ABSTRACTProviding an introduction to this special issue on the ancient notions of liberty and its modern perspectives, this essay contains, first, some reflections about the relation between the fields of ancient history and contemporary political theory. Building on the comments of the final roundtable with Kinch Hoekstra and Quentin Skinner, it then makes an attempt at extrapolating some theoretical understandings of liberty from a wide range of geographical and historical contexts covered in the contributions. Moving away from a strictly classical (...) Graeco-Roman focus, these include investigations from the second millennium BCE polities in the Levant to the Byzantine empire in the fifth-century CE. (shrink)