2025/05/05 by Jeff Tatum · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/9783111705446-011
openalex publication_date 2025/05/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/11
Marlies Glasius has proposed an approach to diagnosing authoritarianism and its rise which emphasises a fine-grained analysis of authoritarian practices observable in specific episodes.The trend of these practices may or may not result in a political culture which is aptly described as authoritarian, and a close examination of these trends can lend nuance to any assessment of the politics of a particular place and time.This chapter endeavours to apply Glasius' methodology to the events of the 70s BCE, a decade in which historians often detect the origins of the republic's decline, by way of Pompey's rise, toward the authoritarianism of Caesar's dictatorship.An argument is advanced that, by formulating political and social conflicts in terms of libertas and its protection (especially by tribunes of the plebs), the governing class resorted to a form of accountability sabotage which obviated political reforms of a kind which might have alleviated social discontent in the city and in the countryside (comp.also Vervaet, Dart and Rafferty).These diversionary tactics, which often resulted in authoritarian practices, foregrounded and in important ways exacerbated popular anxiety over libertas and rendered the tribunate a site for future conflicts which elevated authoritarian practices to genuine authoritarianism.Authoritarians love libertyand love defending it.At least in Rome.There it was a passion exhibited in the violent careers of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and Augustus.And others. 1 Libertas was volatile stuff, and the sheer force of the Romans' passion for freedom and their willingness to take up arms in its protection is undeniable, certainly in the 50s and 40s and 30s. 2 So central was libertas to the Romans' thinking about the res publica that first-century historians insisted on its centrality in the belated legends and memories they accepted as the truths of the city's early history. 3 And they regarded it as a melancholy truth that claiming to be a champion of libertas was often the pose of a would-be autocrat, a conflation which continues to confuse.Indeed, a recent trend in classical studies reveals a pronounced and perhaps unexpected willingness to accept as genuine Caesar's avouchment