![]() ![]() for members of Rome’s ruling elite libertas consisted primarily in the absence of a tyrant or, put differently, the preservation of oligarchic equality that ensured more or less equal opportunities to vie for offices and military commands in the pursuit of power and glory.(Modern definitions often work with the idea that slavery is tantamount to ‘social death’.)ģ(2) Political: in the civic sphere, two distinct understandings of libertas - one associated with the ruling elite, the other with the people - shaped the practice of politics in republican Rome: Invoking libertas implied that those deprived of it were reduced to the lowest form of existence, that of slaves. The foundational importance of the distinction between free/slave for the cultural imaginary of ancient Rome invited metaphorical exploitation, even when legal status was not literally at issue. This fundamental social divide ultimately informs all the other meanings of libertas. ![]() As the Digest of Justinian puts it: ‘all humans are either free or slaves’ (1.5.3: omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi). individuals who had once been enslaved but gained manumission, an intermediary category). 81 The most basic meaning of libertas thus concerns the legal distinction between free persons and slaves (with ‘freed(wo)men’, i.e. (1994), Fitzgerald (2000), Mouritsen (2011), the papers in Bodel and Schei (.)Ģ(1) Legal: ancient Rome (just like ancient Greece and other cultures across the ancient Mediterranean) was a slave society, and the institution of slavery shaped every aspect of Greco-Roman life (including literature). Cicero combines at least four different ways of thinking with and about the term: 80 His guiding ideas, which will resonate throughout his peroration, are worth a more detailed look, in particular his notion of ‘freedom’ ( libertas), which has a complex historical pedigree. His discourse here rises above the level of invective and turns into a personal manifesto about the principles of communal life. Cicero differentiates between (desirable) pax and (intolerable) servitus and asserts that libertas, without which there cannot be any genuine pax, is a value to die for. But the paragraph ends on another gnomic pronouncement. Cicero’s tone - set up by another instance of mihi crede - remains aggressively didactic. A range of political agents (both individual and collective) and entities ( populus Romanus, gubernatores rei publicae, res publica, adulescentes nobilissimi) are ready to take a stand against Antony if he persists in behaving like an enemy of the state. Cicero now explores what this general truth implies for the occasion at hand. 80 The following draws on Wirszubski (1950), Brunt (1988a), Fantham (2005), Cowan (2008), Arena (2007 (.)ġThe previous paragraph ended on the dictum that only a life in harmony with the wider civic community guarantees personal safety.
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