The story of what happened to the concept of forgiveness – or, at any rate, to clementia, one of its most visible Roman manifestations – under the pressure of early imperial ideology is fairly well established. During the Roman Republic, clementia is primarily used in military contexts, displayed on the battlefield by a Roman general toward a defeated foreign enemy, although it also occasionally appeared in the lawcourts, where a convicted defendant might beg for it, or in the domestic realm, given from paterfamilias to dependent. But there was a certain loss of status entailed in receiving clemency, because the one who received it necessarily acknowledged the superior power of the one who was able to grant it (Seneca, De Clem. 2.3). Forgiveness, therefore, was not seen as something that one citizen could or should accept from another. Julius Caesar was the first of the Julio-Claudians to recognize the power of clemency as a political tool, as he famously displayed mercy toward those who fought against him in the civil conflicts leading up to his establishment as dictator perpetuus in 44 b.c.e. Although he does not use the word clementia widely in his own writings, Caesar’s actions caused others – most notably Cicero – to reevaluate what forgiveness could mean as a political virtue. After Caesar and Cicero, we see the transformation of clementia into one of the central merits of the emperor: it becomes a cornerstone of Octavian’s propaganda, found most notably as one of the four cardinal virtues advertised on the golden shield awarded to him by the senate in 27 b.c.e. Thereafter, all of the Julio-Claudians would continue to promote their own clementia, on coinage, in artistic representations, and in religious observances.

“Forgiveness,” therefore, is an important instance of the ways in which the rise of imperial governance caused a redescription and redeployment of traditional virtues in nontraditional contexts. Of course, this shift was not restricted to the concept of clementia. It has long been recognized that the reinvention of the Roman state as a monarchy rather than as a republic entailed not just a change in governmental structures but in the system of values on which the elite had long relied to understand themselves and their place in the world. Thus, for instance, it has been argued that Seneca the Younger reformulates through Stoicism the concept of virtus (manliness, courage) so that it no longer simply applies to achievement on the battlefield but to forbearance against bad fortune. This seems partially in response to the fact that, under the Principate, there were fewer and fewer opportunities for elite Roman men to gain status through military glory, which was increasingly understood to be the provenance of the emperor and his immediate male relatives. As Matthew Roller argues, “By presenting an ethical system in which military achievement emphatically lacks moral significance, yet in which virtus is still attainable because it resides elsewhere, Seneca offers his audience a new set of ethical signposts to orient thought and action, new means by which aristocrats can pursue familiar cultural imperatives … in a world in which the old signposts increasingly fail to point the way.” Like virtus, forgiveness too was an old ideal which came to have new meaning in the changed sociopolitical world of the early empire: in the past, clementia had been associated with the public display of a particular kind of civic, imperialistic power, but under the Principate it became a distinctive personal quality of the princeps, something which he could and should display to his citizen-subjects.