Nor was Roman experience any different. Its ascension to the status of world power over the course of the six centuries before this era, between the period of the Etruscan kings and the advent of empire, is well known. From the start of the fifth century BCE, Rome organized itself as a respublica, a city-republic, with citizens, magistrates, Senate, and laws, and it evolved greatly over the next centuries. Over time, it conquered Italy; later, at the head of an alliance combining the city-states of Italy under its power, it discovered how to resist Carthage, before spreading both east and west while subduing nearly the entirety of the known world. This imperial phase had two consequences at an institutional level. First, the Roman republic had to adapt to the demands of its imperial project, to endow itself with magistracies capable of waging wars permanently on all fronts and to build institutions that combined at the same time effectiveness as well as the defense of essential civic liberties. This prepared the way for the general-magistrates who would contest with each other for power in the last century of the republic.
The second grand change that took place at Rome and in Italy over this period concerned a central element of civic life: the definition of the body politic. In the archaic period, many city-states had known a degree of horizontal social mobility—a circulation of elites—and thus a relatively easy policy with their citizenship. But, over time, the Greek city-states gradually imposed strict limits on grants of citizenship. For this reason, their civic bodies were relatively small, which from a military point of view constituted a clear disadvantage, because the armies of city-states were composed of citizens. From this perspective, Rome remained an archaic city. Oligarchic, yielding the franchise based on tax status, Rome had a much more open conception of citizenship. It progressively integrated the populations of city-states that submitted to it, as citizens of full right or of secondary status—the famous Latin citizens, who possessed only some of the rights of a Roman citizen. It was these who offered to the Romans a virtually inexhaustible supply of soldiers, the famous allies, the socii, of whom the alliance with the Latins of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE constituted a prefiguration. At the same time, it was perfectly normal for Romans to free their slaves, who on this basis became citizens. Magistrates could equally well grant citizenship to people whom they favored. This does not mean that the Romans treated citizenship as a cheap commodity, even in Italy. The process was slow and took centuries before becoming an important phenomenon. In the period of the Second Punic War (218–202 BCE), at the end of the third century BCE, its effects were already making themselves visible, and they would be one of the reasons for Roman victory. The major change came after the Social War, the war with the socii, the allies, when in 90 BCE the Italians, citizens of the second category and the principal bearers of the toils of war, revolted against Roman hegemony. The Romans prevailed, but in the course of the years that followed the victory, all the citizens of the Italian city-states became Roman citizens of full right.
From then, the respublica of the Romans counted more citizens than any other city or civic polity in the world: in 70 BCE, after the Plautian–Papirian law of 89 BCE, which conferred Roman citizenship on all Italians, one is given the figure of nine hundred thousand male citizens; at the beginning of the principate of Augustus, in 28 BCE, the count is four million citizens, including women and children. Such a number of citizens had previously been unimaginable. But this spectacular expansion, which constitutes a profound change to the Roman world, in no way caused the city-states of Italy to break down. On the contrary, it reinforced them, by incorporating them in the very definition of citizenship.
It is essential to understand how the system of the city-states functioned after the Plautian–Papirian law, which distributed citizenship throughout the city-states of Italy, which gradually became either municipia, to wit, autonomous municipalities, or colonies of Roman right. Every Italian had to make a declaration before the urban praetor, at Rome, to indicate the city of origin in which he wished to be enrolled. It is by virtue of his city-state or political community of origin, his “little fatherland,” that he became a Roman citizen, and it is there that ever after he had his origo, his legal place of origin. From this time, a Roman citizen had a double belonging, to his natural fatherland or fatherland of birth, and a universal fatherland, Rome. A number of authors seem to me to confuse everything when they reduce this double belonging to a simple hierarchy of the duties of loyalty, higher to Rome, lower to one’s local polity.3 Of course there is a hierarchy of duties, but the two types of duties and, indeed, of rights are not exclusive of one another. Each is as strong as the other.
It is not necessary to conclude that, after 89 BCE, Roman citizenship was granted by the separate Roman city-states. Nothing could be more incorrect. Roman citizenship was acquired by birth or adoption, by manumission and enfranchisement when one was a slave, or by a grant of the Roman people, 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