Could you please elaborate on the date of which you are interested? The opinions of a Roman in 300 bc could be vastly different than one in 300 ad. You could imagine that a modern American has very different opinions on the subjects of homosexuality, slavery, the status of women etc than Americans did 100 years ago.
In a similar light, I think that Roman morality cannot be so narrowly defined as "Roman Morality," given that romans have lived for, depending on who you ask, 2,000 years.
While I am not a historian, I have studied Roman Philosophy extensivesly, by only post republic examples of "proper roman behavior," such as The Aeneaid, The Meditation. And so on.
As a case study, I would like to point to the character of Odysseus. In the traditional Romano-Greek thought, he is believed to be wise, cunning, and devious, all greatly admired qualities. However, these opinions had changed in later Rome.
In the Aeneaid, he is refered to as "lying Odysseus" or "Odysseus the Snake," always in a very negative light. This can be contrasted with the hero, Aeneas, who tells the truth no matter the occassion. Compare this with the Odyssey, which obviously protrays him in a better light.
This opinion, that a proper roman is truthful no matter what, was so wide spread that in Dantes Inferno, Odysseus is placed in one of the deepest circles of hell -- a vast disparture from his previous status as being worshiped in hero cults!
This represents an important change in what a citizen ought be, and I believe why the question must be narrowed down.
Hello everyone,
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I am no historian, but I have read Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harper is really interested in Christianization of the Roman Empire, but insofar as this moved Romans closer to modern American morality it is relevant to your question. He is also focused on Roman Greece, and I will be using 'Roman' as a synonym for 'typical educated denizen of the Roman Empire'. To summarize, he locates three main differences between pre-Christian Roman morals and post-Christian morals:
Ancient Romans tied morality very strongly to one's position in society: what is moral behavior for a slave is fundamentally different from moral behavior for a free citizen (to see a more theoretical approach to such a morality as opposed to the modern one, you might want to check out Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue) . In fact, they had difficulty even thinking about what morality should mean for a slave, because
'Goodness' was inextricable from 'honor' (and 'sin' from 'shame') in the Roman imagination. For example, there was not much grounds to say that a rape victim was morally superior in any way to a prostitute.
Romans had a very conflicted opinion of free will, which impacts notions of responsibility. I do not understand this part well enough to summarize here; suffice it to say that the Christian position on free will (i.e. that it exists, a person can resist even their strongest urges if they choose too, etc.) was very radical in the Roman context. This goes hand in hand with (2).
I am exaggerating a bit: as Harper shows, ancient Romans were groping towards the moral distinctions that we take for granted today (and Harper suggests that part of the attraction of Christianity lay in the fact that pagans were not really satisfied with their own accounts of some of these questions, free will in particular).
Harper relies heavily on Roman novels to make these claims, which should indicate what sort of 'popular morality' he is actually investigating. The morality of the illiterate public and professional philosophers could have been quite different.