>>>>A civilization that stretches from the 8th century BC, with it's archaic beginnings,
across over a millennium, and whose influence reaches far beyond even the fall of the Roman
Empire, since Latin culture and Roman ideals will endure as the foundation of western European
culture long after the Roman Empire itself is gone. This culture makes many contributions
to the story of law and justice, and the first that we'll explore is the idea itself of republicanism.
Many of our own political words come from Latin, and it's a testament to the importance
and the lasting influence of Roman ideas. And one of these words is republicanism. Republicanism
is an idea that, as we will see, has tremendous influence in the context of the early American
political experience, but we need to explore what it means: what is republicanism? What
is a "res publica?" And to understand the idea of republicanism and the unique contribution
that the Roman Republic makes to the history of the way we can think about law and justice,
we need to have some vocabulary that we share with the ancient Romans. And so in this lecture
I'd like to introduce to you three Latin terms that are essential for thinking like an ancient
Roman, that are essential terms for beginning to enter into the mindset of ancient Roman
thinking about law and justice: "libertas," "virtus" and "res publica."
Understanding these
three terms is not only illuminating when we try to understand how the Romans thought
about law and justice, but in fact can be illuminating for us and for our own understanding
of the way that we think about politics, about law, and about justice. So let's begin by
defining three terms. "Libertas," it means liberty, our word liberty
comes from the Latin "libertas." But to understand Roman Republicanism, we need to understand
what "libertas" means in the context of the ancient Roman world. "Libertas" has very specific
connotations, and it'll help even to remember previous conversations we've had and previous
readings that we've examined together like Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty."
In that essay, he outlines one meaning of liberty, what we can call a liberal concept
of liberty, as the freedom to do as you want. He outlines a second concept, what he calls
positive liberty in his idea, which is an idea of liberty in the sense of having power,
of having the capacity, the ability, the right, the enfranchisement to perform a certain set
of actions. Liberty in this sense is the power, the freedom that is granted to the citizen
within a political order. And for the Romans, libertas clearly has a strong sense of the
right of the citizen. And for the Romans, "libertas" comes to mean the ability of the
citizens to rule themselves, and it has a strong connotation of living in a type of
polity that lacks a king, in which the citizens govern themselves without the rule of a monarch.
And the Romans, as we'll see, come to believe that you can only be free in the absence of
a king--in the absence of a monarch's rule, that the citizens are only free when they're
not under the domination of a sovereign monarch. And for the Romans, you cannot truly be free
unless you live in a self-governing community, "libertas."
Also "virtus," and for the Romans these ideals are all closely interconnected. "Virtus" for
the Romans is where we get our word virtue. It comes from the Latin word "vir," V-I-R, "vir."
A "vir" is a man, and "virtus" is manliness—it's the quality of being a man. And for the Romans,
manliness has a specifically military connotation. Manliness is courage. It is above all this
principle virtue: courage. For the Romans, a real man is a man who will stand his place
in the line of battle, a man who lacks fear, a man who is willing to sacrifice himself
for the greater good, for his community, and for the Romans, this is what virtue is. Virtue
is the willingness of someone to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, for their
country. This is where we come to have the understanding of virtue in general as the
kind of moral goodness that requires self-sacrifice. And for the Romans, "virtus," manliness, virtue
is the foundation of a free republic, and this is a central idea of republicanism. It
says that you can only truly have freedom in a republic if the citizenry is virtuous,
and this will be a tremendously influential ideal throughout the centuries, that somehow
the citizens of a republic must be virtuous to preserve that way of government. It's a
very Roman idea that the greatness of a country is a function of the virtue of its citizens,
that the willingness of the people to sacrifice for a common good is what will determine the
destiny of the country itself.
"Libertas," "virtus," and "res publica," where we get our world republic. It comes from two
Latin words: "res," which is "thing", and "publica," which is "public," and it literally means
the common thing, the public thing. We might say the commonwealth, the shared destiny.
It means something like the country, it means something like the state, it means something
like the community. And the way that our word community in its etymology seems to suggest
the things that we share in common, the common life that we inhabit together, so "res publica"
connotes all of these things, the way that a community shares its destiny, the way that
they are part of a collective, common project, and this for the Romans is the "res publica,"
the state, the country that's bigger than any one individual. And the "res publica" implies
that there is a commonwealth, that there's a shared density, in fact, that there's a
certain amount of harmony within the society that makes individuals within that society
willing to sacrifice for each other. The "res publica" means a community of interest, that
there's a shared interest across the society, and in particular between the rich and the
poor. And as we'll see throughout the history of Rome, this is one of the central tensions
in the reality of the Republic, between the interests of the wealthy and the interests
of the poor. The Republic, the Romans believe, can only exist where there is sufficient concord,
where there's sufficient harmony between the different elements of society. For a republic
to exist, there must truly be a common shared interest in the wellbeing of the state. And
so these ideas, which are expressed most clearly in the ancient vocabulary itself—"libertas,"
"virtus" and "res publica"—will animate a unique ideology of law and justice that is expressed
in the Roman Republic.