Liberty as an abstract concept and the banner under which a multitude of actions might be justified became a highly charged issue during the one hundred or so years of Roman history which modern scholars have liked to call ‘the late Republic’. Studies of the theory and practice of this libertas in its historical context have, not surprisingly therefore, been regularly a focus of research, discussion and publication in the present era; and there is no need to look further than the thoughts of C. Wirszubski and D. Earl (duly noted p. 5) to see that this is so. None the less, it is with considerable interest that one approaches a new work on this timeless theme seeing that it resonates as strongly with a modern audience as it evidently must have done for a Roman of the second and first centuries b.c. The objectives of this study are delivered in a detailed synopsis in the introduction with the main thrust, it seems, to show how and why this idea of ‘liberty’ could mean the same and the opposite to essentially a small number of wealthy citizens who either controlled or who aspired to control the expanding Roman empire of their day. And so libertas could mean many things to suit the ideas and ambitions of many individuals in very much the same way as continues to be the case today.
The first two chapters provide essentially a background to what the concept meant to the Romans and how its values or inherent expectations became practised in the period. Chapter 1, ‘Roman Libertas’, has as its focus the definition of what it meant to possess liberty, in other words being free as opposed to servile, and the ways this is tackled especially by writers of legal texts mostly of the Principate and to whom precisely it applied including the adult sons of Roman citizens (pp. 24–5). This, therefore, is the private nature of liberty and not as such specifically related to the practice of politics other than as a background to involvement in it and primarily to status in the community (p. 29). Liberty could be simultaneously more tangible through its physical manifestation in the urban religious topography or as a visual reminder on coinage and in other media, and in social habits such as that of freed slaves wearing the pilleus (p. 30). In Chapter 2, ‘The Citizens’ Political Liberty’, attention is somewhat broader with issues associated with ‘the notion of a person's civic status, which was considered necessary … for … political liberty’: the right to vote in comitia or legislative assemblies, the right of appeal against perceived unfair judgment, the right to vote by ballot after 139 b.c.; and perhaps most importantly to be governed by laws in a well regulated state.
Chapter 3, ‘The Liberty of the Commonwealth’, takes the political labels of the period – optimates and popularis – (mostly of course a modern invention) and attempts to define how these ‘two styles of political reasoning’ (p. 79) viewed and employed libertas, but that to all it was underscored by ‘the preservation … of the community's undominated status’ (p. 76). This lengthy discussion is divided into two sections the first of which focuses on the views about liberty within a balanced political system provided by writers identified as exhibiting an ‘“optimate” intellectual tradition’ transmitted to us mostly through mostly the philosophical works of Cicero. These, if not always direct borrowings, can be seen to have been derived from an identifiable school of thought, particularly the Pythagorean heritage, about which there is a detailed and insightful survey (pp. 82–116), although there is no mention at all of the evidence from Diodorus (Book 10) and through him Timaeus, while Polybius, Cicero and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are treated without historical context as if on equal terms – a serious flaw. The second tradition emanates mostly from the surviving fragments of speeches credited to the tribunes, such as the Gracchi, and of sources which mention them, such as Cicero and Plutarch. The discussion here is more coherent because it contains a fixed historical moment and the sources coalesce around this late second-century period and afterwards. This accentuates the argument that considered liberty and the actions taken to maintain it were governed ultimately by the will of the citizen body (p. 133) whatever that body might comprise, assuming that the sources we possess fairly reflect the issues, as A. rightly notes (p. 168). Still the trial of Caepio in 103 for maiestas, for example, was before a jury of equites and hence surely only a partial reflection of public will and more likely some vengeance, not for some higher principle associated with libertas (p. 136). Caepio's loss of imperium had in any case occurred immediately after the defeat at Arausio in 105 since it was associated with his proconsular command not with his office.
Chapter 4, ‘The Political Struggle in the First Century bc’, is rather broader than the introduction claims, but there is a focus here on nine extraordinary commands proposed or granted to some of the major players in political life between 70 and 52; the relationship between liberty and the SCU from its inception; and various land measures proposed in the 60s and 50s. In Chapter 5, ‘Political Response and the Need for Legitimacy’, opposition to domination or tyranny, whatever was implicit in that or whoever might be thought to aspire to such eminence, became ‘an act in defence of true liberty’ (p. 257). An epilogue with reference to among others Varro, Quintilian and Augustine stresses the evolution of language and how these sources appear to view ‘the notion’ (p. 276) of liberty. A full bibliography, followed by a rather brief index, concludes the volume.
A. categorically states that the subject under scrutiny applies to ‘between 70 bc, the year when the tribunes of the plebs, one of the acclaimed strongholds of Roman liberty, regained their full powers, and 52 bc, the year when Pompey was elected consul sine collega and officially authorised to use military force domi to restore order in the city’ but in fact the chronological sweep is hugely broad from the fifth-century philosophical tradition through to the Second Sophistic. As a result, the focus on the eighteen years stipulated in the introduction is necessarily of much less depth than one might assume. There are some notable factual errors: (p. 84) which should read ‘two letters of 50 and 45 bc’; (p. 139) Q. Servilius for Q. Sulpicius; (p. 161) Q. Mucius Scaevola was consul in 95 not 82; (p. 162) Q. Mucius Scaevola (d. 82) and Ser. Sulpicius Rufus (cos. 51) belonged to different generations so cannot have been ‘involved in a dispute’; (p. 165) Scaevola born c. 140 can hardly have ‘become familiar with Blosius’ by 133 bc; (pp. 195–6) Marius was consul six times between 107 and 100 bc not seven, and Sulla commanded armies as consul, proconsul and was then appointed dictator not in the order given; (p. 214) Q. Lutatius Catulus (cos. 102) celebrated a triumph over the Cimbri in 101 not in 102; spelling or typographical errors are apparent at pp. 14, 178, 215, 323. The style of the narrative and the footnotes would have benefited from editorial intervention. The latter are somewhat inconsistent and some references (for example, p. 14 n. 3, p. 77 n. 19, p. 81 n. 29, p. 194 n. 130, p. 218 n. 266) are not entirely dependable. Although interesting points certainly emerge from a close reading of the discussion, no startling new slant can be revealed about libertas and its role in the politics of this period. Indeed this study is much more an analysis of the sources for an abstract and how it evolved and came to prevail in the rhetoric and philosophy of an epoch than of its application in the hurly-burly of everyday practical political affairs.
