Chained Animals and Human Liberty

This article focuses on the ways that Aesopic and other fables about interactions between wild and domestic animals can be used to think through human social and political relations. In particular, three versions of a fable about dogs and wolves from the Roman imperial era (by Babrius, Phaedrus, and Avianus) illustrate different ways of conceptualizing liberty and its opposites: physical confinement, restrictions on voluntary action, dependency, and enslavement to luxury. The article then connects these conceptions of freedom with the hierarchical social and political environment of the Roman Empire, and the retrospective construction of Roman republican libertas and classical Greek eleutheria.