When Cleopatra says of Antony, ‘a Roman thought hath struck him’ (AC, 1.2.87) or when Horatio says to Hamlet, ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (Ham, 5.2.325), Shakespeare suggests that there are certain values that are characteristically Roman, but not geographically or temporally limited to a particular place. As G. K. Hunter has said, Cleopatra's ‘Roman’, by a shorthand readily recognizable by Shakespeare's audience, means ‘soldierly, severe, self-controlled, disciplined’, virtues toward which Cleopatra, as hedonist, feels distinctly ambivalent. Horatio's ‘antique Roman’, by a similar shorthand, implies an advocacy of suicide as preferable to dishonour or a life of ‘bestial oblivion’ (Ham, 4.4.39), a view sharply at variance with Christian doctrine. Cleopatra alludes to similar notions when she expresses a desire to die by suicide ‘after the high Roman fashion’, acting in accordance with ‘what's brave, what's noble’ (AC, 4.15.90–1), transforming herself into a Roman by her death. Antony, one of many Roman heroes in Shakespeare to die by his own hand, proclaims his constancy to such values in his dying words:

In many of these passages, there is an assumption that most people fail to live up to this ideal of conduct, that relatively few Romans are worthy of the name.