Human Rights in the Late Republic

We are now at our second defining point in the history of Roman human rights. The dominant force is Cicero. He takes almost complete possession of the words humanitas and humanus and also supplies a wealth of material in the unlabelled form.¹ There is no serious challenger to Cicero. The closest is Caesar, not so much numerically as conceptually. He is the prime Republican exponent of humanitas’ most important offshoot, clementia, but that can more conveniently be considered in a later chapter.² Sallust is disappointing. He is alone among the major Republican sources in not using the word humanitas at all,³ nor are his uses of humanus of much value.⁴ He does provide some unlabelled material of which notice will be taken in due course.