Cicero’s Conception of Liberty

Abstract

French, American, English, and Italian republicanism all shared a common origin in republican Rome. All looked more to Rome in defining their conceptions of liberty than they did to each other, and it is only insofar as they share this common Roman element that subsequent ideologies can properly be considered “republican” at all, in any useful or coherent sense of the term “republic.” This makes the Roman conception of libertas particularly important in understanding republican liberty elsewhere. Roman ideas of liberty appear throughout Livy and particularly in his aphorisms on the liber populus Romanus (free Roman people) and the tranquilla moderatio of its imperia legum (empire of laws)¹ But Marcus Tullius Cicero gave the idea of Roman liberty its most detailed elaboration, in his works “On the Republic” and “On the Laws.”²