I should say that though as a predominantly military society, Rome did not necessarily vacillate on questions of warfare as much as the early US (a predominantly economic society), especially after difficult and bloodying conflicts, it was still the case that early Rome did have its formative instabilities of collective identity, at one point going through a somewhat pacifist stage early on, and then thoroughly scrapping that idea to favor perpetual warfare and expansion. I think this illustrates well that idea that though we can capture certain dominant and ascendant aspects of a given identity with a delimiting concept, it is still the case that within that entity is always a multitude of contradictory and conflicting tendencies, just in differing amounts. And that if you dig enough, you'll find your exception. And then you can dig into that exception and find yet more exception.
