't fit our preconceptions.