The prologue dwells on the ambigous status of enslaved Africans and their offspring in the Spanish Indies and the early Spanish American republics. Since there existed no consistent theory or justification of slavery, who exactly slaves were before the law remained a puzzle. The revolutionaries who achieved emancipation from Spain chose the concept of “captive” to frame their gradual, limited emancipation approach. Regarding slaves as Christian captives crying for deliverance and spiritual redemption rather than as individuals denied access to citizenship, this approach left slaves in a legal limbo. The redemption of captives was a spiritual commitment with no single beginning or clearly identifiable end. It was an ongoing, gradual process rather than a sudden change. By reading litigation as a sphere of politics, however, we know that slaves struggled (conceptually and legally) to propose alternatives to continuing captivity. In this process, often times slaves and their free descendants stood at the forefront of legal change. Their vital and complicated engagements with magistrates and legislators reframed, expanded, refined and even defined citizenship for entire nations.

The slaves of Antioquia, studied in this chapter, experienced a constant tension between captivity and geographic mobility. Many easily and frequently talked to other slaves and to free people, sharing their hopes that an end of slavery was possible. Slave leaders tried collectively to press for the end of their enslavement. After Antioquia’s transformation into a republic devoted to individual freedom in 1812, slave leaders emerged as the first critics of the founding documents and legal principles of this new polity. Felix José de Restrepo and other members of Antioquia’s independent government partially listened to those criticisms. They amalgamated experiences and perspectives that were first developed in Cartagena and Popayán, inviting revolutionary colleagues to consider that legislators and forward-looking governments had an obligation to favor freedom over slavery. Antioquia passed Colombia’s first antislavery law in 1814. Based on the free womb principle, the law was correctly understood by slaves as a legal act with limitations and ambivalences. But the Spanish Restoration of 1816 halted this law and all other antislavery and anti-Spanish initiatives.

Emboldened by the success of his 1926 poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the Scottish poet and critic Christopher Grieve – better known by his pseudonym, Hugh MacDiarmid – set sight on a new creative endeavor, a work that could “glimpse the underlying pattern of human history,” what MacDiarmid called “Cencrastus, the Curly Snake.”

“I am distressed and indignant,” declared T. S. Eliot (1888–1965).1 “[D]iscreet investigations” were warranted, he told Sylvia Beach (1887–1962), for a “conspiracy” against James Joyce’s newly published novel, Ulysses, seemed to be afoot in England.2 In the months since the book’s 1922 printing in Paris, a number of English literary critics had come forward seeking press copies, but few actual reviews of the novel had appeared in British magazines and journals. Disheartened, Joyce himself explained to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) that “certain critics” seemed keen to obtain the novel if only to then “boycott the book.”

Following the conceptual thread of early antislavery and egalitarian propositions in the judicial forum, this chapter turns to the province of Cartagena. It concentrates on the town of Mompox, where one magistrate condemned slavery altogether in 1804, arguing that enslaving others was senseless and inhuman. Some patricians even suggested that equality was desirable, offering college admission for people of African descent. This sensibility built on interpretations of natural law that conferred humans with a legitimate drive for their self-preservation and freedom. An alliance that included patricians steeped in these doctrines and free people of color, led revolutionary Cartagena to declare independence from Spain and ratify an egalitarian constitution in 1812. These Cartagena leaders also proposed that a republican government devoted to the natural rights of equality and independence should question the yoke tying the slaves to the masters in perpetuity. Slavery, and the stigmas from African, enslaved ancestry were said to be unnatural legacies from Spain. Cartagena granted equality before the law for all male citizens, but failed to enact an antislavery policy.

In this chapter, I examine to what extent Epicurus’ message was still relevant as such in the late Roman Republic and to what extent it had to be adapted to the new ideological and political circumstances. An analysis of books 1 and 2 of Cicero’s On Ends shows that Cicero had perfectly appropriated the Greek philosophical tradition and that he basically thought along the lines of the age-old school discussions. A typically Roman context seems to have had only limited influence on his argument: his conception of virtue, for instance, or his stress on the importance of the brilliant achievements of famous ancestors, though illustrated with many Roman examples, are borrowed from traditional Greek arguments. His attack on Torquatus’ inconsistency between words and deeds is clever and convincing, but rests on a theoretical construct. All in all, the Epicureans of Cicero’s day saw no major problems in adapting their philosophical convictions to the complex world of the Roman Republic.

Catullus’ collection contains several clear echoes of the work of two contemporary Epicurean poets, Lucretius and Philodemus. Indeed, several of the neoteric poet’s central themes (the attractions of otium and disengagement from public life; patronage by members of the high elite and its pitfalls; dissatisfaction with the mos maiorum) bring him potentially into close alignment with Epicurean ideals. In this chapter, however, I argue that, on closer consideration, Catullus’ intertextual engagement with his two contemporaries points rather to a self-consciously antagonistic stance towards Epicurean ethics. Catullus’ attack on ‘Socration’ in Poem 47, combined with parodic echoes of Philodemus’ epigrams in Poems 13 and 43, bears comparison with Cicero’s deployment of anti-Epicurean clichés in the In Pisonem; similarly, Philodemean and Lucretian echoes underline a striking divergence both from Epicurean ideals of friendship and from the rejection of romantic love explicit in Lucretius and arguably implicit in Philodemus’ Xanthippe cycle.

Though Cicero offers his most explicit, detailed critiques of Epicureanism in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum, his anti-Epicureanism consistently works itself into a wide swath of his theoretical writings over the last 13 years of his life. Therein Cicero consistently uses a rhetorical strategy whereby he avoids naming the Epicureans outright. Instead he employs a series of shorthand descriptions to attack the Epicureans for what he understands to be their basic tenets. In employing this tactic Cicero both slights the Epicureans by leaving them unnamed and reduces their philosophy to a set of behaviors that he thinks best encapsulate their beliefs. They fail by believing the soul to be mortal, by prioritizing an animal-like desire for pleasure over ratio and oratio, and by using quasi-commercial calculations to make ethical decisions. In each of these ways they fail most of all in Cicero’s eyes by representing a threat to the social fabric of the republic.

This paper offers a provocative re-reading of the passage about the sizes of the sun, moon, and stars late in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.564-613). Attention to not only details of argumentation but also shades of meaning and contorted syntax shows a more complex, ambiguous presentation than generally acknowledged. This paper suggests that Lucretius' narrator—rather than merely parroting wrong, ridiculed doctrines—pulls student-readers into the process of inquiry. It becomes the didactic audience’s task to receive data from sense-perception and use lessons learned earlier in the poem in making correct judgments based upon that data. In Epicurean and Lucretian accounts of reality, the senses themselves are infallible; so the Lucretius-ego’s assertion that the sun as big as perceived by our senses must also be infallible. But our interpretation of what that assertion entails about the sun’s actual size is a matter of judgment, and thus fallible and uncertain indeed.