"At Rome all men paid homage to libertas, holding it to be something roughly equivalent to the spirit and practice of Republican government. Exactly what corresponded to the Republican constitution was, however, a matter not of legal definition but of partisan interpretation. Libertas is a vague and negative notion—freedom from the rule of a tyrant or a faction. It follows libertas [liberty], like regnum [kingship] or dominatio [despotism], is a convenient term of political fraud."