The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

The Río de la Plata, the location itself and the journeys towards that destination, hit by failure and discouragement, helped build hostile discourse about the land but also gave rise to a series of scenes about what has not been found before. Therefore, new ways of envisaging this land came to light, as well as the denunciations of Europeans’ excesses. This chapter studies the legal environment where stories of hostility and degradation reveal the forgotten voice of the plebs. The conquest and colonization of the Rio de la Plata then functions not only as the creator of a discourse of deception but also as a scenario that enables the rising of the marginalized voice of seamen, among others.

By rejecting the two dominant teleologies that have traditionally shaped Caesar's story (his alleged lifelong pursuit of sole domination, the "inevitability" of the collapse of the Roman Republic), turning a skeptical eye toward Cicero's ideological assumptions which shape our conception of this period and the character of the Republic itself, and embracing the major revelation of the last several decades that the Roman People played an important participatory role in the political life of the Republic, it now becomes possible to construct a substantially new interpretation of the political impact of Julius Caesar.