Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Citizenship

Ordinarily, in the ancient Mediterranean world, the basic polit ical entity was the city and its surrounding territory. You were a citizen of, if anything, a city, like Rome or Athens, and typi cally this meant the city of your parents. There was relatively little geographical mobility, and citizenship did not normally take account of immigration. The growth of Rome into a large empire (in the sense of a conquering power) almost necessar ily complicated this picture. Moreover, the Romans introduced some additional twists of their own. In the days of the monarchy and early Republic, Rome was one of a number of communities in the west central Italian region of Latium that shared various features of religion, law, and language. (This is why people called “Romans” spoke a language called “Latin.”) The residents of the various Latin cit ies retained formally independent citizenships, but the lines did blur somewhat. Latins could engage in marriages and com mercial dealings in a way normally restricted to persons who shared the same citizenship. It was even possible to gain full rights in another Latin community (including voting rights) simply by moving there. As Rome grew stronger, the links among the other Latin communities were broken down, but each one remained individually tied to Rome (minus the right to move there). This made Latin status a kind of halfway ver sion of Roman citizenship. At the same time, Rome was slowly conquering a number of other states throughout Italy. After their various military victories, the Romans organized their

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