Libertas is a love story rising from the despair of slavery. Fredericka is the daughter of a White plantation owner and his Black house slave. Horace is a literate slave-companion to the son of a New York hotel baron. This first book in the Pocket Full of Seeds Trilogy follows their flight for freedom through nineteenth-century America. It was a time when runaway slaves were hunted, steamships sailed around the Horn to San Francisco, horse-tugged boats navigated the Erie Canal, a midnight tsunami struck Buffalo, Mormons sought a new Zion, and wagon trains lumbered across a continent littered with unmarked graves. Most of all, this is a story driven by an unquenchable thirst for libertas. "Brimming with excitement...a literary masterpiece!" -Debra Whiting Alexander, award-winning author and 2018 WILLA Literary Award Winner in Contemporary Fiction for Zetty

This is a comprehensive analysis of the idea of libertas and its conflicting uses in the political struggles of the late Roman Republic. By reconstructing Roman political thinking about liberty against the background of Classical and Hellenistic thought, it excavates two distinct intellectual traditions on the means allowing for the preservation and the loss of libertas. Considering the interplay of these traditions in the political debates of the first century BC, Dr Arena offers a significant reinterpretation of the political struggles of the time as well as a radical reappraisal of the role played by the idea of liberty in the practice of politics. She argues that, as a result of its uses in rhetorical debates, libertas underwent a form of conceptual change at the end of the Republic and came to legitimise a new course of politics, which led progressively to the transformation of the whole political system.

Libertas and Res Publica examines two key concepts of Western political thinking: freedom and republic. Contributors address important new questions on the principles of, and essential connection between res publica and libertas in Roman thought and Republican history.

"It is refreshing to read an essay on political ideas distinguished both by precision of thought and clarity of expression." Philosophical Review

This is the evolution of Bard Sarah Schultheiss's philosophy