Licentia: Cicero on the Suicide of Political Communities

Abstract

This paper studies the term and concept of licentia in the Latin Republican corpus, focusing on Cicero’s political theory. Its first part is a philological analysis of the term. It concludes that in the first century BCE licentia had three core meanings: permission, permission to do wrong, and permissiveness. The second part is a study of the concept licentia in Cicero’s rhetoric and political theory. It shows Cicero’s awareness of the effect of permissions unduly given and permissiveness on the force of social standards at Rome.