As Dr. Carlin Barton puts it in Roman Honor, participating in the everyday life of ancient Rome required that “one gambled what one was.” The level of risk you accepted in your actions and words directly correlated to their weight and power and the degree of respect your peers bestowed on you. The more risk you incurred, the more you showed yourself to be invested in what you said, the more status and trust you earned.
It’s for this reason that Roman orators would often open their tunic to reveal the scars they had earned in battle; these tangible badges of honor served as irrefutable appeals to their authority and ethos. Scars showed an audience a man had been in the arena — that he wasn’t advocating for others to take risks he was unwilling to undertake himself. His bonafides were indisputable: the skin he had literally sacrificed in the fight.
As Barton explains, the ancient Romans were in fact so invested in maintaining their honor, they were willing to kill themselves to verify their words:
“The Romans judged the weight of a person’s word not against an abstract standard of truth but how much was risked in speaking; they considered the stakes (the sacramentum, the ‘deposit’ or ‘forfeit’ that backed up one’s words). Words had weight when the speaker’s reputation, persona, fama, nomen, life were risked in speaking. When Vitellius refused to believe the intelligence reports given him by the centurion Julius Agrestis, the latter declared, ‘Since you require some decisive proof…I will give you a proof that you can believe.’ He slew himself on the spot, thereby, according to Tacitus, confirming his words. When a common soldier arrived at camp Otho bringing news of defeat, he was called a liar, a coward, and a runaway by the other soldiers. To certify his words, he fell on his sword at the emperor’s feet.”
In short, the Romans honored the man who held absolutely nothing back — who put all he was as stake in everything he did and said.
Conversely, the man with nothing to lose, who risked nothing in his speech and behavior, was considered to be literally shameless (that is, unable or unwilling to be shamed). A shameless man acted without the check of honor and was thus regarded as contemptible, dangerous, and unworthy of trust. His whole being was considered a vanity; as Roman writer Petronius put it, a man who would not submit himself to test and challenge became nothing more than a “balloon on legs, a walking bladder.”
(Brett McKay, “Strip or Retire: Why Every Man Should Have Skin in the Game,” The Art of Manliness, August 19, 2015).
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