Imperial Citizenship from the Roman Republic to the Edict of Caracalla

WHEN FRENCH POLITICIANS in 1946 evoked the precedent of the decree of AD 212 by the Roman emperor Caracalla extending Roman citizenship to all free and male inhabitants of the empire, they were making clear that citizenship was a relevant concept for an empire, not just for a nation. French legislators knew their classics, although they did not necessarily fully comprehend the import of the edict of Caracalla. We need to look even further back in ancient history to see the persistent debates over citizenship in the context of difference and inequality.

This long history begins with the Greek polis, which established a model of citizenship in a city-state that was both democratic and exclusionary. Women were excluded; slaves were excluded; conquest and expansion did not necessarily result in the incorporation of new citizens. The men recognized as citizens, however, were to have a voice in governing its affairs. Greek thinkers were well aware of the tension between a people, moved by emotions as much as by reason, and leaders, motivated by self-aggrandizement as well as by the idea of representing a people. Democracy, autocracy, hierarchy, and oligarchy existed in relation to each other. If the Greek polis was spatially circumscribed, it was for some philosophers the only world that mattered — a cosmopolitan setting where people could think of themselves as "citizens of the world."

The Greek word polis originally meant citadel, something enclosed. Roman thinkers contrasted the closure of the Greek city-state with what they considered the openness of their own notion of citizenship. Even a Greek philosopher in Roman times could acknowledge that Rome "had made of the whole world a single polis." The concept at the core of Roman politics was civis, and the word has Indo-European roots connoting family, an outsider admitted into the family, a guest or a friend. "Civis," Claude Nicolet writes, "is an associative term: its proper meaning is not 'citizen,' but 'fellow-citizen.'" Romans thought citizenship entailed the melding of people who were of different origins. Citizenship continued to have multiple meanings, in reference to a city, to a wider political community, to the empire as a whole. Civitas meant "a polity and a place."

Making Roman Citizens

The transformation of Rome from monarchy to republic (traditionally dated to 509 BC) meant the participation of the free population as a whole in governance through popular assemblies. This did not prevent the emergence of affluent and privileged families and men occupying key roles in day-to-day politics, creating a countercurrent to the egalitarian tendency of republican politics. Under the Republic, Rome undertook expansion into the surrounding region, and its incorporation of conquered peoples gave the city-state its imperial dimension. The region had been occupied by "Latins" organized in a variety of localized polities. Latin initially became an intermediate status between Roman citizen and outsider, but more and more Latins gradually acquired the status of citizen. That gave them a set of rights that were slowly being defined. The right, for example, to serve in the legions of the army — as opposed to the auxiliaries — offered a means of upward mobility. The provinces became increasingly important as suppliers of these citizen-soldiers.

The Republic conferred other rights on its citizens, of which the most important was the right to be tried for a crime or to bring a legal action in a Roman court and to appeal any decision to courts in Rome itself. Emma Dench links Rome's growing power to its incorporative model of citizenship: "The success of Roman imperial ventures depended on the transformation of competing and ethnically diverse peoples of Italy into a Roman war-machine through the transformation of statuses and lands and the enaction of treaties between individual communities and Rome."

Political rights were an essential component of citizenship in the Republic — to vote in assemblies of the people, to stand for office. Expansion necessarily changed the nature of political participation, for an electoral corps of over a million could not fit in the Forum, and not everyone could come to Rome to participate in an assembly. Although assemblies continued to be a part of political life, more and more political action operated through elites, notably senators and magistrates and increasingly military leaders, who in turn called on their partisans for support. Citizenship beyond the city of Rome was exercised within municipalities and provinces as well as through the institutions of the empire. Public opinion was increasingly "parceled in small units," and political relationships became more personal and private. Nevertheless, leaders remained conscious of the dangers of dissatisfaction among the people.

Roman citizenship had a differentiating quality: there were gradations among Romans and among Latins, among the next outward layer of "Italians," and peregrini — people who lived within the zone controlled by Rome but lacked citizenship rights. Some communities as a whole were granted "Latin citizenship," and a municipality might achieve a special Roman status. Slowly, Roman rank orders became intertwined with local hierarchies. At the bottom of the emerging rank order came plebeian citizens, the peregrini, and on the very bottom, slaves. Craftsmen might be organized in associations of bakers or wine merchants. Women were "not strictly speaking members of the local civic body (populus)," but as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the elite played a role in public life.

As Nicolet writes, "the civitas was not merely the sum of a number of individuals with equal rights but consisted, properly speaking, of intermediate groups which had to express themselves severally to constitute an expression of the people's will." There were different levels of assemblies and different qualifications in terms of wealth and property for various offices. Magistrates represented the controlling, top-down side of the Roman Republic; tribunes, chosen by a more open, popular assembly, could make the voice of "the people" heard.

As Rome in the late second and early first centuries BC subordinated other states — by violent means or the incentive to cooperate with an increasingly wealthy and powerful entity — the people of those states could acquire the status of socii with a restricted set of rights. The position of socii entailed tensions in the relationship between Rome and its neighbors and sometime allies. What upset many of the socii was not so much that they had lost their independence to Rome, but that they were not fully incorporated into Roman citizenship. Some Romans, like the xenophobic elements in today's Europe, worried that admitting too many Latins to full citizenship rights would encroach on the space for real Romans at meetings, festivals, and games: "Don't you realize they'll take over everything?" opined an opponent of a more inclusive citizenship. The tensions led to the "social war" of 91–88 BC — a bloody conflict between Rome and towns across the Italian peninsula. However mixed the causes of the war, Rome resolved the situation by extending citizenship to all (male) Italians who had fought against Rome and who agreed to lay down their arms. The number of Roman citizens as much as tripled, a decisive step toward the incorporative dynamism of the Roman Empire.

Citizenship did not mean giving up particularity: "the Italians were able, without injury to their local patriotism and particularism, to become members of a new patria with an exclusive claim to world domination. They could still be at heart men of Arpinum, Capuans or Gauls from Mantua, while at the same time enjoying a Roman citizenship which did not impose any artificial uniformity." People became Roman — in a juridical and political sense — and as people from different places did so, the cultural landscape of the empire became adaptive and varied but was still regarded as Roman. In Gaul during Caesar's time, individuals, not just communities, could follow "routes into the system, while censuses, taxation, and the Roman law that came with Roman citizenship taught new Gauls new ways of behaving."

Citizenship was a defined status, duly recorded. The census, under the Republic and afterward, not only counted people, but registered each person's age, sex, parentage, family relations, civil status, domicile, tribal membership, and property. It differentiated the citizenry, and such differentials could determine eligibility for particular offices. The inscription of citizenship and the rituals had a further effect: "As a soldier, a taxpayer or recipient of public bounty, and an elector, the Roman was made to realize at every stage of his life that he was a civis, a member of a community that existed because of him and for his benefit." The census was extended, however imperfectly, across the empire, requiring heads of households to present themselves and their family information to magistrates. The census marked both the fact of membership in an imperial polity and the wealth and status differentials within it.

The Roman institution of the "colony" — colonia civium Romanorum — gave later generations the word and extended the practice of Greek city-states of implanting people in another's territory. As early as the fifth century BC, Romans were establishing communities of citizens away from the capital. Becoming a colonist could be attractive to less well-off Roman citizens or for others who, while away from the ferment of the imperial center, might find in the colony a place to fulfill their ambitions. Colonists remained attached to their Roman citizenship. The colonies did not acquire, until later, the relative autonomy of municipalities. The colony, however unwelcome initially to the people among whom it was implanted, could show them the attractions of Roman ways of life, the commercial possibilities that imperial linkages provided, and the value of alternatives to local hierarchies. Taken together, the colonies and the outward extension of citizenship meant that Rome's expansion was more than a matter of violent conquest. Peter Garnsey goes as far as to argue, "we can see that the spread of citizenship held the key to the prodigious success of Rome as an imperial state."

Debating Power and Inequality in Republican Rome

In an insightful book, Joy Connolly argues that politics in the Roman Republic should be seen as a framework for debate, and especially debate over status, hierarchy, wealth, and inequality. Her argument points to the antiquity of a perspective seen in scholarship on citizenship today: that citizenship is not simply a relationship of individual to state, not simply a reflection of a bounded community set against those outside, but a framework in which people ponder the structure of society. While citizenship seemed to express the idea of "being" Roman — a horizontal conception of society — Rome was an oligarchical polity and a stratified society. Awareness of that tension, Connolly argues, was intrinsic to political argumentation during the time of republican rule in Rome.

As she points out, it is well known that highly regarded Roman thinkers "took for granted" that they lived in a society that enslaved people, disenfranchised women, made a virtue of combat, and was characterized by economic inequality and the power of the wealthy. But she goes on to argue, "what is lost is Roman writers' attention to the deep contradictions at the core of their own thinking."

Cicero, she asserts, was concerned with the different forms of power. He saw the rivalry between the senatorial elite — the epitome of oligarchic politics — and the people as a permanent feature of politics. In his view, the rights of citizens depended on their ability to defend themselves against that elite. Such conflict should be channeled in nonviolent ways — not least into oratory — but it had to be dealt with. The tribunes — closer to the people than the senators — presented an institutional check on the elite, but Cicero also worried about the extremes to which the populace might go.

Roman historians like Livy pointed to moments when the greed of the wealthy was revealed publicly. Tacitus sought to understand the obscuring effects of autocratic power on people's judgment. Other writers agonized over the corrupting effects of money in politics. Connolly finds in classic texts evidence of different voices, of the inequities of society being observed and confronted — but not necessarily eliminated. Perhaps we can find in this understanding of citizenship in its formative context a direct and useful encounter with the inequalities and antagonisms that lurk behind the equivalence that citizenship has seemingly entailed.

Citizenship under the Emperors

What does it signify, after the Republic had given way to dictatorship and monarchy, that citizenship continued to be extended far and wide and the state still sought to legitimize empire by underscoring conquered people's sense of belonging within it? Did Roman citizenship become transformed from a practice of political engagement to a judicial status that provided protection but little voice, from active to passive membership in a political community?

These are questions that affected the remaining centuries of Roman empire. A durable component of Roman citizenship was the juridical status it conveyed. When, famously, Saint Paul was being prosecuted, he could call out "Civis Romanus sum," I am a Roman citizen. This invocation did not save him from prosecution, but it did save him from the tyranny of the local powers and conveyed to him the right to be heard by a proper Roman court. Citizens took these rights with them wherever they went within the empire. In the histories of many empires, belonging to an imperial community conveyed the possibility of appealing to the emperor or tsar over and above local aristocrats, local patriarchs, and local tyrants.

At the same time, some of the Republic's institutions continued to have influence under the monarchy: the Senate and the popular assemblies, the magistracies, and the priesthoods. The emperor worked with these institutions, and scholars at the time tried to hold onto something of Rome's republican conception of itself. Senators continued to be respected and influential; tribunes conveyed something of popular sentiment. The army became more powerful than ever, and emperors tried to use their own praetorian guard to offset the power of the legions, not always with success. Rome was often torn by intrigue, and both the praetorians and provincial legions could at times be king makers or assassins. But, Greg Rowe insists, emperors "ruled through republican forms." And with the conquests of Britain and parts of the eastern Mediterranean, "Roman citizenship spread" wider still.

Roman citizenship did not mean a uniform, horizontal Romanness covering the entire empire. As Clifford Ando puts it, "placing the governance of cities in the hands of upper-class individuals whose self-interest aligned them with Rome ... held good throughout the empire." The structure of the empire allowed for the development of relationships, between high- and low-ranking people in the provinces, between local oligarchies and Roman officials. Loyalty to the empire was compatible with continued identification with the culture of particular provinces. Cities were allowed to use their own laws. Residents, however, had a variety of legal statuses, and magistrates were not necessarily local; the influence of Roman law grew over time. Roman citizens retained the right of appeal to a Roman court.

The Roman elite was mobile. One could be born, like the emperor Septimus Severus (Caracalla's father), in "Africa" (present-day Libya and Tunisia), in a family of mixed Italian-African origins, make a career in Rome and Africa, marry a woman from Roman Syria, and end up at the top of the political hierarchy. Inscriptions on the graves of ordinary soldiers in one part of the empire reveal their origins in others.

The Edict of Caracalla

This brings us to 212 and the edict of Caracalla, officially known as Constitutio Antoniniana. The emperor and his edict are something of a puzzle for historians, for there is little to go by other than the short text. Caracalla became sole emperor that very year after assassinating his brother Geta, with whom he had shared the throne. Some Roman commentators attributed his edict to the empire's need for more revenue, for citizens paid taxes and aliens did not. Some considered the edict a largely empty gesture. Current scholarship considers the edict an important act, but not a bolt from the blue. The vast but troubled empire was drawing on its long-term strategy of bounded inclusivity, extending rights and the aura of being Roman across its domains. Although most people in Italy already enjoyed citizenship and the colonies and the cooptation of local elites created pockets of citizenship elsewhere, the eastern parts of the empire and rural areas of the western empire were not so blessed. Perhaps two-thirds of the free population of the provinces were not citizens before the edict, so its impact affected a vast number of Romans.