Citizenship and Its Alternatives

Abstract

This chapter attempts to provide a model for connecting the history of personal status with the history of governmentality. It traces a process that begins with intrusions of Roman citizens into the eastern provinces and ends, perhaps paradoxically, with provincial subjects asserting their rights. The two processes, the chapter argues, are connected, though not in the ways that current scholarship on citizenship might lead one to expect. The Roman state, largely for pragmatic and fiscal reasons, was highly concerned with the inequities that emerged from waves of privileged citizens acquiring large amounts of wealth and, perhaps more important, engaging in brutal behavior with respect to subject populations. Subject populations were similarly concerned and developed, in collaboration with Roman governors, a robust language for protecting their rights—the language of subjecthood.

Connectivity and Disconnectivity in the Roman Empire

“…9.2.3 (ext); Memnon of Heraclea Pontica 31.9 (= FGH III B, p. 352, lines 16–21). See also Bryen 2021 on the power to abuse as a privilege of Roman citizenship.…”