Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in citizenship, particularly in Roman history. Long assumed to be central to historical developments such as the consolidation of the Roman empire, citizenship was pushed to the margins of research in the 1990s and 2000s as historians focused on the cultural construction of identity and questioned the significance of legal and administrative structures. But the past decade has seen the pendulum of scholarly interest begin to swing back towards institutions such as citizenship, albeit with a new focus on the cultural frameworks that gave citizenship meaning. This edited volume, the fruit of a conference in Urbino in 2014, illustrates the vibrancy of recent work on citizenship in both Greek and Roman history.
C. opens with an introductory survey of regimes of citizenship from Classical Greece to the Roman empire, with particular attention to the differences between Greek politeia and Roman civitas (following the lines of an influential essay by P. Gauthier, ‘La citoyenneté en Grèce et à Rome: participation et intégration’, Ktèma 6 [1981], 166–79). The full and up-to-date bibliography will make this a very useful resource for those new to the subject, while its emphasis on the question of how citizenship was experienced and performed signals the central theme of the volume as a whole.
M. Giangiulio problematises the search for the origins of Greek citizenship in the archaic period. Rather than seeking to date the appearance of citizenship as an institution, he approaches the regulation of participation in public life as one of several, parallel processes of institutionalisation that produced the structures of the Classical polis. He suggests that participation became both a source of prestige and an expression of privileged status in archaic communities. He also highlights the diversity of political organisation, marginalising the Athenian model and pointing to very different formations such as ‘ethnos-states’ and ‘political regimes of fixed number’ (e.g. ‘the six hundred’ of Massalia) (p. 46).
C.’s own paper shifts attention to subdivisions of the citizen body, suggesting that projects of political reform often centred on the (re)organisation of sub-units such as tribes, phyloi and phratries. She illustrates her argument with reference to Cleisthenes’ reforms in Athens (especially his introduction of ten tribes and thirty trittyes), Demonax of Mantinea's reforms in seventh-century Cyrene (which divided the population into three phyloi composed respectively of Therans, Peloponnesians and Cretans, and islanders) and the refoundation of Camarina in the fifth century (which, she infers, was accompanied by the creation of new phratries).
C. Lasagni explores the role of politeia in Greek federal states through a discussion of several third- and second-century decrees from four different koina: the Achaeans, Triphylians, Acarnians and Aetolians. She cautions against the impulse to develop a universal model of the structure of these states, recommending that we search for particularities rather than general rules. But she does identify a common structure consisting of (a) common civil rights, i.e. epigamia and enktesis, (b) isopoliteia or potential citizenship in other poleis (which could be realised by taking up permanent residence) and (c) local politeia, which entailed the full enjoyment of federal political rights. In all cases, it was strictly necessary to be a citizen of one of its member poleis in order to be a citizen of a federal state. Her analysis of the five decrees reveals several peculiarities of the individual koina.
A. Ştefan surveys the phenomenon of multiple citizenship in the Roman East, a complex topic recently addressed by an important edited volume (A. Heller and A.-V. Pont [edd.], Patrie d'origine et patries électives: les citoyennetés multiples dans le monde grec d’époque romaine [2012]). Ştefan's focus is on the links between citizenship and individual and group identification. He concludes that additional citizenships, whether Roman or of other Greek poleis, were valued for the privileges and prestige they entailed rather than as expressions of collective identities.
E. Isayev explores the significance of citizenship in the plays of Plautus. She argues that Plautus’ plays are not much concerned with the distinction between citizens and aliens and that this constitutes a marked contrast to the comedies of Menander, which often attribute considerable importance to the possession or lack of Athenian citizenship. What matters in Plautus is rather the distinction between slave and free, while free persons occupy a spectrum of statuses between citizens and enemies rather than a citizen–alien binary. Isayev argues that this reflects the cosmopolitan environment in which Plautus was writing, in which there were few barriers to mobility between cities, though she also suggests that Plautus’ plays contain a few hints of a growing preoccupation with the significance of citizenship.
D. Fasolini discusses the idealisation of children as ‘future citizens’, i.e. citizens who will play an active role in the res publica. His starting point is a new Roman Imperial Tribal Ascription database, which includes examples of 280 children who were assigned a Roman tribe on their epitaphs. He combines a discussion of the place of the tribe in child onomastics (perhaps underplaying how rare it is overall) with a survey of texts that idealise children as future citizens and evidence for the presence of children in the public sphere in order to reflect on the aspirations that Roman communities invested in their children.
V. Marotta analyses the legal framework that excluded Aegyptii (i.e. Egyptians who were not citizens of one of the Greek poleis) from direct access to Roman citizenship – a restriction best known from Pliny's efforts to secure citizenship for the physician Harpocras (Ep. 10.5–7). Marotta shows that the evidence for the ban is conclusive for the first and early second centuries, but suggests that there are some hints of a relaxation from the reign of Hadrian. The paper is a translation of an Italian paper originally published in 2014 (V. Marotta, ‘Egizi e cittadinanza romana’, Cultura giuridica e diritto vivente 1 [2014], 1–21). Oddly, the original paper is not mentioned in this volume. The new version is welcome because it will give Anglophone scholars access to the work of an authority on the law of citizenship (not to mention an overview of a substantial technical bibliography).
A. Besson poses an important challenge to the still widespread view that Roman citizenship had lost much of its significance by the time of the constitutio Antoniniana. He argues that access to Roman citizenship remained ‘highly regulated and severely restrictive’ and concludes that this left citizenship the preserve of an elite group in the provinces (though consideration of the epigraphic evidence would show that the correlation between citizenship and social status was less clear than he suggests). He goes on to argue that Roman citizenship continued to bring significant privileges in this period. The argument focuses on Roman inheritance law, which was ‘oriented toward the conservation and concentration of assets in the hands of Roman citizens’. This is a very important point, though it is worth noting that the central issue is not the capacity to make wills (peregrines were free to make their own wills, despite Besson's claim that ‘control of property at death was a very restricted privilege of Roman citizens’, p. 215), but rather the capacity to accept under a Roman will, which was denied to peregrines. Besson closes with the suggestion that the constitutio Antoniniana can be seen as ‘a private revolution’.
As the focus shifts from institutions to ‘philosophical and political reflection’, J. Filonik illuminates the richness and fluidity of fourth-century Athenian civic discourse through a close reading of Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates. He inventories the conceptual metaphors (as theorised by G. Lakoff and M. Johnson) that structure Lycurgus’ indictment of Leocrates as a bad citizen. Leocrates had fled Athens after the defeat at Chaeronea, only returning six years later. Lycurgus sought to condemn this departure as a form of treason. Among the most developed conceptual metaphors that Filonik traces through the speech are: being a citizen is a form of military service, being a citizen is sharing in ownership of the polis, citizens are children of the polis and civic duties are a form of debt.
F. Carlà-Uhink explores Cicero's response to the trauma of the Social War and the subsequent enfranchisement of all Italians, which precipitated ‘a complete reshaping and renegotiation of the structures and concepts of identity throughout Italy’. Starting from Cicero's famous conception of the two patriae in the proem to De legibus 2, Carlà-Uhink traces the antecedents of its vision of belonging in Cicero's speeches of the 60s and 50s BCE. He stresses that Cicero's vision of a community of Roman citizens with a common patria was always exclusively Italian and never envisaged a progressive extension of citizenship to the provinces. On the contrary, Cicero regarded Caesar's creation of provincial colonies and grants of citizenship to provincial communities as abhorrent.
The chronological focus widens dramatically in the last two chapters which explore the reception of Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship. V. Rocco Lozano sketches the development of Hegel's conception of ‘the Roman citizenship’ (by which he means Roman republicanism). He contrasts Hegel's early idealisation of the Roman republic as a model of republican freedom and active citizenship with his later understanding of imperial politics as epitomising the despotic subjugation of a mass of atomised individuals. Rocco Lozano explains this as a consequence of Hegel's close association of Rome with revolutionary France and his changing perception of French republicanism, which he increasingly associated with repression at home and military expansion abroad, Napoleon's establishment of the Consulate in 1799 being a pivotal moment.
B. closes the volume with a brief history of the idea of citizenship of the world from Democritus and Diogenes to modern thinkers suchs as A. Appiah, M. Nussbaum and U. Beck. The vast span and brisk pace preclude a detailed analysis of any of the texts she surveys (or their relationship to contemporary political projects), but the paper is an excellent illustration of the lasting influence of the Greco-Roman discourse of citizenship.
