Free like sheep: Law, Humor, and Roman Political Culture (Cicero, De Oratore 2.284)1

Abstract

In his discussion of humor in De Oratore (2.284), Cicero reports a joke that Appius Claudius made in the senate at the expense of L. Licinius Lucullus with word play on liber, “free.” The quip often figures in scholarship on public land, because it occurred in a debate about a law on the topic. But the joke reveals little about laws on public land. Instead, it is an important artefact of Republican political culture. In its original second century BCE context the joke perpetrated a coded political attack, using legal expertise to reinforce the political hierarchy. In the next century, the joke had an afterlife in Cicero’s De Oratore, where it played into contemporary anxieties about political freedom and the rule of law. To illuminate the implications of his joke, this paper first contextualizes the different meanings of liber within the political and legal issues relating to public land. Then it examines the joke as a medium of elite identity, and concludes with the broader implications of this humor for Republican political culture by reading the joke with Varro’s De Re Rustica as intertext.