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Our liberty is freedom for all from oppressive restrictions on our lives and behaviours. Roman aristocratic liberty was the freedom to fight among one another, according to the rules, to achieve political power.
The Ten Commandments have somewhat misled modern readers into thinking that written law has always been interested in moral issues like murder and adultery, when really only religious law is interested in those things. Roman law had no particular interest in legislating morality at the beginning.
as far as the modern Western state is concerned, there are two victims in every murder: the person who bled out on the floor and the dignity of the state. The person with a knife in their chest suffers violence, but the state suffers a challenge to its power to control the behaviour of its citizens and therefore it is the state that brings criminal cases.
it backfired wildly because the Tituses hadn’t reckoned with Cicero, whose love of his own voice and people looking at him exponentially outweighed his feelings about everything else.
Nero loved dressing up almost as much as he loved murdering the women in his family, which he loved almost as much as he loved getting his own way.
