Free association : Libertas, metaphor and the politics of Cicero

Libertas is a notion central to the politics and culture of the Roman Republic, yet commentators have found difficulty in interpreting the word and giving a coherent and cohesive account of its semantic and rhetorical content. This report attempts to throw further light on the discussion by examining the conceptual and rhetorical content of libertas, incorporating a substantial study of its metaphorical structures following the linguistic and cognitive work of George Lakoff. The central texts under discussion are: the comic plays of Plautus, which offer an insight into libertas in its "source domain"; the epistolary corpus of Cicero, which is used as a basis to study libertas in its political context and as a contrast to the final text under analysis: Cicero's De Lege Agraria 2.