LIBERAS RHETORIC FREE

3 To be passed successfully, this latter test first requires that no one is in the position of possibly being obstructed, penalised or coerced in the domain of speech because he is effectively protected by law and customs and second, that it is common knowledge amongst the members of the community that these protections are in place. To live in a political system that empowers its citizens to enjoy the central value of liberty from domination and thereby ultimately achieves justice, the citizens, Pettit argues, have to pass three tests: the ‘eyeball test’, according to which every citizen should be able to look their fellow citizen in the eyes without fear or deference the ‘tough luck test’, according to which citizens should be prepared to accept and embrace the notion that if certain policies of which they disapprove are implemented, it is a matter of tough luck and thereby they must be accepted and finally ‘the straight talk test’, according to which citizens should feel empowered to express their own opinion without fear of repercussions or deference. Thus, although there might be differences in what sort of speech is protected in any given society (so that, for example, one can speak one’s mind at all times, except when this threatens public order or amounts to hate speech – variables that can be differently interpreted), it is essential that there are public laws and norms that secure liberty of speech in those domains. In our modern society, as Phillip Pettit argues, one of these basic liberties is indeed freedom of speech.

LIBERAS RHETORIC FREE

of not being subjected to the power of arbitrary interference), each member must enjoy free access to those choices, which that society regards as basic liberties. 1 Although the extent to which such liberty is limited to certain domains, or is conditioned upon certain requisites, will be ultimately dependent on the historical and social context in which it is elaborated, it remains essential that in every civic community that values liberty as a status of non-domination (i.e. The importance of liberty of speech appears to take centre stage in the current powerful revival of Neo-Republicanism as one of the fundamental basic liberties of our modern societies.

However, Republican Rome invites us to think about liberty of speech as belonging to the realm of ethics: as a moral quality sustained by contemporary social norms, not subject to legislation, which inevitably ends up protecting the interests of a group or groups and their specific speech regimes.

It follows that the Roman Republic would not have passed the ‘straight talk test’ that modern Republicanism requires for the establishment of a free and just society. The answer, I argue, lies in the fact that in Rome speaking freely was conceived as the positive moral quality that characterised a natural ability of human beings, and thereby it could not have provided a field of legislation. The fundamental question this paper addresses is why, in the course of the Republic, the right to speak freely was not protected by law and never came to be recognised as a formalised subjective right in Republican Rome. However, in these cases, as later on under Augustus, these measures acted as means of restraint and inhibition and did not directly address the right of the individual to speak freely. Of course, Republican Rome knew laws regulating free speech and perhaps even later provisions had been passed concerning iniuria. Although modern Republicanism, which highly values the right of freedom of speech, finds its inspiration in the historical reality of the Roman Republic, it seems that in the course of the Republican period citizens shared a recognised ability to speak freely in public, but did not enjoy equal status with one another in the domain of speech as protected by law.

Liberas rhetoric