This is a comprehensive analysis of the idea of libertas and its conflicting uses in the political struggles of the late Roman Republic. By reconstructing Roman political thinking about liberty against the background of Classical and Hellenistic thought, it excavates two distinct intellectual traditions on the means allowing for the preservation and the loss of libertas. Considering the interplay of these traditions in the political debates of the first century BC, Dr Arena offers a significant reinterpretation of the political struggles (...) of the time as well as a radical reappraisal of the role played by the idea of liberty in the practice of politics. She argues that, as a result of its uses in rhetorical debates, libertas underwent a form of conceptual change at the end of the Republic and came to legitimise a new course of politics, which led progressively to the transformation of the whole political system. (shrink)

This article argues that, next to a certain intellectual tradition of Roman liberty, often labelled ‘neo-Roman’ or ‘Republican’, we should also take into account the existence of, at least, two other conceptions of liberty, which have so far remained occluded under the prominence of Cicero’s ideas and the appropriation of them by later thinkers. By analysing the debate in opposition and in favour of sumptuary laws enacted from the 3rd century bc onwards, the article identifies a first notion of liberty (...) which coincided with the absence of any external legal constraints upon the citizens’ private life and was, thereby, incompatible with the rule of law in this sphere. The second intellectual family of concepts equated libertas to the absence of constraints from one’s own passions as well as the possession of the capacity to pursue something worth pursuing for the well-being of the community. According to this view, liberty also resided in the supremacy of the rule of law. The third notion of libertas, elaborated by Cicero in the De re publica and De legibus, identified liberty with the absence of arbitrary domination to achieve one’s own ends and resided in the supremacy of the rule of law. Its preservation depended on the constitutional arrangements of the commonwealth and the related civic status of the individual. (shrink)

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)

Although modern Republicanism, which highly values the right of freedom of speech, finds its inspiration in the historical reality of the Roman Republic, it seems that in the course of the Republican period citizens shared a recognised ability to speak freely in public, but did not enjoy equal status with one another in the domain of speech as protected by law. Of course, Republican Rome knew laws regulating free speech and perhaps even later provisions had been passed concerning iniuria. However, (...) in these cases, as later on under Augustus, these measures acted as means of restraint and inhibition and did not directly address the right of the individual to speak freely. The fundamental question this paper addresses is why, in the course of the Republic, the right to speak freely was not protected by law and never came to be recognised as a formalised subjective right in Republican Rome. The answer, I argue, lies in the fact that in Rome speaking freely was conceived as the positive moral quality that characterised a natural ability of human beings, and thereby it could not have provided a field of legislation. It follows that the Roman Republic would not have passed the ‘straight talk test’ that modern Republicanism requires for the establishment of a free and just society. However, Republican Rome invites us to think about liberty of speech as belonging to the realm of ethics: as a moral quality sustained by contemporary social norms, not subject to legislation, which inevitably ends up protecting the interests of a group or groups and their specific speech regimes. (shrink)

The purpose of this interesting book is, in the words of the author, "to demonstrate that aristocratic Roman families attempted to construct ethnic identity . . . in order to advertise and celebrate themselves in Rome's political culture; to discover how these families advertised their ethnic identity; and to recover what messages they intended to convey to the Roman public via such identity advertisement. . . . [in other words, the book aims] to focus on how the ethnic identity of (...) the families of the ruling class interacted within the social and political culture of the Roman Republic". (shrink)

This essay aims at identifying a tradition of lawgivers in the political culture of the late Republic. It focuses on the antiquarian tradition of the second half of the first century BC, which, it argues, should be considered part of the wider quest for legal normativism that takes place towards the end of the Republic. By reconstructing the intellectual debates on the nature of the consulship, which at the time was carried out through the means of etymological research, this essay (...) shows that, when set within its proper philosophical framework, ancient etymological studies acted as a search for philosophical truth and, in the case of Varro, identify the early kings as the first Roman lawgivers. In turn, the language of political institutions and its etymologies, conceived along philosophical lines, could become a weapon in the constitutional battles of the late Republic. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 1 Seiten: 354-356.