Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 avec le précieux commentaire de J. Thornton et la veille bibliographique qui précède chaque volume3 . Avec ses deux Indices qui le rendent maniable et son appareil de notes remarquable pour établir brièvement des états de la question, il deviendra indispensable aux antiquisants comme à tout lecteur intéressé par la pensée politique, les relations internationales et l’historiographie. Universit e de Franche-Comt e (ISTA) Marie-Rose Guelfucci LIBERTAS and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. By Valentina Arena. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. ix, 324. This learned and important monograph sets out “to study the conceptualisations of the idea of libertas and the nature of their connections with the practice of politics in the late Roman Republic” (1). In order to do this, Arena concentrates on the reconstruction of the ways in which political ideas were or could be used and on the “principles adopted in debate to justify a politician’s position on particular political measures” (2). The work thus draws upon, and seeks to make a contribution to, studies of oratory and rhetoric, politics, and the history of ideas. A short “Introduction” sets out the key questions that the work will address and the evidence that will be interrogated. Arena’s approach to the evidence for contemporary thought is agreeably circumspect without being dismissive. Throughout, she highlights the potential of using ancient sources to shed light on the world of ideas, even in a context in which the preserved text may bear only a distant relationship to the “reality” of the speech delivered (see, e.g., on Cicero and Sallust, 2–3). Arena carefully locates her work within a long tradition of writing on libertas whilst at the same time differentiating her project from earlier scholarship.1 Her key contributions to the discussion of libertas are clearly articulated: Arena argues that, far from having no “abstract Idée of liberty” (6), Roman political thought—in the form of the intellectual traditions of the optimates and the populares—“itself informed the discourse on libertas,” and that Roman politicians were able to draw upon a shared understanding of libertas (rather than competing interpretations of the term) and that they actively made use of this shared understanding in rhetorical debate. Thus debates about libertas could be framed not in terms of rival versions of the term, but in terms of rival claims to be the true defender of libertas. Finally, Arena argues that the very idea of libertas underwent a “form of conceptual change” in the late republic. Two chapters (“Roman libertas” and “The Citizens’ Political Liberty”) lay the foundation for an examination of the concept of libertas at Rome. Drawing on the work of Patterson and Raaflaub,2 Arena demonstrates the interconnectedness of the “conceptual3 D. Musti (éd.), Polibio, Storie (Milan, 2001–2006) ; voir aussi J. Thornton, « Polibio e Roma : Tendenze negli studi degli ultimi anni », Studi Romani, 52 (2004), 108–139, 508–525. 1 C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge 1950); J. Bleicken, Staatliche Ordnung und Freiheit in der römischen Republik (Kallmünz 1972); P. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford 1988); I. Cogitore, Le doux nom de liberté: Histoire d’une idée politique dans la Rome antique (Paris 2011). 2 O. Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (London 1991); K. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (Chicago 2004). 416 PHOENIX isation of liberty” and the “historical development of slavery.” Libertas was “a condition opposed to slavery” (39) and, as such, owed much of its conceptual framework of ideas to the legal/juridical constructions of slave and free. The citizens’ own political liberty was, therefore, “conceptually defined as a status of non-slavery” (45). It was dependent on the idea that “all citizens should be equally endowed on the same basis with the same basic liberties” and on the idea that the relationship between citizen and state was such that the state could not dominate its citizens or be dominated by a power external to itself (72). The liberty...