Virgil on Libertas: Before and After Actium

The last twenty years have witnessed a significant advance in our understanding of the conceptual history of 'libertas', especially with regard to the crucial transition from Republic to Empire. It has been convincingly shown that in the first century BC 'libertas' was much more than “a convenient term of political fraud” – to quote Syme’s influential definition – and that an epoch-making conceptual transition occurred in the 40s BC, when, moving away from a juridical notion, the idea of 'libertas' acquired a new moral and universalistic dimension, centered round the 'iudicium' of individual men. In the present paper, I shall attempt to set the only five occurrences of the word 'libertas' in Virgil’s oeuvre against the background of their time and milieu – an attempt that will inevitably result in the exploration of Virgil’s stance before and after Actium, for two of these occurrences appear in Eclogue 1 and three of them can be found in the Aeneid. Both a ‘traditional’ (or ‘communal’) and a ‘revisionist’ (or ‘personalistic’) view of 'libertas' surface in Virgil’s writings, thus reminding us once again of Virgil’s richly ambiguous vision as a poet suspended between the trauma of the civil wars and Augustan discourse. Virgil’s poetry seems to bear witness to the on-going (and still incomplete) assimilation of the new role model of the Libertatis Vindex – which first appears in Eclogue 1 with the 'deus' Octavian (Ecl. 1.27-32) and later re-emerges in Aeneid 6 with L. Junius Brutus, the founder of the 'res publica', judge of his own sons, and ancestor of Caesar’s murderer (Aen. 6. 817-823). Besides these two symbolically meaningful occurrences there are two other passages from the Aeneid – in Books 8 (646-651) and 11 (346-351) – which attest more clearly to Virgil’s persisting memory of the collective experience of 'libertas'.