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Chapter 2

Polis and Republic

The Price of Misunderstanding

One precondition for the study of a problem like the nature of religion in the Greco-Roman world is to know well the historical context of the object of study. This is not a matter solely of contextualizing one’s analysis by situating it within some field of academic debate, but also, with equal rigor, of contextualizing the ancient sources that one cites. No one would be so ridiculous as to explain the findings of archaeologists in their samplings by reference to contemporary material culture, but this is what happens in certain studies of ancient religion. The resulting misinterpretations are numerous, and I will consider some examples of this kind. They concern not only matters of detail, of the kind about which this or that specialist or group of specialists might disagree, or disagreements about method. They concern, rather, fundamental and general disagreements.

These errors are frequently attributable to the separation between different fields of scholarship. The Greeks of the philosophers are not those of the historians; the Romans read by patristic scholars and theologians generally have little to do with those of the historians and archaeologists. During the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Vernant had such an impact because, in order to treat a question, he drew upon the different sciences of the study of antiquity: philosophy, history, philology, the history of art, economics, social history, and anthropology. Nor was his research on religion detached from more recent scientific developments. He encouraged comparative study, by inviting all scholars who worked on antiquity to participate in a given research project. This methodological advance has not found an opening in certain areas of study: in philosophy, literature, or theology, and in the German university system, for example, it is largely unknown and always provokes surprise and perhaps even suspicion. The results of Vernant’s research of this kind are today judged by one or another discipline, such as philology or epigraphy or theology, and often the specialists do not find anything to interest them, quietly regarding the social conduct of the Greeks as brought to light by Vernant and his collaborators as of little interest to their own projects or little relevance to the history of Greece in general. This is because they do not understand what Vernant was talking about.

What Is a Roman City?

It is the same with the problems that I am seeking to explore. The main contributors to the debate have only a very vague idea of what an ancient city-state was and, hence, of the way in which individuals integrated themselves in society. It is not a particularly innovative methodological move to suppose at the outset that this is not a historical problem, or to say that this question is not one that needs to be posed, because the form of the civic community has no particular relationship to actual society. If we deconstruct the arguments used to defend this position, we find once again the old theory of the decadence of the ancient city after Chaeronea, after the fall of Athens under the blows of Macedon and the advent of the Hellenistic age. Thereafter, the city as civic community would have dissolved into larger structures. It is significant that all authors admit that the system of polis-religion was in fact able to function in the framework of the archaic Greek city-states and in Rome of earliest times. Later, in each case, the world and society would have changed to such an extent that city and citizen would no longer have been the principal units of social interaction, but the individual confronted with a distant power.

Often, historians establish a direct link between the Hellenistic and Roman empires and the form of religious practice.¹ And always, polis-religion is relegated to the archaic period. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, by contrast, polis-religion would have been weakened and defeated at the same as the traditional city-states were, and the lonely individual would have henceforth made his or her own religious choices from among the totality of cults and gods offered thanks to the opening of the Mediterranean. More precisely, it would have been from the fourth century BCE that the evolution and differentiation of religious choices in the Mediterranean world would have led to the collapse of civic religion, which would have been unable to integrate the new options.² Then, commencing with the triumviral period through the last quarter of the first century CE, deviations in public life from earlier norms in public religion would have become obvious. These deviations revealed the diversification of the religious system and provoked ongoing reevaluation of the role of cults in society. Put another way, according to these people, the history of religion in antiquity is actually the history of the destabilization and dissolution of civic religion, which was unable to coexist with social structures that exceeded a certain level of complexity.

The Myth of the Decline of the City

Let us examine these claims in detail. For the moment, it suffices to recall that the modern myth of the decline and disappearance of city-states in favor of more complex systems was long ago denounced and corrected by Louis Robert, Philippe Gauthier, and numerous other historians. One can admit without difficulty that one phase in the history of city-state civilization ended when foreign kings, in the form of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, and their successors came to dominate Greek lands. Henceforth, city-states were no longer able to have an autonomous foreign policy or, in other words, to make war and choose their enemies and allies on their own. Also, for a while, it was equally impossible for them to freely choose their own magistrates. But beyond these restrictions, Greek city-states continued to be Greek city-states, functioning and evolving according to the model of the so-called classical city. The Macedonian and Hellenistic monarchies did not have the means wholly to control the city-states, and the citizens of the Greek city-states did not become members of the Macedonian or Seleucid monarchies to which they were subordinated. They remained citizens of Athens, Thebes, Rhodes, or Ephesus, and they conducted themselves as such. What was terminated in the fourth century BCE was the age of the myth of the Greek city. One could compare what happened to the Greeks with that which occurred in Europe after the First and even more after the Second World War. The age of the absolute preeminence of Europe was then ended. The myth of Europe, the leader of the world and of civilization, still exists and, from time to time, particular European states pretend that nothing has changed. But the facts are there. Henceforth, world politics and economic life are shaped by other states and continents. And yet, who would say that the European states have been dissolved? That they are in full decline, together with the entirety of European culture? That one can no longer analyze France, for example, in light of its constitution, society, and culture?

Similarly, the Greeks continued to the end of antiquity to live in city-states and to order life according to this model. City-states evolved, as they had evolved from the sixth to the fourth century BCE; they came to employ a backwards-looking rhetoric and lamented the passing of that glorious age when they had dictated terms to the king of Persia. But this did not prevent them from being passionate about the political debates that took place in their city-states, before and after the Macedonian or Roman conquest.

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 in the second third of the second century, for example, an alien’s obtaining of Roman citizenship implied no diminution of taxes, fees, or duties arising from the customs or laws of one’s city of origin.⁶ The new citizen saw no modification as regards his situation interior to his little fatherland. He retained his obligations there and benefited in return from the possibility of living according to local law. Christopher Jones has written about Athenian Roman citizens of this era: they were local magistrates, preserved the family law of aristocratic families of Athens, and settled some of their disputes before local tribunals, according to Athenian law.⁷

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.