The research is concerned with verbal and non-verbal behaviour during private quarrels in ancient Rome. Its aim is twofold: as first, to offer a linguistic description of the expressions occurring in this kind of conflictual communication; as second, to attempt a reconstruction of the behavioural code underpinning it. The theoretical approach that Federica Iurescia applies to the Latin literary texts is to be framed in the realm of impoliteness theories: they provide methodological tools which proved to be the most suitable for a thorough pragmatic description of the speakers’ behaviour. After the introduction where the state of the research and the authors stance in this realm of studies are described, she focuses on representations of quarrels, in order to show the language use; starting from the metalanguage about quarrel’s lexicon, she presents the results of a lexical enquiry on the main Latin terms for quarrel, in order to gain further information about the speakers’ perceptions of this interaction. Both these proceedings point to the same evidence: Latin texts tend to show a negative evaluation of quarrelling.