The Gods, the State, and the Individual. John Scheid

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СКАЧАТЬ generally through the intermediation of magistrates, and under the empire by benefaction of the emperor. This means on the one hand that Roman citizenship remained under the control of the central power, and on the other that the site of registration for citizens who did not live at Rome was the Roman city-states of Italy and the provinces. The city became an indispensable level, or perhaps locus, of Roman citizenship. Indeed, the legal system was so arranged that a Roman citizen of Italy or a province who found himself at Rome was not legally absent from his domicile of origin. On this entire topic, one should have recourse to the works of the lamented Yan Thomas, which some historians have ignored, to their loss.⁴ The Roman jurists studied by Thomas naturally had their own ways of reasoning, in virtue of their particular objectives, but one cannot simply regard the evidence of the jurists as fantasies. Their arguments take into consideration the question of whether one does or does not have citizenship as well as privileges or obligations as regards liability for taxation—in brief, extremely important details about daily life—which endows their legal deliberations with highly concrete aspects.

      To this must be added the fact that Roman origin could be acquired not only by birth or manumission by a citizen of full right, enrolled in a Roman colony or municipium, but also in communities of Roman citizens legally recognized by Rome and installed in foreign city-states. It is always through a place of Roman origin, through a Roman community, that Roman citizenship was conferred. And if the emperor gave citizenship to an individual, which happened often, he always enrolled that person in a Roman city of the empire.

      After the Social War, the presence of Roman citizens in the city-states of Italy ceased to pose a problem, because all those city-states were henceforth Roman. In the provinces, where peregrine, which is to say, city-states alien in respect to Rome, were the large majority, the presence of Roman citizens could create strong inequalities. Indeed, citizens of these communities who also possessed Roman citizenship could profit from the privileges of being Roman and, with the complicity of the provincial governor, they could commit abuses, not least regarding jurisdictional rules, which were a potent source of conflict. Augustus tried to resolve this problem with the edicts of which we possess the version addressed to the province of Cyrenaica, in North Africa.⁵ One there finds in outline what will become the rule in the imperial era. The changes made by Augustus concerned above all fiscal exemptions and exemptions from other local obligations that Roman citizens—particularly the wealthy—tried to escape. These abuses were most problematic in alien city-states, but they could also affect Roman city-states and place in peril the system of obligations and duties in these small civic communities, because it was possible to obtain immunities at Rome that were then extended to the city-states where the persons concerned were resident. The reform enacted by Augustus drew a strong distinction between Roman citizenship and exemption from charges and duties in one’s community of origin. In particular, fiscal immunity had to be expressly conferred, and it was limited to goods owned at the moment the grant was made. In this way, local city-states were not voided of their most important taxpayers and candidates for elected offices essential to their functioning. Later, the principles visible in the Augustan texts become clearer still. Thanks to an array of documents, we know that in the second third of the second century, for example, an alien’s obtaining of Roman citizenship implied no diminution of taxes, fees, or duties arising from the customs or laws of one’s city of origin.⁶ The new citizen saw no modification as regards his situation interior to his little fatherland. He retained his obligations there and benefited in return from the possibility of living according to local law. Christopher Jones has written about Athenian Roman citizens of this era: they were local magistrates, preserved the family law of aristocratic families of Athens, and settled some of their disputes before local tribunals, according to Athenian law.⁷

      In spite of all these changes, the world of the city-states continued its life and development under the Roman Empire, and it is absurd to continue to speak of the decline, the implosion, or the disappearance of the city as one did in the nineteenth century. Such talk has no meaning once one breaks free from the artificial dialectical structures in which it was embedded. Every free inhabitant of the empire lived in a city-state or, for the marginal populations, in a tribe. Regardless whether any given city-state was of alien status, a municipium, or a Roman colony, they were all autonomous. They were of course subject to the power of Rome and provincial governors, to whom they paid taxes if they were not freed from them, as were some Roman colonies—Cologne and Carthage, for example—but they all administered themselves by means of their own institutions. Only the colonies, which were Latin or Roman, were obliged to function according to Roman law and to use Roman institutions. A colony was a city founded directly by Rome, whether or not colonists came directly from the metropole. A colony was like a district of Rome transplanted to the empire, sometimes on territory where there had been no Mediterranean city, as, for example, at Narbonne or Lyon, or superimposed on a preexistent city, as at Carthage. Colonies were classified as either Latin or Roman. Latin colonies were composed of Roman citizens and former aliens belonging to the local population. Persons of this latter type, who benefited from an inferior form of Roman citizenship, the so-called Latin right, could accede to full Roman citizenship by holding a local magistracy. In Roman colonies, all citizens were Roman citizens, and Roman public and private law were imposed on everyone. These colonies were not free and were subordinate to all the laws of Rome.⁸ Municipia, by contrast, maintained a continuity with their pre-Roman alien past: the institutions created at the moment of their foundation as a Roman city were therefore not necessarily Roman and might perpetuate preexisting traditions. Municipal citizens therefore had the right to live according to local institutions and local law, even though they were all Roman citizens.⁹ Again, there were both Roman and Latin municipia. As for city-states alien in respect to Rome, which were very numerous in the empire, nothing whatsoever prevented them from functioning according to their own traditions and institutions.¹⁰

      We are therefore far from the disappearance of city-states and the erasure of local customs and institutions, another myth of modern historiography. Even when, in 212 CE, the famous edict of Caracalla (the so-called Antonine Constitution) granted citizenship to all free persons of the empire, this juridical elevation changed nothing in their daily life. They continued to live in their city-states, in conformity with local institutions, even if, henceforth, all benefited from what had theretofore been a privilege: double citizenship, local and Roman. Even then, one cannot speak of the end of the city-state—for as we have already seen, free persons of the empire were not registered abstractly with Rome even in their capacity as Roman citizens. There was no “citizenship of the empire.” As before, they acquired even Roman citizenship in their city of origin, and it is always through those city-states that they were registered at Rome. Moreover, as Claude Lepelley demonstrated twenty years ago, the city-state survived as the framework for daily life for the population of the empire until the fifth century CE, and it was only under the blows of the Alamanni, Vandals, and Goths that, little by little, the world of the city-state sank into the Middle Ages.¹¹

      It is therefore necessary to distance ourselves from the old historiographic model that fixed the end of the age of the city-state in the fourth century BCE and understood the Roman Empire as a fundamentally different, even superior form of political life, in the same way in which, in Prussia, the great historians who diffused this model—Johann Gustav Droysen and Theodor Mommsen—called for the unification of Germany and the surmounting of the world of small principalities, which they instinctively identified with the city-states of the ancient world.

      Moreover, one should not assume that the institutions of the city-state were uniquely strong in Italy and in Rome. They were strong throughout the provinces. There were of course differences between contexts. The Greek east included a large number of old city-states that enjoyed great prestige among the Romans. Apart from some colonies founded by Augustus after the civil wars, all the poleis continued to exist, in a more or less brilliant fashion according to their historical evolution. In the West, the Romans encountered a different landscape, including several entire regions, in Gaul and the Iberian peninsula, where there existed as yet no city-states of the Mediterranean type, and others where they took over earlier city-states, as in Africa. Everywhere, however, they impelled or promoted the emergence СКАЧАТЬ