or LIBERTINUS, among the Romans, a freedman, or a person set free from a legal servitude.

These still retained some mark of their ancient state: he who made a slave free having a right of patronage over the libertus: so that if the latter failed of showing due respect to his patron, he was restored to his servitude; and if the libertus died without children, his patron was his heir. See SLAVE.

In the beginning of the republic, libertinus denoted the son of a libertus or freedman; but afterwards, before the time of Cicero, and under the emperors, the terms libertus and libertinus, as Suetonius has remarked, were used as synonymous.