What is the relationship between the right to water and the right to vote? And between the categories of political philosophy and the rules of coexistence established by a rural community in a peripheral region of the Roman Empire? Everything hinges on the dynamic between equity and equality.
It is Cato the Elder who guides us in our understanding of the relationship between these two notions, with his statement that places them in relation and almost in opposition. This lecture will examine the second part of Cato's discourse, dedicated to equity, which must ensure that social distinctions, in terms of fame and political office, are distributed in proportion to each person's personal merits.
Equity and equality, however, appear to be in contradiction:each citizen - Cato tellsus - enjoys equal political rights; yet his political weight varies according to his wealth (and virtue, understood as conformity to socially accepted standards of behavior). In fact, it's the structure of the comices centuriates that makes it possible to link equality and equity, transforming differences in wealth (and age) into a differentiated weight in the vote. To equalize would be - says Cicero, echoing Plato - iniquitous.
Centuries later, this same mechanism was applied in a rural area of the Roman Empire, Spain, where a regulation defining the rights and duties of beneficiaries of access to water (the lex rivi Hiberiensis) was based on the same principles theorized by Greek philosophy, Cato and Cicero: greater access to water meant greater obligations to maintain the canals. Between social life and political reflection, the Roman concept of justice takes shape, offering a counterpoint to the lexicon of modernity.
