Guest Post by Thomas Hanes: An Enervating Historiography of Nationalism

There are some very silly ideas being spread right now about the Roman Empire.

To drop you into the discourse in medias res, there has been a discussion on Twitter over the last few weeks on whether nationalism was invented in the 19th Century. The strong version of that claim (whereby ethnonationalist loyalties were not politically significant until the Age of Revolutions) is spurious. Consider John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle…

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall…

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry…

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world…

That speech alone should convince anyone that political loyalties were often tied to nationalist feeling long before 1848 (or 1789). Unfortunately, facts have rarely gotten in the way of historians reaching a left-leaning consensus.

The push to minimize the role of the nation in history spans beyond the early modern. Much discourse has been about how the Romans were not an ethnically organized society. Here is an exemplar:

These people are wrong.

A Less Insufferable Alternative

Today, I am going to explain, briefly, the relationship between ethnic loyalty and the SPQR. In brief: the Roman Republic was a nationalist enterprise, and its institutions were the codification of informal ethnic-and-familial ties. Rome built her empire on national, familial, and ethnic loyalty, just as England did two millenia later. And yet Rome, like England, was not a purely biological phenomenon. The Roman identity was not literally taxonomic. Instead, family ties were codified into civic institutions. So, citizenship was not legally dependent on family or ethnic origin, even though citizenship originated as a legal representation of family-membership. This codification provided an advantage to Rome: institutions and ethnic loyalties could co-evolve as circumstances required.

In those respects, what is true of Rome is true of England. Since at least the 17th century, it has possible for non-Britons to become English through civic processes. Thus, soon after the Huguenots traversed the channel in flight of the Church of Rome, they were decidedly English, with all the rights and responsibilities of Englishmen. And yet, even though England was open to immigration, the English nation is clearly an ethnic phenomenon, rather than a “creedal” or “civic” nation like Singapore or South Africa. English (and later British) institutions command the loyalty of the people due to basically ethno-nationalist sentiments. Britain is a cultural group, first and foremost. Rome was, in that respect, similar (as I will argue below).

Beyond mere codification of ethnic ties, Rome and Britain had something else very special in common: in both cases, the ethnicity which defined the state changed. So, in the 17th century, London’s empire was an English one, built in the interest of the English people. Eventually, that changed. By the 19th century, London ruled a British empire, where the Scots and protestant Irish were genuine equals in the state. Scotland may have been a rather eccentric region of the metropole, but Scots (unlike the Catholic Irish) were not foreigners in the eyes of her majesty’s government. The empire of London remained an expression of ethnocultural ties, but these ties expanded in scope alongside the empire. Rome developed much the same way, and this is reflected in the history of Roman citizenship.

The complex transformations of the Roman ethnic identity have deceived a number of historians into thinking Rome did not have an ethnic identity whatsoever.

This is an enormous mistake, and misleads many on the nature of Rome’s “secret sauce” that allowed Rome to dominate the Mediterranean.

There is one further aspect of Roman citizenship that has led to confusion. Unlike the British, the ethno-racial ties of a Roman were deeply nested. So, Britain today has only a few significant hereditary identities. These are the English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish (and Ulster Irish). Other than those, the country has no politically important hereditary groupings (except among immigrants). Romans were more complicated. These complications were rooted in the pre-Roman history of the Italian peninsula, and the gradual expansion of Roman citizenship.

The Relationship of the Roman State to Ethno-Familial Ties

Here is how Roman citizenship developed:

Rome, in its very beginning, was a small community of Sabines, Latins, and Etruscans, as we can see from the ancient genetic record. Over the centuries, this small community grew, largely through birth, and had (rough) consanguinity. However, beyond blood ties, it also had strong institutions around its center: the Roman urb. So, Roman citizenship always had a more civic character than other Italian polities like the tribally-organized Samnites. But the Romans did not have a merely civic identity. They shared a language, gods, a history, festivals, rites and habits. Because the ancient world was a violent place, the Romans were stuck with each other against even their nearest neighbors. Over time, the ethnic divisions within nascent Rome dissolved, and there was a coherent Roman people. They were a tight-knit community. Scholars debate exactly how the early Romans related to other Italians like the Etruscans or Latins, but there was at least some period of time when the “Ius Conubii,” (i.e., the right to marry Romans) was tightly restricted, even being unavailable to other citizens of Latium. At some point, these rules were relaxed. At some point, some Latin communities acquired the right to move to Rome and become Roman, or to marry Romans. These rights¹ came to be called the “Latin Rights.” They may have originally been held only by certain Latin communities, or elites from certain Latin communities, but by 338, they became the right of all Latins, after a war over the question. Note that by 338, Rome had already acquired dominion over many communities outside Latium, and so the Latin War was a dispute between the most Roman people (Latins) over how to rule less Roman people (other Italians).

So, as one can see: the relationship between Roman-origin and Roman citizenship was always mediated through institutions, but it had a significant ethno-cultural element. Being Latin became (nearly) equivalent to being Roman when Rome began to project its power over others.

Thus, even through the late Republic, by which time the city of Rome had become a fairly cosmopolitan place, the Romans defined themselves by common ancestry, tracing themselves in myth to the divine Mars, through Romulus and Remus. As Livy writes:

The traditions of what happened prior to the foundation of the City or whilst it was being built, are more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian, and I have no intention of establishing either their truth or their falsehood. This much licence is conceded to the ancients, that by intermingling human actions with divine they may confer a more august dignity on the origins of states. Now, if any nation ought to be allowed to claim a sacred origin and point back to a divine paternity that nation is Rome. For such is her renown in war that when she chooses to represent Mars as her own and her founder’s father, the nations of the world accept the statement with the same equanimity with which they accept her dominion.

It is worth noting that the word translated here as “nation” is “gens” - which is the Latin word for an extended family.

The terms by which commentators referred to Romans were decidedly tied to ancestry. Thus, the historian Appian, centuries later, referred to the Romans as a “γένους” a word which is typically translated as “race,” “stock” or “lineage,” and is distinctly more racial in connotation than the alternative “ethnos.”² Florus, another historian from Appian’s time, described the Romans as a single “Sanguinus” or “bloodline,” combined from the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans.³

It is intriguing that historians managed to reconcile their views of a common Roman bloodline with the brute fact that Roman citizenship expanded radically over time. In part, they did this by emphasizing ancestral (or cultural) ties between the original inhabitants of the city and later admittants to citizenship. Thus, Livy writes that the Latins in 340 wished not to war with the Romans due to their “consanguinity.” Appian wrote that the Roman senate could not have denied citizenship to the Latins in 338, as they were “kinsmen.”⁴

By this method of expansion, blood ties continued to structure the general understanding of Roman citizenship, even though the requisite blood-ties changed over the history of the Republic.

Now, fast forward to the century after the social war, the final era of the Republic, when Rome saw its most rapid expansions and the cultural flowering called its “Golden age.” At that time, “Romanness” and Roman citizenship had greatly expanded beyond Latium. Yet, citizenship still had a decidedly ethnic dimension. At that time, the empire was dominated by Italians (now significantly latinized⁵). Not all of these Italians would necessarily be called “Romans,” but all of them held citizenship, and thus had powers and privileges over Rome’s subject peoples across the broader Mediterranean basin.⁶

The Italians, even after the social war, had a complicated set of loyalties. An Italian of the late Republic would be loyal to his familia (i.e., his immediate relatives). He would also be loyal to his gens (i.e., his clan). In later centuries, most gens would be divided into different sub-clans called cognomina, but such divisions were rare at this time. An Italian would also likely be loyal to his city (Naples, Brindisi, Tarento, Pompeii, etc.). Then he would perhaps be loyal to his people. He might be Etruscan, Ligurian, Piceni, Greek, etc., and would feel loyalty accordingly. Finally, he would be loyal to the SPQR itself.⁷ Thus, the empire was divided into hereditary groups that were themselves divided into hereditary groups, and each layer had political significance.

Because pre-Roman Italy was largely a world of ethnically-organized polities, many of the wars of the early Roman Republic were against informally-organized ethnic groups. These included the Samnite war, the Picentine war, etc. So, once the Romans had conquered and integrated those groups, the Roman empire was in some ways like a British empire if Britain had been built by Scots (who were also fractal in organization: divided into lowlanders and highlanders, and further divided into clans and septs). We can draw an even more direct analogy between Republican Italy and a modern people: Rome was built by Italians. Italians today clearly have nationalism, but also have nested identities. So, Italians today are very loyal to their city, and the Sienese are even loyal to their ancestral neighborhood. In some regions, there is intense nationalism for the north of Italy, and finally there is loyalty to Italy itself.

Like Rome, or Britain, loyalty in Italy today is a mix of ethnic and civic. It is possible for a Napolitano to become Veneziano (hypothetically…), just as it is possible for the son of Berber Jews to become ethno-nationalistically French. And yet “Venetians” are understood to have a common history, a common dialect, and a distinct appearance. Italian cities and regions have ethnic ties which are mediated through civic identities, but those civic identities are given life by ethnic ties. Similarly, the Roman Republic was an organization of a people, connected by ties of ancestry and culture, even though Roman citizenship was not legally defined in terms of shared ancestry.

By the late Republic, the Roman ethnic-identity had somewhat simplified, by becoming largely co-extensive with Italian origin. Thus, in the records we have, we find numerous “snide remarks” by Romans to the many peoples of the Mediterranean (Gauls, Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, Spaniards, Africans, Sardinians, Germans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Persians, Thracians, etc.), and yet there is little ill said of any Italians (except for the occasional jibe at the Etruscans).⁸

By this time, the Italians had come to be seen as one common community. Thus, Livy presents the Campanians, in their apologies for disloyalty in the second punic war, as claiming good treatment by Rome due to their “consanguinity.”⁹ Similarly, Polybius presents the Campanian Mamertines as pleading for Roman support against Syracuse on grounds of “homophily.” The historian Vellieus, in the time of Tiberius, explained the social war as motivated by allies’ resentment at Rome for treating them as “aliens” despite their shared “gentis et sanguinis.” At least by the time of the Empire, it was so obvious that Italians were fundamentally Roman that withholding citizenship from them was unfair. The Socii named their capital “Italica,” and its coins depicted the Italian bull goring the Roman Wolf. Rome, by building the Italians into a military and commercial superpower, had created an Italian nation that it could no longer unilaterally control.¹⁰

Now, the enfranchisement of all Italy certainly put a strain on the Roman self-conception in terms of shared genous, given the diverse ancestry of pre-Christian Italy. Consider: Cato sometimes explained the traits of Romans as tracing to their descent from the hardy Sabines. And yet, by Cato’s time, the senate had incorporated the wealthy elites of all the Italian peninsula. One way the Romans got around this problem was by lying. So, Italian aristocrats of the late republic fabricated genealogies for themselves to tighten their ties to the heroes of the Roman past. Modern historians have thus described Roman ethnic identity as having a “strikingly heterogenous, even labyrinthine character.” The Romans were greatly concerned with “descent,” and yet “traced no single chain that gave a linear quality to their lineage… They took pride in multiple origins” and were a “conglomerate” of “repeatedly renegotiated identities.”¹¹

And yet, the “labyrinthine” views of the Imperial-era historians were not pure fraud or anachronism; there was a pre-existing connection between Italians¹² that was already apparent in the middle-republic. Thus, Polybius, in the Second Century B.C. described the strength of the Roman state as the strength of these Romanized Italians acting in defense of their homeland.¹³ He explained the superiority of Roman infantry to Carthaginians thus:

[A]s regards military service on land the Romans are much more efficient [than the Carthaginians]. They indeed devote their whole energies to this matter, whereas the Carthaginians entirely neglect their infantry, though they do pay some slight attention to their cavalry. The reason of this is that the troops they employ are foreign and mercenary, whereas those of the Romans are natives of the soil and citizens. So that in this respect also we must pronounce the political system of Rome to be superior to that of Carthage, the Carthaginians continuing to depend for the maintenance of their freedom on the courage of a mercenary force but the Romans on their own valour and on the aid of their allies. Consequently even if they happen to be worsted at the outset, the Romans redeem defeat by final success, while it is the contrary with the Carthaginians. For the Romans, fighting as they are for their country and their children, never can abate their fury but continue to throw their whole hearts into the struggle until they get the better of their enemies… Now not only do Italians in general naturally excel Phoenicians and Africans in bodily strength and personal courage, but by their institutions also they do much to foster a spirit of bravery in the young men.

You can see here that “Rome” was already a grouping along basically ethnic lines: it was a polity of Italians to pursue their collective interest, and its traits depended on the Italians’ traits.

So, the genius of Rome was not that Roman citizenship was untied to ancestry. Instead, its genius was its power to change which ethnocultural ties defined membership. Rome began as one community against the other Latins, and then it was Latin against other Italians, and then it was Italian against everyone else.

In the early empire, we can see Roman-Italian ethnic self-comprehension in its mature form. Thus Juvenal, writing in the late first century, sees all Italians as basically co-ethnics, and sees foreignness in Greeks and (even more so) eastern-mediterraneans. By this time, the city had become significantly non-Italian in origin, causing Juvenal great… consternation:

That race most acceptable now to our wealthy Romans, That race I principally wish to flee, I’ll swiftly reveal, And without embarrassment. My friends, I can’t stand A Rome full of Greeks, yet few of the dregs are Greek! For the Syrian Orontes has long since polluted the Tiber, Bringing its language and customs, pipes and harp-strings, And even their native timbrels are dragged along too, And the girls forced to offer themselves in the Circus. Go there, if your taste’s a barbarous whore in a painted veil. See, Romulus, those rustics of yours wearing Greek slippers, Greek ointments, Greek prize medallions round their necks.¹⁴

The Decay of the Roman Ethno-Cultural Identity

After the end of the republic, the ethnic character of Roman citizenship faded away.

Earlier, in the last decades of the republic, ethnic conflict had ceased to be the primary political- or military divide in society, as factions came to be defined by loyalty to individual generals or political factions,¹⁵ rather than to communities and kings. In such a world, admission to full citizenship became a tool for patronage or other public policy, rather than a manifestation of ethno-cultural ties. Under empire, the Romans, stripped of self-government, could no longer protect their ancestral privileges from dilution. The emperors often found the expansion of citizenship to be a useful tool. In a few cases, they might even citizenship out of sincere, Lib-Dem idealism.

The process of patronage-motivated-expansion began even before the Principate, with the Lex Roscia in 49 B.C. By that law, Caesar granted citizenship to Transpadana - the Po valley, which was inhabited by Gauls at the time. [It is generally believed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Roscia)) that the law was passed to reward the Gauls’ loyalty to Caesar in his wars against Pompey (and to secure that loyalty for further wars).

A particularly striking sign of the shift from ethnic-citizenship under self-governing Rome to purely civic Romanness under autocracy is memorialized in the Lyon tablet. That tablet records a senate speech, in which the (genuinely liberal and idealistic!) emperor Claudius argues for allowing trans-Alpine gauls into the senate, and chides his senators for their small-minded and chauvinist resistance:

Of course, I can foresee the objection which will arise in everyone’s mind [to lettting transalpine Gauls into the senate]… But do not rebel against [my proposal], and do not regard it as a dangerous novelty. Look instead at how many changes have taken place in this city, and how, from the origin, the forms of our Republic have varied….

…Undoubtedly, by a new custom, the divine Augustus… wanted all the flower of the coloniae and the municipium… to be admitted to this assembly. But what? Isn’t an Italian senator preferable to a provincial senator? What I think on this point, I will show… but I do not think that the inhabitants of the provinces should be excluded from the Senate, if they can do it honour.

[Claudius lists some distinguished senators from beyond the Alps]

All these distinguished young men on whom I cast my eyes, you do not regret seeing them among the senators any more, than Persicus, a man of noble race and my friend, do not regret reading on the portraits of his ancestors the name Allobrogic¹⁶! If, then, you agree with me that this is the case, what else is there left for you to wish for, other than I make you touch with your finger the soil itself, beyond the boundary of the province of Narbonne, sending you senators, while we have no reason to repent counting people from Lyon among the members of our order? With hesitation, it is true, Conscript Fathers, I stepped out beyond the provincial boundary you know and with which you are familiar; but it is time to openly plead the cause of Long Haired Gaul. If I am accused of this war it waged for ten years against the divine Julius, I would counter with a hundred years of inviolable loyalty and devotion in many of the critical circumstances in which we found ourselves. When Drusus, my father, subdued Germania, they ensured his safety by keeping the country behind him in profound peace, and however, when he was called to this war, he was busy making the census in Gaul, a new operation and out of the habits of the Gauls. We know too well how difficult this operation still is for us, even though it involves nothing other than publicly establishing the state of our resources!…

In many ways, Claudius’ views are admirable. And thus, his speech is often lauded by classicists today.¹⁷

And yet, it is hard not to separate Claudius’ attitude from the viewpoint of an autocrat. Claudius, a representative of the top-down state, is in conflict with the prior order. The older senators prefer a senate and polity defined by thick ties: land, ancestry, history, gods. To them, the state exists to serve the interests of a particular community, and is a bottom-up manifestation of the community’s collective interests. Claudius does not view things that way. Instead, Claudius represents the new top-down state, which sees none of its subjects as fundamentally different from the others. His state is not a bottom-up development, and so sees no need for pre-institutional ties.

The new state views its subjects from above, rather than from within. Under the top-down view, foreignness is irrelevant to inclusion (“Allobrogic!”). Caring about that is bigoted, and small-minded: because foreignness is unrelated to the state as an organization. To the top-down state, citizenship is purely a concern of an institution (the state), which exists for its own purposes. Thus, inclusion in the senate is a proper reward for helping the government in a pinch.

Unfortunately, the top-down Roman state did not retain the kindly, responsible liberalism of Claudius. Aside from a string of five good emperors, and a smattering of other responsibles (such as Titus) the Roman emperors were a series of extractive warlords, slowly consuming the loyalty, homonoia, and institutional structure that centuries of republic had fostered.

And so, eventually, citizenship ceased to have any real weight whatsoever. The final blow came with the Edict of Caracalla in 212, whereby that emperor granted citizenship to all free residents of the empire’s lands. It is generally understood that the edict was passed simple to make these subjects easier to tax.

Why am I Bothering to Talk About This

Now, why am I writing this? Was it really because of tweets? There is no reason to care about Tweets. The trouble is that these tweets are based on ostensibly reputable scholarship, which gives a misleading impression of how Rome thrived. Consider some (very slightly exaggerated) statements by Mary Beard, the grande dame of Roman scholarship today. According to her:

[The Romans] redefined the word ‘Latin’ so that it was no longer an ethnic identity but a political status unrelated to race or geography. This set the stage for a model of citizenship and ‘belonging’ that had enormous significance for Roman ideas of government, political rights, ethnicity and ‘nationhood’

Other classicists have stressed the Romans’ “inclusiveness, the unprecedented willingness of Romans to take new members into their community and share the privileges of citizenship with them.”

Brett Devereaux, a military historian who teaches at NC State and blogs constantly, has stated that “‘Roman’ was at its core a legal status, defined by citizenship which marked membership in a community.”

Beard is more nuanced than her peers, and better captures the nuance in the nature of Roman identity.

Romans were as xenophobic and ethnocentric as any people there’s ever been; they look at the streets of Rome and say, ‘Too many bloody Syrians.’ When the Emperor Claudius thinks he will allow people from Gaul to become senators, he has a big backlash of people saying: ‘We don’t want those f—— Gauls in here.’

Thus, Beard understands ‘Romanness” as rather like “Britishness, Scottishness, or Europeanness,” “a bit like the American dream.”

Beard wisely captures the nuance - there was a Roman civic identity that emerged, and “Roman citizen” was not a purely ethnic signifier. And yet ethnicity, blood-and-soil ties to the gentes of Plebeians and Patricians, was core to Romanness, just as ethnic ties have always been central to Britain.

So Beard’s rather liberal, cosmopolitan, and optimistic statements can be reframed: The Roman state arose as the project by which a collection of families, tied by blood and soil through the institutions of a single city (the Romans), dominated their neighbors (the Latins). They did this in order to hoard resources within the dominant families/city. The state secured loyal service because it was built on meaningful pre-institutional ties. However, the family-based identity of the Romans was closely tied to their civic institutions, so the state could legally reshape the Roman identity around broader ethnic ties when political exigencies demanded.

This expansion and reshaping of Romanness was a remarkable feat; one at which the Greek institutions failed when faced with the same challenge. The background conditions for Greek-unification were at least as favorable as those in Italy. Writings of any Hellenistic-era Greek will show that panhellenic sentiment was strong.¹⁸ And, history would vindicate the panhellenists: eventually the Greeks would be united (with Macedonians) as the privileged caste of the vast empires of the Diadochi.¹⁹ However, the Greek institutions were not up to the task of expansion. Unlike Rome, the Greek poleis were incapable of expanding without losing cohesian. Thus, a Periclean Greek might call himself an “Athenian” or “Rhodian,” but never a “Delian.”²⁰

This difference from other poleis (like Athens) allowed the Roman coalition, while remaining an ethnic coalition, to expand far beyond what one city could conquer. So, once the Romans had dominated the Latins, they integrated them as equals (more or less) in the Roman state, in order to dominate more-distant peoples. Then, with Latin support (and the help of other allies), they dominated Italy, culminating with the conquest of Greek-speaking Tarentum in 272. They then integrated the Italians, and incorporated them in the Roman state in order to dominate further outsiders. This final process culminated in the social war, when the Italians claimed their rights to equality in the SPQR. Since the Italians were now organized under the Roman military system, they were as militarily capable as Romans, and could thus claim their place as equals. The Roman-Italic identity remained key to the Roman identity for some time. “Roman” came to be contrasted with Greek, Syrian, or Gallic, rather than with Volscian, Faesuelean, Sabine or Etruscan.

However, this expanding-process didn’t survive the transition to empire. As citizenship lost its ethnic dimension, civic ties didn’t transform, they broke. For centuries, “Romanness” had been a privilege proudly held by the unified people who militarily dominated their neighbors. With the empire, ethnic and civic factions ceased to be important, militarily. The citizen-army of the early republic was replaced by a professional soldiery which had enough institutional cohesion to mold recruits from anywhere into Roman soldiers.²¹ Thus the portion of Italians in the legions starkly declined over the 1st and 2nd centuries. Lacking military importance, Rome’s “citizens” no longer had the leverage to hoard their special privileges, and citizenship expanded according to the state’s immediate needs. Slowly, Romanness ceased to be any type of unified grouping, and came to represent nothing more than a series of past policy-judgments. Under such conditions, it is no mystery that Romanness ceased to command any sense of loyalty from Rome’s citizen-subjects, and government fell to anyone who could convince enough legionnaires that he could given them booty and land.²²

So, in complete, context, the purely civic citizenship of the late principate, lauded today as a triumph of open-mindedness, is not so aspirational as it seems. The Romans did not discover a form of civic unity divorced from ethnocultural ties. Instead, the transformation of Romanness from an ethno-cultural label to a purely civic identity was its hollowing, as civic unity lost political significance.

Eventually, even the civic institutions lost all meaning. The SPQR (a military government ruling the Mediterranean world) ceased to have any real tie to the SPQR (a city and its deliberative body). The capital could move to Milan, or Istanbul, as was needed by the military organization that now ruled for its own sake. The senate could be staffed with the emperor’s friends and lackeys because its administrative and legislative responsibilities had been eliminated. The people could be pacified with a grain dole, and eventually that dole could cease, because the people didn’t have any leverage over the military-institution that was the real power in the world.

And then Rome fell.

1. (along with a few others, such as the right to contract) ↩

2. It’s at the end of the preface of his histories. ↩

3. It is remarkable the degree to which that view was vindicated by modern genetics. ↩

4. Erich Gruen, Ethnicity in the Ancient World – did it Matter?, Chapter 5. ↩

5. Even the Greeks of Magna Graecia were significantly latinized by the Social war. Thus, inscriptions from the period in some Greek cities came to be primarily in Latin (though other cities, like Naples, were slower to change). https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/1996.12.03/#:~:text=In%20many%20cases%20the%20inscriptions,L. ↩

6. If we look beyond Italy (where all were citizens), the late SPQR had several degrees of political-membership. The first were true citizens. The second were “Latini,” meaning those with the Latin Rights. By this time, all Italians were citizens, so the “Latin rights” were actually not found in Latium. Instead, many of those with Latin rights were the people called “coloni:” those living in cities (mostly) populated by the descendents of Romans and Auxiliaries who had settled in conquered territory. After the “latins,” there were the “socii,” or allies, with the power to attain citizenship through military service. Finally, there were the “provinciales” - conquered subject peoples. In the later republic, status as a provinciale was nearly universal outside Italy (except among coloni). Thus, we see in the late Republic a pattern quite similar to 338: citizenship expanded to those similar to Latins when the empire began to rule people very different from Latins. ↩

7. Cicero described rather eloquently the emotional commitments of a Roman with a “dual civitas.” ↩

8. Id., Chapter 4 Section III. ↩

9. Id. at Chapter 4, Section II. ↩

10. Accordingly, it is not unreasonable to see the social war as a war of nationalist unification. Ancient Italy resembles the modern nations of France, Germany, and Italy, which grew out from the Ile de France, Prussia, and Piedmont-Sardinia. It especially resembles France, where the culture and institutions of the mature nation were so tightly tied to a single region of the pre-unification era. ↩

11. Erich Gruen, Ethnicity in the Ancient World – did it Matter? Chapter 4, Intro. ↩

12. Or, at least among Italics. Italy had many peoples who were not quite as easily folded into Italian nationalism as the truly “Italic” peoples who dominated the middle of the peninsula. Most importantly, the Greeks of Magna Graecia in the south had a virile culture that long resisted Latinization. It is hard to tell at this distance exactly how these Greeks fit into the Roman self-image in the late Republic. The Romans often contrasted themselves with “Greeks,” but the Greeks of Apulia, Calabria and Campania were significantly Latinized by that time. ↩

13. Polybius was a nobleman of Arcadian origin who lived in Rome under a quasi-enslaved status as a political hostage. He is among my personal favorite ancient writers, alongside Thucydides and Aristotle. ↩

14. Juvenal’s remarks on the large numbers of Syrians in Rome are paralleled by the genetic record, which shows a great number of easterners in the city of the late empire. These peoples eventually disappeared from the Italian genetic record, since they were concentrated in urban areas, and urban areas have always been population-sinks. ↩

15. These factions were generally divided by social class, and are traditionally called the Optimates and Populares. However, one shouldn’t overemphasize the importance of ideology or party in late Republican politics. Often, the “optimate” and “populare” labels seem little more than veneers legitimizing the claims of individual generals whose true power lay in the loyalty of their legions (e.g. Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Antony & Pompey, but also Pompey Strabo, Cinna, Agrippa etc.). As far as I can tell, the doomed legions of Thapsus and Phillippi were the closest things to ideologically motivated forces in the late Republican world. And they lost. ↩

16. Use of this particular name is likely a reference to a famous speech by Cicero wherein he impeached some Gallic witnesses named Allobroges by noting the (alleged) vicious qualities of Gauls. ↩

17. Especially by Mary Beard ↩

18. Panhellenism is most famously tied to Isocrates, but I find several of its more interesting exemplar’s in Xenophon’s Anabasis. There, in the Greeks’ interacting with foreigners, one sees a consistent assumption that Greeks are a team. Xenophon describes a war against Thracians as “in the interests of the Hellenes, and with such happy result that the Hellespontine cities, of their own accord, were eager to contribute funds for the support of [it].” Separately, the general Clearchus defends his behavior to the Greek troops by saying, “Never shall it be said of me by any one that, having led Greek troops against the barbarians… I betrayed the Hellenes, and chose the friendship of the barbarian. No!… Whatever betide, I will share your fate. I look upon you as my country, my friends, my allies; with you I think I shall be honoured, wherever I be.” In Isocrates, panhellenism is a project, or a goal. In Xenophon, it is a background assumption: everyone knows that Greeks will be, generally speaking, loyal to other Greeks. Later, the Seleucid empire was sustained by continuous waves of Greek and Macedonian colonists who served the dynasty in exchange for land in the levant. ↩

19. I know it is considered disreputable to say this, but the reason for the privileged Greek position in the Hellenistic empires is quite obviously that the Greeks were militarily superior to Egyptians and Asians. Emperors gave them a privileged position because emperors needed Greeks. ↩

20. (unless, of course, he was from the small island of Delos. My point is that no one was ever that loyal to the Delian league). In the same way, a modern would never describe himself as a “European Unioner” or a “NATOan.” He would perhaps be European, but he would much more likely to describe himself as Spanish or French. ↩

21. Eventually, the recruits came from beyond Rome’s borders, as the foederati replaced the legions as the chief force in Rome’s continuous wars. Under such conditions, it is hard to imagine how the empire could have survived. ↩

22. I should note: throughout the first two centuries of the Principate, the old notions and institutions still held serious weight: the senate could place a man on the throne, and the emperors were often devoutly loyal to Rome itself. Overwhelmingly, emperors were of old-stock Roman blood. By the third century this was no longer the case. Pertinax was the first emperor without clear Italic descent (he was the son of a freedman). The first long-lasting emperor to not be of Italic origin was Severus, who was a Libyan of Punic descent and equestrian rank. After that, few of the emperors were Italian. ↩

---

<

Previous Post

The Political Economy of the Capital / Labor Trade

>

Blog Archive

Archive of all previous blog posts