Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of freedom and of republicanism, placing Skinner’s work on neo-Roman freedom in that context.

This chapter explores the moral and psychological dimensions of the neo-Roman concept of freedom, dimensions that have often been overlooked in favour of a political (and, still more narrowly, republican) analysis of non-domination. Through the example of Montaigne, the late sixteenth-century moral essayist, I argue that neo-Roman freedom is neither exclusively nor intrinsically republican in orientation, that it is best understood as a claim about the status of persons, and that this approach provides a firmer basis for establishing its distinctiveness and value than those accounts, including Quentin Skinner’s, which cast it as a robust variant of non-interference.