Libertini

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A term referring to individuals who are freed from slavery or servitude, often associated with the concept of civil rights
2. Denoting those who have been emancipated or released from bondage, typically within a historical or social context
3. Referring to persons who have gained freedom from oppression or restraint, often signifying a status change in society

Etymology: The Latin "libertinus" was the legal status of a formerly enslaved person who had been given their freedom, and the plural "libertini" named that group as a whole. Freedom did not make them full members of Roman society. Many worked as traders, artisans, and clerks, and they occupied a legal position between slave and free-born citizen. Tacitus, writing about Rome, notes that people of Jewish descent who had been enslaved and later freed were called Libertini, which shows the name described a group defined by their past rather than by ethnicity. The root is "liber," meaning "free," which also gives English "liberty" and "liberal." English "libertine" descends from the same Latin word but moved far from its origins. It began as a neutral term for a freed person and came to mean someone who rejects moral restraint, the sense most readers know today.