Liberty and the People in Republican Rome

Why have I chosen to use our time together today on the theme of popular liberty at Rome? Certainly recent events have brought strongly to our minds the conflict between the values of liberty and security, but I want to leave our present century behind, while concentrating on a value perhaps more talked about by politicians than interpreted. Most of us have at some time read and admired the monograph by Chaim Wirszubski in which he carefully distinguished what the senatorial class meant by their own political liberty—freedom to govern—and that of the people, whose active exercise of liberty consisted largely in freedom to pass the laws recommended by their senatorial betters and to elect the magistrates whom the same elite governing class had kindly offered them. Instead I want to consider the personal liberty or free condition of the (adult male) Roman citizen, the man in the vicus: how it differed from that of non-citizens and slaves, and how he experienced the burdens and rights of citizenship. I have found one of the best guides is Claude Nicolet's Le métier de citoyen, not least because Nicolet pays far more attention to the early and middle republic than do most historians. But even Nicolet plays down the other aspects of citizenship when he discusses its implications in order to explain the half-way status Rome granted to the people of Caere, that is, Roman citizenship without voting power. For myself I doubt that the power to vote, not just in elections but for legislation and in major popular trials, meant much to the average citizen: even if he lived near enough to come to the Comitium or the Campus, and could afford to leave his business untended, he would be voting in a mass unit that carried less weight than the many units of the elite knights and first class, a unit that might not even be called to vote if a majority had already been reached. So despite the powerful recent advocacy of Fergus Millar¹ and subsequent more nuanced discussions by Mouritsen and now Morstein-Marx, I want to concentrate on the extent to which the everyday life of ordinary Roman citizens was affected by citizenship—defined compactly by Nicolet as "their military and financial obligations (balanced by the fact that their civil status was assured and they could benefit from the protection of the civil and criminal law)."²

Liberty surely consists in the degree of the citizen's autonomy day by day, his control of person, labor, and property. So reconstructing his rights and responsibilities will occupy half our time, before I move on to the more provocative issue of freedom of speech, and how and where the ordinary man could exercise it—I hope this will balance the citizen's work and service with a proportion of play and even license.

The populus Romanus was primarily its fighting men, both on active service and in the assemblies that gathered to hear policy speeches, elect leaders, pass or reject bills, and cast their verdict in major trials. Hence orators and historians treat the citizens who assembled on any given occasion as the sovereign Roman people. But the tradition has left us two contrasting images of the Roman citizen, neither of which could be universally true. Whereas Cicero, and Scipio Aemilianus almost a century before him, treats the assembled plebs as newcomers to Rome, once captive Greeks and Levantines or their children, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and parasitic con-men, city slickers unsuitable for military service, Livy offers a very different picture of the citizens in Rome's early and middle republic, and it is from his shifting narrative that I want to extrapolate the republican myths of citizenship and liberty.

Livy's Roman citizen is a sturdy smallholder, going outside the community or his own village each day to cultivate his iugera, a man whose yearlong work on the land is almost as hard as military service—we might compare Virgil's metaphors in the Georgics of the farmer campaigning like a soldier to conquer wild nature on his land.^3...