Seite - 61 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 2:2

62 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom the experience of freedom in the Greek world. Max Pohlenz’s studies, for instance, demonstrate how the Greeks understood liberty first and fore- most as internal freedom of conscience, as a distant premise of modern liberty (Pohlenz 1966; Toynbee 1959). The analysis of de Romilly appears more radical, placing the very same origin of modern liberty in Athens (de Romilly 1989). Actually, Constant himself sees Athens as an exception, though he emphasises that Socrates – the emblematic figure, together with the Sophists, of a vital Enlightenment trend within the monolithic corpus of the Greek tradition – was sentenced to death: being motivated by a rationality aimed at a higher form of justice. In fact, Socrates’ will to free his fellow citizens from the symbolic system of the Athenian aristocracy could not be tolerated by the aggregate of demos and ethos that structured the whole horizon of the ancient world (see Plato 1999, 109–111). A close scrutiny of ancient Greece reveals that the experience of freedom [eleutheria] pointed first of all to the image of and desire for a self-deter- mined mode of life following the patrioi nomoi or social customs, without the obligation of submitting oneself to the tyranny of an arbitrary power. The notion of liberty has a defensive meaning and defines an anti-despotic principle, the exercise of which is the prerogative of a limited group of in- dividuals: according to the Greek and Roman lexicon, a person can be said to be free if he is not in chains, namely if he is not a slave but rather a male and adult citizen belonging to a community of peers in charge of the gov- ernment of the city and endowed with certain political powers. Women, children, elderly people, slaves, foreigners could not enjoy these powers and therefore they were not free.2 In any case, liberty in antiquity amounts to the protection of one’s own customs, the adherence to one’s own tradition, and the obedience to the authority of the social body. It concerns people’s self-determination and self-preservation in the choice of their origins and goals as well as in the faithful cultivation of a shared ethos. That represents a key element of an- cient republicanism, which modernity transposes into the unity between the autonomous rule of law and the collective’s sovereignty. For this rea- son, what we are dealing with here is a democratic form of liberty as the pos- sibility of publicly and personally intervening in a direct way into the res publica (like in Athens or Sparta during the classical age). Liberty is equiva- According to the Greek and Roman lexicon, a person can be said to be free if he is not in chains. 2 In the age of the decline of the Greek polis, Aristotle considers the free man as a zoon politikon (i. e. as a political animal), who exists thanks to a specific web of interpersonal relations within a general horizon of civil friendship. An exemplary synthesis of the ancient model of liberty and democracy can be found in his Politics, where despite his scepticism Aristotle delineates the essential traits of the democratic form of government (Aristotle 1992, 362–363). For Aristotle, there is an integral relationship between de- mocracy, liberty, and equality: like every ancient political thinker, he considers only those men as citizens who are free and were born of free parents, whereas slaves are unfree.