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Before imposing itself as a sociological concept thanks to the foundational works of Norbert Elias, Max Weber, or, more recently, Pierre Bourdieu, the term ethos was no more than a vague and ambivalent notion of classical Greek, used by philosophers like Aristotle to refer broadly to politics, oratory, or even music. Is it pertinent to consider the use of this word, whose spelling (ἦθος, ἔθος) and meaning (way of being, character, disposition of the soul; custom, usage) can vary according to context and source, when trying to apprehend political change in Rome in the first centuries BCE and CE? Ethos certainly has no strict equivalent in the Latin language (mens, mos, mos maiorum, disciplina, and so on), but the use of this term has at least two advantages for historians. First, it allows us to restore the element of uncertainty and, sometimes, of aporia specific to the vocabulary and political practices of the Romans. Second, it offers the possibility of approaching the res publica through the idea of the performativity of the Roman grammar of politics. In other words, political language does not serve to report on a pre-existing political functioning: instead, it generates a “fiction” that gives body, consistency, and legitimacy to political structures, whose norms, capacities, and prospects for action it delimits more or less arbitrarily. At the crossroads between conflict, legitimacy, and consensus, ethos offers a potentially innovative angle for study. This is particularly clear for the long period that stretches from Sulla to Trajan: a period of creative destruction of individual and collective norms that we can consider characteristic of a changing imperial res publica.