Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)

Assembled from 18 blocks · 3 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. A legal status, not an ethnicity, and this is the whole point. Citizenship carried rights (appeal, contract under Roman law, marriage recognised in Roman law, exemption from certain punishments) and duties (inheritance and manumission taxes). Crucially it was grantable: to individuals, to communities, to discharged auxiliary soldiers, and finally in 212 CE to almost all free inhabitants of the empire. A conquered elite that could become Roman had an incentive to invest in Roman institutions rather than to resist them.
3. Knowledge
4. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
5. Carthage
6. Connections
7. Carthage
8. The Roman Legion
9. The Roman Aqueduct System
10. Leptis Magna
11. Trajan (Marcus Ulpius Traianus)
12. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
13. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
14. The Punic Wars
15. Evidence
16. The only near-contemporary text of the edict, in Greek, badly damaged at the top left. It presents the grant of citizenship in providential and religious terms - thanksgiving to the gods for the emperor's preservation - and contains an exclusion clause whose reading (the dediticii) is disputed because the papyrus is broken there.
17. Dio states that Caracalla made all inhabitants of the empire Roman citizens in order to increase revenue, since the 5% inheritance and manumission taxes fell on citizens only, and that he had doubled those taxes. Dio is a senator personally hostile to Caracalla, and this passage survives mainly in Byzantine epitome rather than in Dio's own words.
18. Bronze certificates issued to discharged auxiliary soldiers record grants of Roman citizenship to the veteran and, in defined periods, to his children, together with the right of legal marriage. They are the hardest documentary evidence that citizenship functioned as a distributed reward mechanism tying provincial non-citizens to the imperial system through military service.