Liberty’s earliest traces in ancient Greece

Περίληψη

Liberty has become so nuanced a notion that keeping some good track of its most elementary features requires some careful time and effort. In this respect, the article takes a closer look at liberty’s earliest record in ancient Greece to trace how the understanding and use of the term and its cognates evolved throughout different times and places. The first section focuses on the few but crucial attestations of the adjective eleutheros in Homeric poetry and ends up suggesting that these served as a template for its invocations by the main antiquity Greeks. The second section substantiates this claim by following the next attestations of the term, which take us, first, to sixth-century BCE settings and eventually to democratic Athens and further beyond. The final section ponders on the related legacies and their ramifications till the threshold of our times.