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 and development of city-states. And when it was a matter of Roman city-states, whether colonies or municipalities, the institutions were always the same in all the provinces. A city was always a conurbation with a territory that could be more or less grand: “One used the term civitas for a place and a town and also the legal status of a population and of a population of human beings,” writes Aulus Gellius.12 The term thus possesses multiple meanings. The city was a material reality, a town with a territory; it was also founded upon a juridical idea: the right of a city; finally, the term designated the body politic of the city. The ensemble constituted the city, not simply the monumentalized urban core, as there was a tendency to believe in scholarship inflected by nationalist tendencies, in which the Gauls or Germans or Africans were imagined as resisting the Roman invaders and living peaceably among them on the territory of the city-states, but far from the towns that the Roman occupied. This approach makes no sense; there is no reason to believe that city-states were different in Gaul, in Iberia, in Italy, in Africa, or in Asia Minor. But this way of representing city-states, as towns of colonists, merchants, and Roman functionaries, like towns of the Middle Ages or the European colonial empires, is still widespread. Nothing reveals this better than terminology. In Germany, one always translates civitas by Stadt, “city,” never by Stadtstaat, “city-state,” in large measure because at the start of the twentieth century, the German scholars who set the tone could not accept that the city-states of Germany also embraced their rural territories, which were thought to be the framework of life for the Germans.13
These are all the differences between the modern political and social landscape that it is necessary to have in mind in order to reflect on the place of religion in a world of city-states.
Chapter 3
The Individual in the City
We have seen that criticism of the historiographical model of civic religion was in part indebted to a dated vision of the city and its supposed decline in the fourth century BCE. I have argued briefly that city-states continued throughout antiquity to constitute the material and legal framework for the life of individuals, in both the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.
I described the different types of city known under the Roman Empire and underlined that a city possessed a territory that might include dependent villages: it is the ensemble of this little state that formed the city-state. The city-states of the Roman Empire largely administered themselves, and there can be no question of imagining that Roman power somehow directed everything. Had it wanted to do this, its material and human resources would never have sufficed to the task. The Romans, which is to say, Roman promagistrates, governed the provinces at a very abstract level, by collecting taxes and maintaining the peace, making war, and holding assize courts. All the rest fell to the supervision of the city-states and their citizens.
What Was the Place of the Individual in the City?
The first general remark that one can make is that, after the defeat at Chaeronea in 388 BCE, after the creation of the Hellenistic monarchies, and after the conquest of the civilized world by the Romans, individuals