Was Rome A Polis

Was Rome a Polis?
Author(s): Clifford Ando

Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Apr., 1999), pp. 5-34
Published by: University of California Press
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CLIFFORD ANDO
Was Rome a polis?
I. INTRODUCTION
Ancient models of cross-cultural contact under theRoman empire are notori
ously simplistic. The observations of Tacitus on Britain andFlorus on Spain-that
theRomans encouraged thenatives to live in cities on level ground, towear togas,
and to speakLatin-are typical of Roman reflection on the topic.' Both Romans
andGreeks asserted, however, thatRome's relationswith Greece took place on a
different level and that between them cultural influence flowed in the opposite
direction. Although philhellenism occasionally became controversial in political
life at Rome, especially in the second century B.C., it did so in part because the
dominant tendency was not to question the seductive sophistication of Greek
culture.2This dominant view was best expressed by Horace: "ConqueredGreece
conquers thewild victor and introduces her arts into rusticLatium."3
By asserting the superiority of Greek culture, advocates of this position
deflected attention away fromGreek subjugation to a foreign power; in so doing,
theymust have comforted Greeks unaccustomed to subservience to anyone other
than their fellow Greeks.4 Modem scholars have proved largely complicit in
thatproject, emphasizing the superiority of Hellenic culture as though thatwere
Earlier versions of thispaperwere delivered at Princeton University, York University, and theAnnual
Meeting of the APA. I thankmembers of the audiences on those occasions for their comments,
particularly Jonathan Edmondson and Peter Brown. For instruction on earlier drafts I am indebted
to Erich Gruen, Sabine MacCormack, Gary Miles, Jeremy Trevett, Phiroze Vasunia, and a reader
for this journal.
1. Tac. Agr. 21.1-2; Florus 2.33.59-60.
2. On the history of this problem in second-century Rome see Gruen 1990:158-92 and 1992.
3. Horace Epist. 2.1.156-57; cf. Cicero Brut. 73.254.
4. On Greek acceptance of the domination of powerful (Greek) states andmonarchs over other
less powerful cities, Greek and otherwise, see Austin 1986:454-56.
1999
BY THE
REGENTS
OF THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA.
ISSN0278-6656(p); Io67-8344 (e).

CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
Volume 18/No. I/April 1999
sufficient compensation for the hegemony of Rome. Yet Hellenistic kings prior
to the second Macedonian war never regardedRoman conquest as inevitable:
indeed, one might argue thatmany Greeks of the late thirdcentury B.C. assumed
that they could defeat Rome precisely because of their superiority in all branches
of political and cultural endeavor. The conquest of the easternMediterranean
therefore demanded explanation, and all themore so for the astonishing speed
with which Rome accomplished it.The explanations for, and narratives of, Roman
conquest had ramifications that reached farbeyond the narrow confines of ancient
scholarly endeavor, whether in historiography or political philosophy. Political
circumstances and post-colonial angst have conspired to produce rigorous and
well-crafted studies on the geistige Widerstand gegen Rom;5Greek intellectual
and emotional accommodation toRoman rule, particularly in the late Republic
and age of Augustus, has received less attention.6 Yet that latter process must
have shaped contemporary narratives of the past: as Greeks grew willing to
direct their patriotism and nationalistic aspirations towardsRome, they required
an intellectual model of the empire that could exonerate, even justify, their
participation in its political institutions.
The basis of this intellectual accommodation calls for investigation not least
because research of the last century has so deepened our knowledge of life in
theGreek East at a religious, political, and institutional level. The last several
years have seen thepublication of largeand sophisticated regional surveys, but the
empiricism that informs theseworks seemingly constrains them to view and to de
scribe surviving data exclusively as the result of concrete actions.7The revolution
inGreek political consciousness that took place during this renaissance inGreek
urban culture has not received similarly detailed study.8Yet theGreeks' willing
ness to integrate particular instantiations of Roman power into civic institutions
and to accommodate imperial cult within their individual pantheons must have
been preceded by a conceptual model allowing such integration. Greek actions
following Roman conquest-seeking priesthoods in the imperial cult or Roman
citizenship or meeting with Roman officials, to say nothing of describing such
5. Fuchs 1938; cf. Gauger 1980 and Swain 1996. On the social trends inwhich these studies
participate seeMomigliano 1986:103-104.
6. Felicitous exceptions include Jones 1971:122-30; Gabba 1982 and 1984; Eckstein 1985,
1990, and 1995: 8-27 and 194-236; Stern 1987; Erksine 1990:181-204; Rogers 1991;Woolf 1993;
and Shaw 1995.
7. Sartre 1991,Millar 1993, Mitchell 1993, and Sartre 1995.
8. Swain 1996 is an important exception, but that work fundamentally misunderstands the
causal link-apparent even to contemporaries-between Greek classicism and Roman rule. See
Hidber 1996:75-81 and 117-23: Dionysius proposes Hellenic paideia as themeans to unite Greeks
and Romans culturally, while admitting that his ambition is capable of realization because of what
Augustus and theRomans had achieved politically. Similarly, the Panhellenion gave expression to
Hellenic identity, and gave rise to much research into classical history, but its focus was on the
relationship between theGreek people and theirRoman emperor.Greek in inspiration, its existence
and content were inconceivable without Rome: see Jones 1996 andBirley 1997:217-20.
ANDO:Was Rome a polis?
deeds in the language of honorific decrees-presupposed amental geography that

assigned individuals and institutions their own place in the greaterwhole.
The creation of suchmaps ormodels must have been largely subconscious,
but they find expression in themetaphors throughwhich Greeks articulated their
understanding of the structure of the Roman state. But the language of Greek
historians seeking to understandRoman Italy is not merely, perhaps not even, a
reflection of the realities of life on the Italian peninsula. Rather, that language
springs from and can reveal theconceptual system thatordered reality and assessed
the boundaries of the possible for Greeks under Roman rule.9 Of course, the
Greeks did not share a single "conceptual system," nor could the parameters of
their systems
in a paper of this scope. This essay argues for amethod
be elucidated
of researchingGreek accommodation toRoman rule by investigating themodels

throughwhich they understood Rome, her empire, and theirplace within it.
Constructing a history of this process poses certainmethodological difficul
ties, for which I advance only tentative solutions. Intellectual history-in this
case, of Greek misunderstandings accomplished through flawed metaphorical
construal-does not proceed at the pace of political events, and is thus suscep
tible neither to the same periodization nor to similar narratives of causation. It
is easy enough to suggest thatGreeks of the second century B.C. viewed Rome
and her empire as two distinct entities, apolis thatconqueredmany territoriesand
an empire thatpossessed no more affective cohesion than aHellenistic kingdom.
Likewise, I can assert thatGreeks of the second century A.D. had come to view
the city and its empire
with Rome
as a unified whole,
as a single polis
embrac
ing innumerable fields and villages.'0 This shift was obviously profound. But the
fourhundredyears separating theseperiods display no simple progression. Indeed,
Greeks of the lateRepublic proposed several differentmodels of Rome andher em
pire, and the gradual consensus favoring the second of the views described above
resulted from a harmonious if accidental convergence of trends in the political
and intellectual
arenas. This essay
conceives
in three stages.
of this process
The exponents of the varied late-Republicanmodels shared a single method:

to assimilate
each sought
ence and then broadened

cal extension.
In doing
a Roman
institution
to a paradigm
the scope of this archetype

so, Greeks
from Hellenic
through a process
experi
of analogi
B.C. misapplied
of the second and first centuries
the terms and concepts of theirown political forms to those of Rome (Section II).
By using the existing vocabulary of Greek politics, thesemodels masked serious
disjunctures between Greek andRoman definitions of citizenship and community
that Greeks
had to negotiate,
articulating
it. As Mommsen
a form of
even
wrote
as their method
of Greek
LaotnoXLTeia, these approaches
were
attempts
rendered
them incapable
understandable
of
Latin
status as
enough,
but they
to construe
9. On reading metaphor and political language in these terms, see Lakoff and Turner 1980
and Bourdieu 1990:54-55.
10. See Dio 52.19.6, quoted at n. 115.
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
yielded results contrary toRoman conceptions of those same institutions.1'The

examples in this section concentrate on political terminology for two related rea
sons: they illuminate the gap that separatedGreek and Roman political theory,
even as they reveal the depth of Greek misinterpretation. The mapping of fa
miliar conceptual schemata onto the foreign thought-world of Rome, concretized
in term-for-term translations of Latin documents inGreek, was thus based on
false analogies. This is true in spite of the success of such translations, insofar
as the success of a reference-in this case, of applying Greek terminology to
Roman institutions-does not depend on the accuracywith which any given term
mapped the associative network of ideas on which the term and its referentwere
customarily predicated in their respective Greek andRoman contexts.12
Greek efforts to understand Rome were not mere intellectual games. They
possessed personal, political and moral dimensions. In the last decades of the
first century B.C., Augustan rhetoric to the provinces, exemplified in the fifth
Cyrene edict, possessed a universalizing dimension thatmany probably wanted
desperately or cynically to believe. In the same era, Greek historians studying
the integration of Italy after the Social War sought to understand and then to
describe the peninsula and, implicitly, the empire as a united community.Among
the conceptual models available to them, the only paradigm for a collectivity in
which individuals had equal rights and towardwhich they directed theirpatriotic
sentiments was thepolis. Prolonged engagement with, and repeated applications
of, polis-based understandings of Rome inducedGreeks tomake an ontological
commitment to theirmodels: they ceased to employ them as heuristic devices and
came to regard them existentially.13 Between theAugustan age and the second
century, the continuous application of Greek political terminology to institutions
that they did not literally describe forced a shift in the semantic field of the terms
themselves
(Section
"
111).
In the third stage of this process, Greeks' evolving understanding of Roman

institutions changed the interaction between the target and source domains in
thismetaphorical mapping, and ultimately changed the underlying conceptual
I1. Mommsen 1887-1888: vol. 3, part 1, 231 n. 1: "Das der Latiner zu den Romern betrachten
die Griechen vielmehr geradezu als Biirgerrecht (-noX-retLo,LnoXLteLoa),mit Rticksicht auf ihr
Stimmrecht; begreiflich genug, aber entgegen der r6mischen Auffassung."
12. On the success of references requiringmetaphorical construal, see Soskice 1985:50-55.
13. On this process and its dangers see Black 1962:220-42.
14. For a similar problem inRoman political thought, see Thomas 1996, amost elegant essay.
Thomas asks how the traditional idea of a patria could have been extended to such a large and
heterogeneous collectivity as the empire. Thomas begins with Roman juridical categories andwith
the overriding ancient tendency to see cities as both the basic unit of political life and the natural
object for patriotic sentiments. He then shows that innovations in religious and public law of the late
Republic and Augustan age, intendedmerely to extend earlier practice and based on antiquarian
research, in fact deconstructed the very foundations on which theywere intended to build. The result
was a fundamental shift in the notion of the "origin," a dissociating of theRoman people from any
particularized locality: this shift, in turn, allowed the creation of a shared patria, based on a legal
fiction, that transcended traditionalgeographic and ethnic boundaries.
archetype of the political collectivity. Greek cognition developed hand in hand

with Greek linguistic praxis.'5 Describing Rome as a polis eventually required
many Greeks-used to assuming a congruence between polis, patris, and po
liteia-to regardRome as thepolis of the empire (Section IV). For such people,
as for Aelian,
Rome
became
their city, and her laws the laws of their homeland."6
II. ROME FROM A DISTANCE:

SOMETHING STRANGE, FRIGHTFUL, AND MYSTERIOUS
There is every reason to think that the repeated failures of the Hellenistic
monarchs andGreek leagues in the face of Roman aggression were exceptionally
bitter. Greeks had long prided themselves on the power of a united Hellas, and
speakers throughout the text of Polybius urge their fellow Greeks to unite in order
toward off enslavement and depredation at the hands of the barbarians from the
West. 17Particularly notable are the repeatedexhortations by the representativesof
Greek cities urging that all Greeks, "holding hands likemen crossing a river,"
should rally behind theMacedonians, "people of the same race," "who spend their
whole lives fighting barbarians for the safety of theGreeks.""8The Greeks never
did present a united front against Rome, andGreek historians under the empire
repeatedly contrasted the single-minded progress of Rome with the internecine
strife of Greek poleis and of theHellenistic kingdoms.'9 Beginning at least from
the end of the first century
and to praise Roman
erupting
into war.
of this era, Greek
rule:
it alone
orators
this topos to justify
adapted
the rivalry of Greek
prevented
In the third and fourth centuries
a common
this became
from
cities
theme
not only in Jewish texts, but also among Christian authors seeking to findDivine
Providence atwork in the foundation of the empire.20
In blaming their ancestors for allowing their own subjugation, these authors
implicitly suggested that a united Greece might have been able to defend itself
15. See Lakoff and Turner 1989:60-67 and esp. Sweetser 1990:1-13 and 47-48. Sweetser
deploys her theoretical framework in historical inquiries, concerning, inter alia, metaphors for
epistemic processes, thatbrilliantly confirm themerit of that framework.
16.
oyA5ac
See Aelian
8tx0CLW
Hist.
2.38:
a&oycav,
i 8E oCUx aXv 'EtoT.LtLxcl

EL T&
Vv
Aoxp6v
xol
tov
'P0aicd&v
MaaaaXLw&tv
vo4ov;
xiL
t\
xaL
Tca
oCux
MLXkoLWv
&l&
tuTcxuoinovp'Loq &X6yo e'ac; See also 12.25 (8&cxptprL ,UOl

,uv#pirgs06i.niv, t& be
8e\
xotl toucwv [referring to ol.TEXXnveq], r'iye 'P&oVoZto6
e'LV)and 14.45.
17. E.g. Agelaus theAetolian atNaupactus in 217 (5.104), Lyciscus theAcarnanian in Sparta,
late in the spring of 210 (9.34-38), or the speech of an unnamed ambassador to theAetolians in
207 (11.5).
18. For theMacedonians as oyu'Aor, see 9.37.7.
19. E.g. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.3.5 and 5.2; Appian Praef 8.30 and 10.42; cf. Polybius
5.106.3-5, referring only to the Peloponnesians.
20. E.g. Dio Chrys. Or 38-41, on which see Jones 1978:83-94; Pausanias 7.17.4, on which
see Jones 1971:17-18 andHabicht 1985:123; Cassius Dio 52.37.9-10; andHerodian 3.2.8. In later
literature see Augustine Civ. Dei 17.23; John Chrys. Homil. contra Iudaeos et Gentiles 3; and Sefer
Ha-Aggadah 5.92.
ANTIQUITY
CLASSICAL
10
againstRoman aggression. They therefore shared a conception of political life in

which solidarity based on ethnicity claimed second place only to one's loyalty to
thepolis. Between the city of one's origin and one's cultural identity,moreover,
there existed a natural bond. Hellenic solidarity ought, according to the logic
deployed by these admittedly later authors, to have requiredGreeks to give up
fighting each other in order to fight their common foe. That correlation was
so fundamental to classical and Hellenistic political thought thatGreek writers
never developed a vocabulary to describe the result of its breakdown.When, for
example, Posidonius attempted to describe the behavior of individuals during the
massacre of Italians inAsia instigated byMithridates, the narrative strained his
vocabulary: "Of the other Romans, some prostrate themselves before the images
of the gods, while the rest, changing into squared cloaks, identify themselves by
their original
na-tp(q once again."21
Justwhom does Posidonius here label as Roman? Strictly speaking, a person

was Roman
about
only
if he was
to be whipped
v, but only
TPcox,u
a Roman
in Jerusalem,
that he was
citizen.
Thus,
he did not have
for example,
when
Paul was
to say that he held noxeLtov
'P&,IcZtoq.22 Yet I very much
an av6ptnoq
doubt
thatPosidonius here observes such constitutional niceties. Inpractice, Greeks had

difficulty distinguishing Romans and Italians-they were equally un-Greek-and
no doubt many inAsia operated on the same principle as Posidonius: a person
was Roman if he assimilated toRoman customs.23How else could one change his
race by changing his clothes? On thatbasis, the "Romans" in this passage could
easily include Romanizing Greeks wearing togas.24Yet it is just as clear that
as a change
this metamorphosis
describing
violence
in notxpL' does considerable
to the conventional meaning of the term.

Traditional
Greek
categories
of ethnicity
did not aid attempts
to elevate
the
warriors of Rome to near-paritywith theirmore civilized subjects. Dividing the

population of the world into Greeks and others by labeling men as 6o,6?uXot
or aXXYpuXoL
did not tolerate any conceptual interstice in which to accommo
date a more
bellicose,
yet marginally
less civilized
Roman
between
Greek
and
Greeks were, of course, capable of distinguishing ethnic subdivisions

barbarian.25
21. Posidonius fr. 253 Kidd, 11.82-84 (Athenaeus 213B): t&v 8' BXXwv'P uai'v
Ek&V cyo(4XLcZGL lTpOcnTErG')xa7YLV,
apXnS
OL 8E XOlIOL VETU
Lec0qEVOL
TEXpYV
Oi vev
L.tlOCLt TC't
TtaCtpL8Ot T tXLV OVOVai'OUoL.
22. For the former phrase, see Euseb. Hist. Ecl. 5.1.47; for the latter see Acts 22:24-29.
23. This problem found expression, among other things, inGreek astonishment that PWVicLoL
see Kramer 1993.
spoke -i'v Acxtiv&v &&XEXTOV:
24. Cf. Seneca on the rhetorArgentarius, Controv. 9.3.13: illud tamen optima fide praestitit,
cum uterque Graecus esset, ut numquam declamaret, <et> illos semper admiraretur qui, non
[fuerunt] contenti unius linguae eloquentia, cum Latine declamaverant, toga posita sumpto pallio
quasi persona mutata rediebant et Graece declamabant. Argentarius derides this practice precisely
because the change in garb, from toga to pallium, could not alter those facets of one's character
thatwere, in fact, determined by one's patria.
25. On the development of this opposition in the classical period see Hall 1997:40-51.
11
within theGreek world, a process visible in classical andHellenistic diplomacy

and in the formation of fourth-century leagues.26And yet conversation about and
appeals to a unitaryGreek identity tended, after the fashion of all ideologically
charged discourse, to create and thenmaintain polarizing categories, of which the
most obvious was the reductive binarism of Greek and barbarian.27Under this
constraint, theonly route to reconciliationwith Roman rule on ethnic grounds was
that takenby Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Dionysius argued not only thatRomans
had descended from Greeks but thatRome had developed her most admirable
political institutions through the imitation of earlier,more virtuous Greeks.28 In
this he fought an uphill battle: he undertook the project, he said, because Greeks
remained ignorantof the history of thepolis of theRomans: they therefore con
tinued to complain thatTkXr had unjustly bestowed the blessings of theGreeks
upon the basest of barbarians.29
Iwill return toDionysius and his understanding of Roman institutions later,
but I note here three facts about his place in Greek historiography. First, we
must separate Greek scholarly interest in the origins of Rome and the racial
background of the Romans from any meticulous analysis of the structure of
the Roman state: the manipulation of the legendary past within ethnographic
literaturemay be understood as Greek antiquarian interest in the Greek past,
and not as interest
in Roman
history
for its own
sake.30 Earnest
attempts
to in
clude Roman affairswithin the contemporary history of theMediterranean (i.e.,

Greek) world began with Timaeus, whose interest inMagna Graecia naturally led
him to notice the growing power of Rome, and yet Rome fell within his orbit
largely because Rome's involvement in the first Punic War brought her firmly
into themainstream of Sicilian history.3' Second, althoughGreek historians from
Timaeus and Xenagoras throughPosidonius had devoted more and more space
toRoman affairs,Dionysius found his truestpredecessors among cultural histo
rians and grammarians likeHypsicratus of Amisus and Philoxenus of Alexandria,
both of whom attempted to demonstrate thatLatin derived from Greek.32Third,
Dionysius did not persuade anyone. Among other things, he clearly exposed
Hansen 1996b; Beck 1997:165-66.
Hartog 1988:212-30.
1.89.1-2; see Bowersock 1965:131-32 andGabba 1991:190-216.
Dionysius 1.4.2: xaXi o' yE xaXxo0oEsepot
xarTYopeVv cX0AWL , TUXr xauor TO
'
-r&
-cCv'EXXvvv
co?7
fxP3ap'pwv
TcOplvOpeVTayao .
Tcovi)pot&toLq
ycvep'v
30. On Greek ethnographic history the locus classicus is Bickerman 1952. See also Gruen
1992:6-51, and, toward a very different end, Wiseman 1995:43-62. Of course such legends
could serve political ends: Greek cities often manipulated themythical past to establish kinship
(GuyyEveLa)with other cities and in thatway established a racial justification forwholesale grants of
for the connections between these phenomena see Giovannini
honorary citizenship ('ioonoXLTeLot);
1993:277-79 and Curty 1995, who collects extant epigraphical evidence for appeals tomythical
founders in diplomacy of theHellenistic and Roman eras.
31. Momigliano 1966, esp. 44-51.
32. Hypsicrates: FGrH ii B 923. Philoxenus: Cicero Att. 13.8 and Suda b 394. Cf. Suda T
1 85, on Tyrannio the younger.
26.
27.
28.
29.
12
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
himself to the charge that he leveled against others, that of writing a false his
torywhich labeled his patrons as Greek and their enemies as barbarians.33 In
the long run, it was not the category "Greek" thatwould stretch to accommo
date the polyglot population of the empire, a sad fact thatDionysius himself
almost anticipated.34
Dionysius failed in part because he was too ambitious. He tried by a his
toriographical sleight of hand to reconcile Greeks and Romans. In so doing,
he dissented from a long-standing tradition that tied Rome to theGreek world
through the legend of Aeneas. That legend provided Roman and Greek with a
sharedmythological history, to be sure, but certainly not one that could read
ily unite them.35This tradition, as Amaldo Momigliano has shown, reached its
mature state during the Hellenistic period, to provide a historical background
to diplomatic contacts between Rome and the cities of the East.36Of course, it
remained possible for select cities to argue for a close connection with Rome on
thebasis of its putative Trojan past, but the language of ethnicity intrudes in those
cases, too, indeed, is fundamental to them. Thus, when Lampsakos sought an
alliance with Rome after Cynoscephelae, it cited its kinship (auyYEvrELC)
with
theRomans, grounding that claim on littlemore than its location in the Troad.37
Such negotiations over kinship thus treatedonly membership among theGreeks
as questionable and subject to inquiry,while leaving the categoryGreek ontologi
cally intact. If the practical result of manipulating themythological past was to
render the boundary between Greek and non-Greek quite permeable, thatperme
ability was not acknowledged: ideological stresswas rather laid on the existence
of the boundary.
More seriously andmore ambitiously, in aiming at reconciliation Dionysius
departed from the path blazed by his intellectual forbears, Polybius and Posido
nius, with whose
world.
narratives
Reconciliation,
a non-issue.
he intended
for a writer
The growth
of
of the Roman
to join his own in a tripartite history

pr,aX-LX'
empire,
'tL^op'Lasuch as Polybius,
like the evolution
of the
was
of the Roman
33. See Bowersock 1965:108 and Sacks 1990:135.

34. See below (at n. 86) on 2.17.1-2. Thus men did not become Greek merely by participating in
Hellenic culture, as Isocrates hadmaintained (Paneg. 50); rather, theywere discovered already to be
Greek through assimilation to pre-existing legendary genealogies.
35. Cf. Plutarch Flam. 11.4: The Greeks are astonished thatmen of another race (&Xo&(puXoL),
who were believed to have only insignificant traces of a shared ancestry (Evocxu6aaica,Lxpa X0l
.
aLXcoL)
yXLaxpa xoLvWV#,para
yevou; EXeLv8oxoCvte), would undertake such toils to free
Greece from despots and tyrants.See also SEG 30.1073, from 189/8 B.C.: theChians expressed their
friendship with Rome by erecting a monument depicting .iUOOL
np6g 80'aV 'Pca LoLv,namely
the story of Romulus and Remus and their descent from Ares, which was "justly to be regarded
as truebecause of themanly courage of theRomans."
36. Momigliano 1984a, and see the bibliography cited in n. 30.
37. L Lampsakos 4 = Curty 1995, no. 39. Lampsakos seems not to have noticed that its
simultaneous citing of its kinship with Massilia (they were both colonies of Phokaia) rendered its
blood kinship with Rome impossible. Attempts to resolve that contradiction have produced some
ingenious scholarship: see Curty 1995:81-82 and 251.
13
constitution, had takenplace xacx yuaLv, according to nature.38It simply didn't

matter whether one likedRoman rule: thewise statesman, however, would want
to know why it had come about.39
Polybius grounded his explanation forRoman expansion in theparticular form
of theRoman constitution, towhose explication he devoted the sixth book of his
history.40Polybius has risen steadily in the estimation of his readers over the last
several decades: we want to recognize in his sociological inquiry a sophisticated
attempt to escape the cult of personality that so dominated ancient historiography.
Yet his work both stands outside the mainstream of Greek thought and falls
just short of its goal: the "mixed constitution" might have preserved Rome's
internal stability, but it certainly cannot explain the growth of the empire. Nor
do theHistories anywhere address, at least in the extant fragments, the peculiar
permeability of theRoman citizen body that so aroused the curiosity of Polybius'
countrymen. To adapt the comments of Momigliano when he reflected upon the
inadequacy of Polybius as a guide to Greek encounters with Roman culture,
Polybius failed to see Rome "from a distance-as something strange,mysterious
in language and religion, frightful in rituals and formidable inwarfare."'" This
blindness arose, according toMomigliano, because Polybius wished too strongly
to view Rome as amember of the civilized community of theGreek world.42
Momigliano directs our attention to another question that the scope of Alien
Wisdom did not allow him to explore. Given thatPolybius explicitly addressed a
Greek audience, what conceptual categories were available tohim for the analysis
and articulation of his topic?We must answer thatquestion before we consider the
consequences of Polybius' decision within its culturally-determined parameters.
The next section explores Greek attempts to understandRome on analogy with
empires, leagues, and city-states. At a theoretical level, however, the belief that
Rome
can be explained
through
an analysis
of her constitution,
her ntoxt-sea,
in
itself presumes that she is a polis, with institutions and thereforementalities at

some
to Greek
level analogous
of settlements
of meaning,
as poleis
nor did
does
it prevent
cities.43 That Greeks

not require
theoretical
referred
the conclusion
reflection
to a broad
that polis
on the nature
was
range
devoid
of the polis
itself. On the contrary,designating a community as apolis gave it status, implied

38. Polybius 6.9.12-13.
39. On Polybius and Rome, amidst a huge bibliography, seeWalbank 1965, Derow 1979, and
Eckstein 1985.
40. See esp. 1.1.5, 3.2.6, and 6.9.
41. Momigliano 1975:37 and 1942:119-20.
42. Momigliano 1975:37.
43. That Latin had no equivalent for noXtlteLx is well known: see Cicero Att. 7.8.4. Cicero
himself had to employ various circumlocutions to surmount this problem: see Rep. 1.41 (omnis ergo
populus, qui est talis coetus multitudinis qualem exposui, omnis civitas, quae est constitutio populi.
omnis res publica, quae ut dixi populi res est, consilio quodam regenda est, ut diuturna sit) and
Leg. 1.15 (Atqui si quaeris ego quid expectem, quoniam scriptum est a te de optimo rei publicae
statu, consequens esse videtur ut scribas tu idem de legibus).
14
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
its political autonomy, and pointed to a citizen body with a shared commitment
to particular criteria of membership.' But Rome did not resemble any notional
idea of thepolis, neither in its attitude towardmembership, nor in its eagerness
to assimilate conquered populations, nor in its control and use of its colonies.
Polybius was, of course, not alone in seeking and ultimately positing an illusory
similarity between Greeks and Romans. But themanifest superficiality of this
presumptionmasks itsmore serious consequences, both positive and negative. As
a handicap it crippled Polybius in his attempt to explain Roman rule even before
he began; at the same time, it provided a conceptual frameworkwithin which
Greeks could justify theirwholesale participation in imperial culture and political
life.Ultimately itwould also forceGreeks to choose, consciously or not, between
theirpolis of origin and thepolis of their empire.
In their efforts to understand the Roman constitution, Hellenistic Greeks
faced a series of conceptual obstacles logically prior to any attempt to construe
its operation on analogy with Hellenistic models. I focus on two issues and the
terms throughwhich Romans, and subsequentlyGreeks, articulated them, namely,
citizenship and popular sovereignty. In each case, describing the errors committed
by Greeks requires understanding the difference that separatedGreek andRoman
thought on these topics.
We may begin by acknowledging thatGreeks no less thanmodern scholars
wrestled with Latin political terminology.The fact thatGreeks crafted translations
of Roman documents should not be allowed tomask the considerable conceptual
disjunction between their respective political traditions:did Greeks really under
stand thedifference betweenpopulus Romanus and 6o8i,uoq 'Pw iatv? According
toCicero, "the res publica is the respopuli, but a populus is not every crowd of
men,
gathered
for any reason, but a crowd bound by consensual
commitment
to a
particular normative order and by common interest."45The populus Romanus was

thus notionally permeable, open to thosewilling to participate in this consensus,
and yet that consensus constructed the Roman people, in its corporate identity,
as a singular
and homogeneous
collective.46
A Greek
8n,oq,
by contrast, was
an
44. On poleis see Hansen 1996a: 14-34. See also Gauthier 1981:168-72, together with the
review of Hansen's collection by A. Chaniotis and Hansen's reply to that review (BMCR 97.7.16
and BMCR 98.2.7, respectively).
45. Cicero Rep. 1.39.1: "Est igitur" inquitAfricanus "res publica res populi, populus autem
non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et
utilitatis communione sociatus." On this passage see Zetzel 1995 ad loc., as well as Brunt 1988:2
and 326.
46. See, for example, Cicero Mur. 5 1, construing thepopulus as a corpus, orAteius Capito, cited
by Gellius 10.20.5: Plebem autem Capito in eadem definitione seorsum a populo divisit, quoniam in
populo omnis pars civitatis omnesque eius ordines contineantur, plebes vero ea dicatur, inqua gentes
civium patriciae non insunt. To Justinian belongs a particularly concise formulation: appellatione
populi universi cives significantur (Inst. 1.2.4). For the contexts inwhich Romans made explicit
reference to consensus, see Ruggiero, Diz. Epigr. s.v. Instinky 1940 is notable particularly for its
discussion of texts inwhich the ideology of consensus is operative without being explicitly raised.
More recently, see Nicolet 1979:332-39.
15
agglomeration of citizens defined ultimately and almost exclusively by descent.47

The genitive-populus Romanorum?-makes all the difference.
The Greeks thereforedid not understandhow thepopulus could havemaiestas.
Translating
maiestas
as OE:L&rT or occe3PeLo is understandable
under
the empire
because of Augustus (Eep3aaTo6)and all that his name represented, but under
the Republic doing so would have reflected a profoundly mistaken idea of the
relationship between the individualRoman and his populus.48Nor did there exist
aGreek equivalent for respublica: the official Greek translationof theRes Gestae
of Augustus uses four different phrases to cover that term'sbroad semantic field.49
Polybius' narrative of thenegotiations between theAetolians andManius Acilius
Glabrio is paradigmatic of the linguistic pitfalls that confronted Greeks in their
early encounters with Roman magistrates. In 191 B.C. theAetolians decided to
ask the consul Glabrio for his pardon and resolved to commit themselves "to the
faith of the Roman
people"
(?t5 -rV Pwiczcov
KLaTLv), not knowing,
as Polybius
writes, the import (8&vcxciLq)

of the phrase. In fact, aRoman understood surrender
infidem as unconditional; theAetolians, Polybius explains, were deceived by the
word "faith" intobelieving that theiractionwould obtain amore complete pardon
TOOTO TE?XLOT6pOU YLoYLvEXeou; 07povcoq).
(W? aV 8L&&
After
granting
the
Aetolians an audience, Glabrio began to dictate the termsunderwhich they could

act in the future.
The Aetolians
cried
out
in surprise:
"What you demand
is
not Greek (EXXrXvLx6v)."

Glabrio responded coldly: "Are you still going to run
around acting Greek
yourselves
(E':L yOp V ?LX ?XXvoxo1trE:),
s15 tnv Tctaatv? Iwill
even after you have given
throw you all in chains
if Iwant
to."50
Such broad disparities between the semantic fields of superficially synony

mous terms can reveal even more substantial differences between Hellenistic
47. See M. Humbert 1978:85-143, Gauthier 1981, andMeier 1996. On the importanceof ethnics
see also Hansen 1996b: 194: "All three types of ethnic were used as a kind of hereditary surname but
in contradistinction to all other western peoples the Greeks used them primarily as an indication
of political status rather than as habitation names, i.e. names indicating where a person was born
or lived."Other recent essays contrasting Greek andRoman conceptions of citizenship include Eder
1990, concentrating on the differential hierarchies between individual citizens and the citizen body
inGreek andRoman thought, andEder 1996. For the role of legal theory in theAthenian andRoman
traditions, see Nippel 1996.
48. The earliest use of 0et6tj,; is on an inscription from Aphrodisias: Reynolds 1980:73-74,
no. 2 = Reynolds 1982, no. 54. For &Olae La see Philo Flacc. 128.
49. Res Gestae 1.1 (rem publicam = tos xoLv&aitpay,aiot), 1.4 (triumvirum rei publicae
constituendae
= x v
npoyVa-&cv),
2 (bellum
x&v tpL&)V &VAP&V

reipublicae
inferentis
i'XOVta
= no6XeVov
eTYL -Cl XCl-tatCrL

'L(EpoV
T)oV 8TVOGL&V
-Ca L TC-orLptLL),and 34.1 (rem
publicam is subsumed, in theGreek, in natvtCovxxv npotyV6Cuv).Many other renderingswere also

employed (see Mason 1974 s.v.). On "the ideology of theGreek 'ResGestae'" seeWigtil 1982,
and on translating respublica in particular see Judge 1974:280-85. See also Drexler 1957, 1958. and
Stark 1967.
50. Polybius 20.9-10. The accounts of this episode have generated an enormous bibliography
that is not immediately relevant tomy purposes here, since I cite this episode merely as an example of
a larger phenomenon that is not itself in doubt. Gruen 1982 provides references, and I have seen
nothing since then that represents a significant advance.
16
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
and Republican political ideologies. Thus, for example, a Hellenistic monarch

was the state: Greeks did not address Antigonus or Ptolemy or Antiochus as
"King of theGreeks," or "King of Egypt," or even "King of theGreeks who live
in Asia":
it was
characteristically
Roman
to insist
that a king must
be king of
something.51Compare, for example, Livy's description of thosewho signed the

peace of Phoenice with Polybius' narrativeof thedebate before theAchaean synod
in 188/7 B.C.Livy identifies both kings andmagistrates by thepeoples whom they
represented-"Amynander, king of theAthamanians, and other magistrates of
the Epirotes and Acarnanians"-while Polybius identifies kings by name and
private individuals by nationality-"King Ptolemy" and "King Eumenes," but
"Nicodemos of Elaea" and "Apollonidas of Sicyon."52
The reasons behind thisdeserve examination. Romans conceived of thepower
of amagistrate or legitimatemonarch as something transferredto that individual
by thepeople, and itwas thepopulus Romanus in its corporate identity thatretained
the right to choose thebearers of its authority.The briefest formulationbelongs to
Ulpian: "Thewishes of theprinceps have the force of law because thepopulus
transfers to him and into him its power of command (imperium) and its powers of
jurisdiction (potestas) by that lex regiawhich is passed concerning the imperium
of the princeps."53 The office towhich Ulpian refersmay be anachronistic, but
the reasoning is not: when Cicero argues thatnothing so harmonizes with justice
and
the laws of nature
as imperium,
he
intends
by
that phrase
the legitimate
exercise of power by a magistrate. The magistrate should command "justly,

beneficially, and inaccordancewith the laws"; the law thusprescribesmagistrates'
power
of command
in specific
ways,
even
as it urges
the citizen
to obey
that
power in its legitimate domain.54Greek political vocabulary did not connote the
same limitations and tended to describe instead theRoman magistrate's control
over, and governance by, coercive force; not understanding the termprovincia
in its non-geographical sense, Greeks were unable to reconcile the seemingly
limitless powers granted to holders of imperiumwith theultimate and unqualified
sovereignty of thepopulus Romanus.55
As a consequence of his subordination to the populus, a Roman magistrate
could justify his actions by appealing to his patriotic sentiment, his studium rei
publicae,
but a Hellenistic
monarch,
who
had similar-indeed,
often
inferior
coercive force at his disposal, accepted no such constitutional link between

51. On the lack of ideological import behind the rare, and exceptional, usage "king of the
Macedonians," see F.W. Walbank in CAH2 VII.1 64-66.
52. Livy 29.12.12-14; Polybius 22.7-8.
53. Dig. 1.4.1 .pr On theRepublican origins of Augustan construals of imperium see Beranger
1977.
54. Cicero Leg. 3.2-5.
55. See Magie 1905 s.v. orMason 1974:132-34. Of course, theRomans hadmaintained that the
consuls' potestas was genere ipso ac iure regia (Cicero Rep. 2.56). See Livy 2.1.7-8 and 2.7.7:
The iinperium of the consuls was more limited than regia potestas only in duration, and yet the
people appreciated that itsmaiestas visque were greater than those of the suspect consul Valerius.
17
himself and any community.56This generalization oversimplifies the range of

ideologies governing the eastern monarchies of the third and second centuries,
but I concentrate here on themuch vaster gulf that separates them from Rome.
On the rare occasions on which Hellenistic kings referred to their =TopL8eq,
they signified only an emotive link to the city of their origin.57 Indeed, this is
precisely the period when themeanings of ta-tp'Ldiverge, separating the notion
of "birthplace" from "the object of one's patriotic sentiment and nationalistic
aspirations." Similarly, loyalty toward a king, expressed through the titulature
of his "Friends,"was a personal relationship, not grounded in theirmutual love of
a shared native land or community.58
Polybius in the second century had already understood something of the
obstacle facing Hellenistic Greeks in their encounters with Rome. According
to him, someone with a limited perspective might easily extrapolate from the
functional power of magistrates or the senate or thepeople atRome to an erroneous
assessment of theRoman government asmonarchical, aristocratic, or democratic
in turn.The language of Polybius stresses that this fictive observer was just that,
an observer,who would errwhile watching themagistrate in action or viewing the
senate while the consuls were absent.59To rewrite Polybius in the terms of the
present inquiry, these individuals interpreted the exercise of authority at Rome
using theparadigms provided by Hellenistic political thought.Polybius corrected
these individuals by asserting thatHellenistic paradigms provided only a partial
model forRome, by yielding exemplars for each branch of themixed constitution.
Extrapolation through analogical extension from any one of these exemplars was
thus doomed to failure.
Given
thus to misconstrue
of Greeks
the tendency
the exercise
of authority,
suspect thataLatin source-Cornelius Sisenna?-rather thanaccounts derivative

from the ambassadors
revealed
Mithridates,
sent to Rome
to Appian
of Bithynia
by Prusias
that the urban praetor,
on the eve of war with

o 'P&otiocdLWv
GTpWC-yo
Ev QCTcEL,
deliberately delayed introducing them to the Senate. In comparison,
the description
baffling. Rumor
of Rome
reported
in the first book of Maccabees

they make
to help
and to make
depose,
and they have been greatly
kings,
kings;
exalted.
seems
at once astute and
that "those whom
to Judas Maccabeus
and those whom
the Romans
they wish
wish
they
Yet for all this not one of them has
56. E.g. Memmius at Sallust Iug. 31. 1.

57. See Welles 1934, no. 45 (= IGLS 3.2.1183), 11.4-5, no. 67 (= OGIS 331 IV), 11.5-6, or
no. 71 (OGIS 257), 11.15-16. Indeed, the ability of Antiochus VIII to display both "piety" and
"generosity" to Seleucia, his 7out-p'L,signifies the break: "piety" signifies his emotive obligations,
but "generosity" reveals thatwealth and privilege are his to give, and to take away.
58. On the institutionalization of "friendship," see Habicht 1958. For a broader treatmentof the
phenomenon, considering the changing perception of such "friendships" amongGreeks, seeHerman
1980/81.
6.12.9
;trMlv av, &r" TLg El
59. Polybius
(65oa' elxO6&;
X
aOlXLXO'xVEGtL 'c6
6LOTlVOVOCPLXOXV 0C7)&)( Xcl
TOoX[TruVa),
6?1L8T)V ORnl '7 frCXOpVTO, Ut0ctTOU.. .), and cf. 6.14.12.
rCv 4SpEL8(,
T(XUtTV C'7OPAxELr
6.13.8
(?t Ov T&XLV &OiOIT .Lr
18
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
put on a crown
or clothed

in purple
himself
as a mark
of pride. And
they have
built a council-chamber for themselves, and each day three hundred and twenty
men take counsel, deliberating concerning the people, to govern themwell. They
trust one man
each year
to rule over
them and to control
all their land; they all
obey one man and there is no envy or jealousy among them."'Without Appian's
narrative, Iwould leap to the conclusion that these Jews, desiring to interpret the
exercise of power at Rome in terms familiar fromHellenistic monarchies, have
here described a consul and assumed that therewas only one of them. But in
light of Appian's story,we should perhaps leave open the possibility thatearnest
ambassadors mistook for a king-like magistrate themere praetor who ordered
them about.6'
III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MODEL

BETWEEN POLYBIUS AND DIODORUS
Let us now connect two problems already raised: the identityof theRomans in
thenarrativeof Posidonius and the size of theRoman citizen body. It is impossible
to know precisely whom Mithridates targeted for extermination in the cities of
Asia early in 88 B.C.62Two contemporary letters byMithridates survive, which
and do not address the extermination as such, leaving us
refer only toWPuIaXoL,
with the same difficulty thatwe encountered in the textof Posidonius.A Posidonius
believed thatMithridates received embassies from Carthage and the peoples of
Italy, seeking his aid in the destruction of Rome.64 Appian, on the other hand,
attributed toMithridates the knowledge thatRome was preoccupied with a civil
war against the Italians but nevertheless argued that he included both Romans
and Italians
in his plot.65 Cicero,
speaking,
to be sure, before
a Roman
audience,
lamented only themassacre of cives Romanos.66 Even if, as seems probable,

Mithridates wished only citizens to die, many Greeks throughoutAsia clearly
did not differentiate
between
the Romans
who
ruled the empire
and the Italian
publicani who profited from it.67
60. IMacc. 8:13-16.

61. Cf. Shaw 1995:378-80, arguing that Josephus under the Principate, as opposed to Polybius
and the author of IMaccabees, felt little need to explain the structureof Roman government because
he could interpret the Principate as "a form of personal power" "much like thatwhich typified his
own world."
62. The sources are canvassed byMagie 1950, vol. 2:1103 n. 36; Brunt 1987:223-27; andmore
briefly by J. G. F. Hind in CAH2 IX 149 n. 67. For the chronology of events between 91 and 87,
Badian 1976 remains fundamental.
63. Welles 1934 nos. 73 and 74, from theChaeremon dossier, fromNysa on theMaeander.
64. Fr. 253 Kidd, 11.87-92.
65. Appian Mith. 22.83.
66. Leg. Man. 3.7 and 5.1 1; cf. Livy Per. 78.
67. Appian Mith. 23.91.
19
If many easterners drew no distinction between Romans and Italians, ac

cording to what political structure did they imagine the Italian peninsula to be
arranged?That is to say, throughwhat paradigm could they envision a political
collectivity uniting cities throughout Italy in the shared task of world conquest?
For what surprisedGreeks was not the size of the Roman army: anyone with
enough money could hire an equivalent number of mercenaries. Rather, Rome
fielded enormous armies of citizens and allied Italians, all of whom had something
patriotic, and not just pecuniary, at stake in theoutcome of thebattle. Surely some
understanding of thatproblem, correct or not, underlies the famous letterof Philip
V toLarisa fromAugust 215, inwhich he commended theRomans for extending
the franchise to freedmen. "In thatway," he wrote, "they have sent out colonies to
nearly seventy places."68And surely forGreeks so inclined, an appreciation of the
unity of Italy could provide a paradigm for theirown gradual assimilation into the
corridors of power within theRoman government.
We should be chary of holding Greeks to an unreasonable standard.Romans
had themselves aspired tounite Italy at an emotive level only in the lateRepublic,
and they did not all share in that objective
even
then.69 Nor
did Romans
develop
a helpful vocabulary to describe relations between Rome and the cities of Italy
under such a plan. Livy, for example, described Servius Tullius as wanting to
unify the cities of Latium under Roman leadership, in which case the city of
Rome would become the caput rerum-not the stuff of catchy political slogans.70
In attempting to express what such a unity would constitute, Romans of the
middle Republic no less thanGreeks were hampered by traditionaldefinitions of
patria
and of citizenship.
Put simply,
a patria was
the place whence
one's
family
sprang, and in thatcommunity one held citizenship: political rights in some far-off
polity were, through sheer impracticality, regarded and explicitly labeled as such,
as though not
intended
to be exercised.
As we have
seen,
the Romans
defined
citizenship through intersecting legal, emotive, and participatory criteria, while

Greeks allowed that citizenship followed blood. Insofar as citizenship inGreek
states did not depend
on an individual's
actions,
it could conceivably
be bestowed
on an individualwho would not exercise its rights or fulfill its obligations.7'
68. SIG 543, from August 215: seeWalbank 1972:156 n. 151 and the literature cited there.
Compare the astonishment of Pyrrhus at the rebirth of the army of Valerius Laevinus: he remarked
that the legions of theRomans, like a hydra, when cut down grew whole again (Cass. Dio 9 fr. 28).
69. Augustus' claim that tota Italia swore an oath of loyalty to him (ResGestae 25.2) illustrates
the vast changes which had taken place since the state of Italia rose against Rome in 90/89; it also
looks back to the enormous propaganda campaign thatAugustus had waged precisely to unite Italy
against the victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro. See Gabba 1978. For up-to-date summaries of
evidence, concentrating more on process than on cause, see David 1994 andM. Crawford, CAH2
X 414-33 and 979-89. On the integration of Italy as an intellectual problem in late Republican
literature, see Habinek 1998:88-102.
70. 1.45.3.
71. See at notes 39-43, with the literaturecited there.
20
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
Thus, for example, those who regard hospitium publicum as a status that
brought "all the private rights and privileges of Roman citizenship" without "its
burdens and obligations" seem, tome at least, to have misunderstood its import.72
Hospitium publicum was explicitly not a form of citizenship and was, on the
contrary, ideologically distinct from it.73Consider, for example, Cicero's defense
of Lucius Cornelius Balbus: it does not matter for us today, as it did not matter
for Cicero, whether Balbus might, as amatter of law, hold citizenship inGades
and Rome simultaneously.74Before the juryCicero emphasized not thatBalbus
had conformed to any existing statute, but rather thathe had formally renounced
his status as a Gaditanus once he moved his domicile toRome: Cicero insisted
thatBalbus now dealt with his former countrymen through pacts of hospitium,
precisely because hospitium did not imply shared patriotic sentiment. Honorary
citizenship among Greeks, not unlike dual citizenship between a polis and a
league, concretized very different attitudes toward the exclusivity of a patria's
emotive, political, and legal demands.75
municipal Italians aspired
Again, unlike Greeks holding tao- or ouItnoXLtEia,
to full participation in Roman life, and it was themuniceps Cicero who best
articulated an Italian ideal.76In the conversation thatopens the second book of De
legibus,Cicero referred to the land inwhich theywalked as his patria; this elicited
a question fromAtticus: "Have you then twopatriae? Or is our communispatria
the only one? Unless,
that is, you think that Cato's
fatherland was not Rome,
but
Tusculum?" To which Cicero responded: "Absolutely I think that both he and

all othermunicipal nien have twopatriae: one by birth, and one by citizenship....
Thus we consider
by which
we
as our patria
are adopted.
But
both the place where we were

that patria
must
born, and that place
be preeminent
in our affection,
inwhich the name of the res publica signifies the common citizenship of us all.
For her it is our duty
her altar we ought
to die;
to place
to her we ought
and to dedicate,
to give
as it were,
our entire
selves,
and on
all that we possess."77
Cicero thus urged that political loyalties need not stand in conflict with
each other. Although the next sentence evidently emerged badly mutilated in
the archetype of all surviving witnesses to the Leiden corpus,78 it seems clear
thatCicero concluded this section by urging that loyalty to the communis patria
must
take precedence
over
that to any other political
collectivity.
In the hierarchy
of allegiances outlined by Cicero, loyalty towardRome occupies a superordinate

72. E.g. Cornell 1995:321.
73. So, rightly,Humbert 1978:139-43 and Brunt 1987:515-16.
74. See Balb. 28-30, 42-43, and Caec. 100, and cf. Brunt 1982, Rawson 1985, and Errington
1988:153. Contra: Sherwin-White 1973:302-304.
75. See Gawantka 1975 and Beck 1997:174-85.
76. Roman patriotism received exemplary treatment in Bonjour 1975. I believe that she has
supplied a proper framework for approaching the topic, although I do not always sympathize with
her reading of individual texts.
77. Leg. 2.5.
78. Schmidt 1974.
21
position: her laws and her culture provide thenormative fabric thatwill, to borrow
the phrase of Rutilius Namatianus, "create from distinct and separate nations a
single fatherland."79
InDe legibus Cicero could ignore the Social War. Appian could not. His
narrative of the political machinations leading up to the Social War participates
in two important trends in Hellenistic thought. First, Appian played the race
card. According to him, Gaius Gracchus reasoned that the Senate could not
refuse to grant full citizenship to the Latins because they were "of the same
race."80Second, he acknowledged the complaint by Italians thatcitizenship could
not be held piecemeal: the Italians desired citizenship "so that theymight be
Whatever its provenance, Appian's
partners in the empire, rather than subjects."'81
history of these years recognizes two categories-ruler and ruled-and these are
distinguished in the first instance along ethnic lines.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus approached relations between Rome and her
Italian allies in a very different fashion and, given his declared desire to educate
his fellow
Greeks,
we would
be remiss
if we
failed
to read his narrative
as a
polemic with contemporary relevance. As Livy did in the same era, Dionysius
connected the legal details of Rome's relationswith her Latin allies to the reign of
Servius, althoughDionysius posited a source for Servius in thatking's admiration
forAmphictyon and theAmphictyonic council.82But Dionysius brought to the
entire issue a Hellenistic sense of wonder at the sheer size and structureof the
Roman state, one directly continuous with the remarksof Philip V.83More so than
his Roman counterparts, Dionysius attributed the fundamental rules of Roman
government toRomulus.84 The most significant of these rules by far, he argued,
established Roman policy on citizenship. Romulus extended citizenship to all free
men, including select members of conquered cities, and he started thepractice of
sending
colonies,
&.toLxoua., to occupy
some portion
of the land in any conquered
territory.By thismeasure he increased the citizen body and stretched the tentacles
of Roman power throughoutLatium.85
Dionysius explicitly contrasted this practice with that of contemporary
Greeks. Taking up the comparison of constitutions, he declared allGreek states in
79. Rut. Namat. 1.63.
80.
BCiv.
1.23.99:
xal
TOuR Aa-cLvouv
Erl
Taivo
aPoiXc,(v,
ex&CXEL t&
S OCux EUTpET1J)5
tr( f3ouXi( (V-CLOtT)VaL

UyYYEVEAL
8uvocievr). P.A. Brunt is quite right to describe his analysis
of "the concept of Italian unity" in the context of the Social War as concerned with Romanization:
Brunt 1988:111-20, esp. 112-13.
81. BCiv. 1.34.152.
82. Livy 1.45; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.23-25.
83. Cf. Gabba 1991:19-20.
84. Although Gabba 1991:162-63 remains unconvinced, I follow Balsdon 1971 in seeing the
"constitution of Romulus" as a fully Dionysian product. See also Poma 1989 at 201-203, as well
asMiles 1995:124-25.
85. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.16. On Dionysius' understanding of Roman citizenship and the
contrasts he drew with theGreek world see Humbert 1978:85-143 but esp. 86-99, as well as Poma
1989.
22
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
this respect as failures: the Spartans, Athenians, and Thebans jealously guarded
their birthrights and granted citizenship to no one. As a consequence, each lost
their hegemony after a single defeat.86 Dionysius credited both Romulus and
Servius with a desire for world conquest; believing that the size of the Roman
state had been an important factor in her success, he attributed to both kings a
desire to increase the body of citizen-soldiers. He articulated the goals of this
policy most eloquently in his version of a speech delivered by Appius Claudius
during thewar with Coriolanus: "For all the Latins, towhom we recently gave
equal rights of citizenship, will standby us, fighting for thispolis as if theirpatria,
and themany good cities colonized from here will protect Rome, regarding it as
imperative that theirmetropolis be saved."87
I highlight two features of this remarkable passage. First, Dionysius has
followed Cicero and crossed the emotive boundaries of Hellenistic forms of dual
citizenship. The Latins ought tovalue Rome as apatria, above and beyond the city
of theirbirth. Second, Dionysius no less thanPhilip attributedan ideal strength to
the bonds between Rome and her colonies. Despite his assiduous and arduous
reading of Thucydides, Dionysius clearly had not learned that citizens of Greek
colonies did not automatically esteem theirmetropolis as theirpreeminent ntxTpL.
Indeed, itmay well be thatGreek cities of the second century petitioning Rome
for the status of a Roman colony transliterated the Latin colonia because they
recognized, even if they never quite articulated, that the semantic field of &7COLXLca
did not match the purely emotive attachment that their requestwas intended to
convey.88
The history of Greek politics did offer one potentialmodel for the integration
of several
communities
into a single
state, and that was
the xotLV6V, or league.89
Yet understandingRome on strict analogy with Hellenistic leagues remained an

illusory fantasy. For example, Polybius gave eloquent testimony to the glories
of
the Achaean
league.
"While many
about because
each made
for the acquisition
in bygone
to bring
the
able
to bring
this
the effort not for the sake of the common
freedom
but
into a state of common
Peloponnese
of personal
power.
advantage,
Yet
times
attempted
no one was
in my
time this object
has been
so
completely realized that there exists among them not only an allied and friendly
but they use the same
community,
laws and weights
and measures
and coinage,
86. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.17.1-2; theargument is repeatedby Tacitus' Claudius (Ann. 11.24.4),
though not in this form by Claudius himself-perhaps a satirical reference throughDionsyius to
Claudius' Greek learning.
87. Dion.
8E8cw,tv,
Hal.
oL T' EVOEV86
Ant.
Rom.
v l
aTOO0l,
7.53.5:
-re yap
TTjv LotLOXJL;CEliV
otg vEWCr
tCXavCEq,
"
t
Trz Tc ccp
TiT98E
aY KVL6XsC
8i1pn
XOLXL9OSELOOCLTtO6XeLSTOXXoXLxcXt &yaC'L TCEP'L
TXVTOc TCOLOUlE4V0L CYW'E{79OXl
GU
ovu
"Aocttvo'l
Ti) VUycp7tO-AOXLV 0t1UVOU5LV aOj."
88. For petitions toRome for colony status seeMillar 1993:143-44, 147, 150, 155. and 257-58.
For the use of xoXwv(e)Lot, see Millar 1990:9-10.
89. Greek terminology for confederate states and their institutions is notoriously vague: see
Larsen 1955:24-25, 87-92, and Beck 1997:10-19.
23
as well as the same magistrates, councils, and courts: the entire Peloponnese
falls short of having the arrangement of a single polis in this respect alone, that
its inhabitants are not enclosed by a single wall, but in other respects-both in
common and city by city-conditions are nearly identical."90This formulation
of the achievement of theAchaean league maps the parameters within which
Polybius, as aHellenistic writer, could conceive of a community in its corporate
identity.Thus, inmatters thatconcern othermember cities, individualpoleis must
cease to command the specific loyalties of their citizens; at the same time, the
xolvov
was
itself did not become
a political
ideal
in its own
right:
the ideal xoiv6v
a polis.
In contrast to Polybius, theAugustan writers Dionysius and Diodorus each

display-albeit in different fashions-the influence of Roman conceptions of
community. It is not that they coined new words, or transliteratedLatin; on
the contrary, they employed the terminology of Polybius. Yet we may detect
in their usage subtle shifts in the meanings of the terms themselves, as they
stretched to embrace the institutions to which they were now applied. When
Dionysius described the foundationof theLatin league underServius, he attributed
that king's inspiration to the paradigm provided by the Amphictyonic league.
According toDionysius, the cities in that league had laws common to the league
and laws unique to themselves.9"Dionysius did not draw attention to Servius'
departure from that plan, but, like Livy, he argued both that Servius assigned
leadership in the league to Rome and also that the Latin communities assented
to that plan.92 Although
Dionysius
had argued
that the Latins
formed
a natural
unity because of their sharedGreek descent, Diodorus understood that the Italians
who
against Rome
rebelled
in the Social War came from many
different
cities and
peoples.93 In his narrative they came together, however, as Italians. As Italians

they fortified
established
Corfinum
a common
rule their patria
as their xowVj
toXUL,and it was
senate of five hundred men,
and those capable
in that city
from whom
that "they
those worthy
of taking thought for the common
to
safety would
be chosen."94Diodorus has here successfully envisioned, through an analysis of

Italians imitatingRomans, a political union inwhich individuals abandon their
partisan
loyalties
and communis
to race and polis
and direct
them instead
toward a single polis
patria.
the key clause

being xcOo6Xou
be -coit
,oivo
90. 2.37.9-11,
8tLoXXa&CeLV tou VuvLoij
'
elBk
AU,lOCVa
tC
0V InV
x tv cXUt6 v EepLf3oXov
tcv Ga[
IkXrt6vvr)ao
OZvy)(YOVI
8lO'COelLV 'eXELVO6v
axe
, ZlnTVajo
lO)XeW(;
Te
'
A 0
tOl, XOtOLXOuaLV aUrT)V, TCXXaX
LVOXL
XXd XOLVj XAl XOCtl LO6XEL;EX&aGTOL5 -CuO
U7TCXPXELV
xci
potpa7txYaCLOC.
91. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.25.3.
92. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.26.1-2.
93. Diodorus 37.1.6: .csxva-rr&vv
94.
Diodorus
XEVItVOL, NwXavoL,
nEvTaLxocatv
OtLTpoPou
rev90otL
yap tCOvXaxT&T)v'ICxXv
e,ovcv ....
Il
Ee PwLcx'LOL; EaUV-aL,
Aaxo)cwvoL',
Aeuxavot,
XOLVTv
XaL ETepRt TO'XEL(xai eOviq .... EuvEa-Cj%OvCrO 8E xat cuYxX7nyov
(Ej O'L e tT) T(XrpL8O;
E,~ xv
APXSLV C'LOL TXpOaeCFO0a
6VEXXOV XoI
37.2.4-5:
'EnoX4Eouv
8UVcXI.ELVOLrTEpiLCY XOLVT) O-T)PLO;.
24
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
We can observe the development and exploitation of this language in that

most Hellenistic of historical genres, universal history. Given some anecdotes
connecting Ephorus to Isocrates, scholarly imaginations have naturally assumed
that the first universal history culminated in a paean to the unification of the
world under a united Hellas.95 But if it was first the dream of an Alexander,
and thenAlexander himself who made universal history possible,96 itwas Rome
thatmade universal history meaningful. Polybius gave voice to this view in his
preface, after judging the achievements of previous empires to be lacking: none
of them had truly conquered theworld. But since the start of the second Punic
war, "history became like an organicwhole" inwhich the events of East andWest
tended toward a single t?Xoq.97Yet for Polybius the Roman empire remained
the natural culmination of man's natural tendency towards imperialism: he felt
no need to disguise its coercive force. Although he continued his history from
167 to 146 specifically to understandwhether Rome governed her territorieswith
the same intelligence with which she had conquered them, he did not expect the
empire to be anything other than an agglomeration of conquered territories: itwas
a 8uvaa-m(a,
and the Romans
were
Eyxpocre6;
or xpaxouvrEq.
They
ruled over
others because they had the power to do so.98

Of the universal histories written in the age of Augustus, thatof Diodorus is
themost complete. Dionysius, aswe have seen, intendedhis narrative to endwhere
Polybius began, though itwas no less politically charged for itspreoccupationwith
ancient history. Diodorus carried this political program a step further, not least
in his integrationof Stoic political philosophy with universal history.99Diodorus
understood universal history in precisely the terms outlined above; in fact, he
opened
his work
a review
with
of
the political
power
wielded
by authors
of
universal histories. "Furthermore,these authors have aspired to gather allmen

who
share with each other ties of kinship
beneath
one and the same narrative
and yet are separated
structure,
as if they were
in time and place

the agents of divine
Providence. For Providence, assembling the order of the visible stars and the
natures of men into a common relation, continually directs all things for eternity,
to each
distributing
thing the lot cast for it by fate; similarly
those writing
up the
95. E.g. Fornara 1983:42-46. Momigliano 1984 implicitly argues against such simplistic,
'rhetorical"models. Cf. K. Sacks 1990:36.
96. See Tarn 1948, vol. 2:399-449. Badian 1958may have successfully denied the relevance of
"cosmopolitanism" to the study of Alexander, but his work does nothing to disprove the effect of
Alexander's conquests on theGreek political imagination.
97.
Polybius
3UVEf3tLVE; Tk
1.3.3-5:
T7(
ev
lIbv
O'LXOUie;Vi5
ouiv
TOl5
TpO' EL;,
UT
Tp6OTOU6TWV XpOVOlq 6r, aEv
EIVOU
1topab&X
TO\
OaS 7tnLOXO),(q 8E
xat
8\ca TO XXL XXa\
E`C
OuvTEXELO(
Ocu`v O6qOl(&8e;xOCxczta toC\ t6itoU<;&yineXCLV
iexxcracctxv nenpczyVESvx. aci.o
8E TOUTCOVT&V Xalp&OV O'LOV Et 06
Ea'Itc)Xixa
xcx3.ALvx&
Titp6r i'v YLIVe(YOCLt6?,Xo(
aTOCL87 aUIPcxLVeL yiVEGOaL T V LOTopiav,
-cp\,el to
-Ci\v &Vayopopv
ouVnXe6aXOL
TC oua& xcv AOL'ov xcd Talg 'EXrnVLxO(ZXcoct
&ot&vtrcov.
98. Walbank 1965 and 1972:173-81; cf. Eckstein 1985.

99. See Pavan 1991 and Camoux and Bertrac 1993:xviii-xxii.
ANDO:
Was
Rome
apolis?
25
common history of theworld as though of a single zT6XiL

have produced in their
treatises a unified narrative and common storehouse of historical knowledge."'00
Diodorus latercontrasted the four great empires of world history, as the rules
of his genre demanded. But he clearly saw theRoman empire as a very different
entity than any which had preceded it. Rome's uniqueness did not stem from
her control over the entire oixouue'vr. Diodorus understood thatmen derived a
common kinship from their shared humanity, but he also understood that that
had not been and was not in itself sufficient to unite them. Diodorus could not,
therefore, articulate theRoman achievement using oLxou,evr)-it was, for him,
simply a geographical term-nor could he use the vocabulary of empires. To
speak of empires was to invoke a dichotomy of ruler and ruled. Rome had done
far more
than conquer men.
Rather,
Rome
had united
all men
no less than the
universal historianswho connected them through theirauv-r&TELq.

Rome therefore
crowned the succession of world empires precisely because itwas not an empire:
itwas apolis. On thisunderstanding, even the choice of genre becomes a political
decision: "writing the common history of theworld as though of a single not6Xi"
construes narrative not merely as the representation, but as the construction of
a political reality.ForDiodorus, theRoman empirewas thenatural culmination of
man's desire to gather in themost natural form of political collectivity.
Authors of theSecond Sophistic display their allegiance to this understanding
of the empire in various ways. Lucian, for example, referred toRome repeatedly
as "The City."'01
In this period,
too, authors
to describe
began
as a city
Rome
whose countryside was the empire. Aelius Aristides delivered themost famous
development of this theme in his panegyric toRome, inwhich he added the detail
that the armies
on the borders were
of a single,
like the walls
great
city.'02 At
one level suchmetaphors and themodels they represented arose from theGreek
tendency to divide theworld between Greeks and barbarians,'03and on that level
theirusage must reflect aGreek desire to lump themselves togetherwith Romans
as common participants in a single ethnic and political reality.Yet thesemetaphors
accomplished thatdesire throughawholly Greek attempt to envision the residents
of the empire
as the inhabitants
of a single
city. On
these
terms,
the erroneous
definition of pomerium given in theSuda-"Pomerium: aminiature representation

of a city wall"-may
the pomerium
of a wall
be unraveled."'4
to be some
around
a city
To be sure, the compiler
sort of wall.
But why
could have thought
use a miniature
that had a real one? Perhaps
because
representation
the wall which
the
100. Diodorus 1.1.3. On the strands of thought intersecting in this passage, andDiodorus' role in
bringing them together, see Sacks 1990:10-11, 36, and 64. Among earlier literature, see esp. Burton
1972:35-38.
101. See, e.g., Nigrinos 2, 16, 29, 34, and cf. Jones 1986:85 n. 31. Elsewhere see Philostratus Vit.
Soph. 488 and 534.
102. Or. 26.80-81.
103. Palm 1959:56-62, 75-76, and 82-83; J.Vogt 1967:8-9 and Brunt 1990:473-77.
104.
Suda
[I 2178:
fI&un5ptov
-o
tou
LeLXouq sExo6vLaGcX.
26
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
pomerium representedwas the imaginarywall around the borders of the empire,

throughwhich the community of theempire became coextensive with the territory
of itspolis.
IV.COMPLICATIONS
The
author of
the first book
AND CONSEQUENCES
of Maccabees
was
not alone
in his desire
to
see power exercised at Rome by a single, all-powerful magistrate, whom the

Romans entrusted "to rule over them and to control all their land." Scattered
inscriptions and papyri describing embassies to the triumvirs suggest thatGreeks
throughout the East not only welcomed the existence of de facto monarchs
with whom to negotiate, but that they particularly appreciated that access to
thesemen was controlled by others, like somany qlXOLof a Hellenistic king.105
These embassies, which continued unabated for the next four centuries, were
themselves directly continuous with the Greek practice of using embassies to
congratulate a new monarch on his accession while receiving assurances that
the city's status with the central government remained unchanged.'" To these
Greeks, the outcome of the civil wars seemed perfectly natural. In the words
of Appian, "Thus, from its varied internal disorders the Roman state resolved
to harmony andmonarchy."'07Both he and Cassius Dio remarkedupon Roman
reticence
to call a spade a spade: the principate
was,
for them, amonarchy
cloaked
in fancy dress.'08
That fancy dress was the res publica. Imperial ideology continued for cen
turies
to suggest
quarreled
that the emperor
with maiestas
the state:
thus Tacitus
they had no legal justification
that he was
was
trials because
the servant
of
prepared to recognize. He would not have objected, I suspect, to trials based

on the emperor's tribunician sacrosanctity.The application of maiestas, however,
implied that thedignitas of theemperorwas somehow coextensive with thatof the
Roman people, and thatTacitus found intolerable, not least because it conflicted
with the publicly professed ideology of the Principate. A Greek steeped inHel
lenistic political thought could not understand theobjections of aTacitus because,
to put it bluntly, Hellenistic thought had developed a philosophy of kingship but
never one of empire.Nothing inHellenistic rhetoric resembled theuniversalizing
105. On knowledge in the Greek East regarding men's status as amici Caesaris, see Millar
1977:116. Cf. Shaw 1995:378-80, paraphrased in n. 61.
106. Millar 1984.
'
107.
xCa
Appian
,ovapXLctv
108. Appian
s
r
BCiv.
1.6.24:
68e
,uv
?x caO?@t(YV TtOLXLX&V
T0oXL'teLCXPTN0L0Lool
praef
t
6.23: xad 1aicv

t s
ws
r t
"bePiX;
s
*~T)
T)
iUCv
I'XPL VUV
o
E'L
;V. XpXOVtl oU,
t
*
&Vto V) VOVLG), lQOV

OpXOVMCltOUl.eLVOL
l OU XeyOUl,V,
l;OVntEXcXL,
a'utoxp
o XaL t(O3V
tat 8e ppy( t 1tVT
TtpoCxaip&v atpa7y&v ovo,u
OvoIICoucQLv,
See also Cassius Dio 53.17-18 and JohnLydusMag. 1.4 (o`m nxpd
%aiC px
TPWV.EZOL, otov
opvotxv
7CEpLeG-U.
CL npw,TT)V xeyaXpc0v
ti(
7TorS
noXLt-cebx)
and 2.2.
On Greek
fXcOLXErc,
topcX e
l
ea& av
names
Roman emperor, seeWifstrand 1939.
for
the
27
tendencies or the rationalism inherent in the fifthCyrene edict, in its concern for
non-citizen provincials and its allusions to a hierarchical appeals process; nothing
in the ideology of Hellenistic monarchies suggested thatkings were not sovereign
within their territories.When in Roman political oratory the goddess Roma or
thegenius publicus addressed the emperor, the author simultaneously honored his
emperor and yet also suggested thatRome herself was the ultimate repository of
authoritywithin the state. The prosopopoeia of Dea Roma or the genius publi
cus inGreek oratory, which became prevalent only in the fourth century A.D.,
thus represented the penetration of a purely Roman imperial ideology intoGreek
thought, andByzantine legislation retained for the next two centuries this explicit
subordination of emperor to state.109
The breakdown of traditional links between citizenship, city, and fatherland
required considerable negotiation to resolve, nor was its outcome predetermined.
To adapt
the phrase
of Appian,
it was
not necessary
for Rome
to invite
all her
subjects to become equal participants in the empire. Yet in the end theRomans
themselves played no small role in this process. Polybius himself had remarked
that theRomans had thecapacity-which theydid not always act upon-to govern
their subjects wisely.110 As Cicero saw, themore the Romans subordinated the
coercive aspect of their rule, and themore they governed for the good of their
subjects, the greater would be the good realized by both ruler and ruled. For
that reason he urged that a properly governed empire not be called an empire, an
imperium,but a protectorate, apatrocinium. l' Greeks acknowledged this rhetoric
regarding theuniversalization of thebenefits of Roman rule in the age of Augustus,
at which
time the empire
largely ceased
to be a&uvaa-erLo or a xpacioq
and became
an apXt)
Some inscriptions fromAsia Minor in the same period exhibit similar sensi
tivity to the finerpoints of diction. Late in the rule of Augustus themember-cities
of the koinon of Asia erected a series of inscriptions recording honors voted to
the emperor.They named the emperor using his official titulature, translated into
Greek, with one minor but importantaddition. They render the titlepater patriae
as narTp
norpL'8og xai toO a,u'4TEcvtoE Txv oiv6pxTv
yEvou~: "Father of
his fatherland and of the entire human race.""12 At one level, this represents a
perfectly natural adaptation of royal honors from theHellenistic period: kings

at that time were
intrusion
always
of that phrase
benefactors
into several
or saviors
of the human
lines of Latin nomenclature
race. And
must
yet the
have been
109. E.g. N. Maj. 1. Though [Aristides] does not personify Rome or the state, he does describe
the emperor as useful to the empire, implying the priority of the latter (Or. 35.12): ... rov[tEv ,eya
O(prXO(
I 10.
T?) PaGLtXSL
10.36.2,
XtL
iTplV ELS X6T)'V
XxtaoTi(Vxl.
and cf. 3.4. 1.
111. Off 2.8.27: itaque illud patrocinium orbis terrae verius quam imperiumpoterat nominari.
Cf. Erskine 1990:202-203 andDyck 1996 ad loc.
112. Texts collected in Buckler 1935. See IGRR IV 1410.6-7; IGRR IV 1611 (= OGIS 470),
tabletB.6-8; IGRR IV 1756, section X, 11.101-102; and IBM 894.
28
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
intended, at least in part, to claim Augustus as their father, too. These Greeks
began to share the empire, by first sharing the emperor.
Citizenship remained a contentious issue, of course. But long before the
universal extension of the franchiseGreeks began to use first-person possessive
adjectives to refer to Roman institutions.113In the words of Aelius Aristides:
"You, again, have best proven the common maxim that the earth is themother
and communis
patria
of all. Now
at last it is possible
or non-Greek,
for a Greek
travelingwith orwithout his possessions, to pass wheresoever he wills, as easily

as if traveling from country to country.The Cilician Gates do not cause fear,nor do
the narrow, sandy roads fromArabia toEgypt, nor impassablemountains nor the
endless lengths of rivers nor the savage tribes of barbarians: for safety it suffices
to be a Roman or, rather, simply one of those under your rule."'14We should,
I believe, read the last sentence as a prescriptive slip of the tongue: realizing
that "Roman," strictly construed, meant "Roman citizen," his correction urged
the extension of the franchise by thanking theRomans for extending the benefits
of empire to all.
Aristides does not envision an empire whose residents link their identity
as Romans to some abstract political community, which has a capital but is
nevertheless defined by the geographic and imaginative dispersal of its citizens.
On
the contrary:
as we
have
seen, Aristides
lacked
and a term for a
a model
national state.He has rather succumbed to that reasoning which, with the benefit
of hindsight, Cassius Dio put in themouth of Maecenas in the fateful debate
of 29 B.C.: by giving his subjects a share in their governance, Augustus could
bring it about that they "believe themselves equal participants in the politeia
and thus become
of us all,
our faithful
regarding
allies,
as though
in some unified
they dwelt
and their cities
as truly their own,
this polis
city
as its fields
and villages."'15 Dio's clumsy expression in this climactic phrase divulges the
poverty
of his political
his selection
vocabulary
of Rome
over Nicaea
even as it discloses
as the primary
the model
object
that exonerated
of his loyalties
and the
beneficiary of his talents. Libanius participated in the same mentality as Dio,

albeit with
polis
different
of their origin
attitude, when
he argued
and "the polis
founded
that men must

by a certain
choose
emperor"
between
the
that drained
the city-councils of theEast."'6

Greeks did not universally subscribe to the binarism that forced Libanius to
choose between Antioch andConstantinople. Career inscriptions throughout the
East celebratemen likeTiberius Claudius Diogenes of Aphrodisias, andwe should
note
that the council
and people
of Aphrodisias
listed
first in their dedication,
13.
I
Instances catalogued by Palm 1959 passim.
114. Or. 26.100.
115. Cassius
Dio
)CFTLEpXOlVLV [cV
(7(p Tepa &ypouc
52.19.6:
t
xai
xiVcr
CUVVLXoL U6lV WYLoV,

cotc6
'LOOVtLpO CVtErRlGtO.
e 8
-OtUTV 4EV OVT
TtOXLVta
nOtXLV OLXOU5VrE, XXl
. .. 'Lxvoxot
)V ICpEE V
VoViLoVtEg
etVal.
116. Libanius Or. 49.2.
29
in positions of priority, Diogenes' priesthoods in the imperial cult."7 Yet their

perspective, like thatof Plutarch, urgedmen likeDiogenes to use their influence
with imperial officials for the benefits of their local cities: the binarism is there, if
it is not destructive."8 Romans did not subscribe to the necessity of this choice.
Cicero's achievement inDe legibus had been toprivilege a legal abstraction as the
basis for a largercommunity. Other Romans may not have been as sophisticated
inmatters of political theory as Cicero, yet neither Virgil nor Ovid nor Tacitus
felt the need to sacrificeMantua or Sulmo or Gallia Narbonensis to the claims
of Rome.
What about those provincials who did feel loyal toward Rome and who,
well before theConstitutio Antoniniana formally embraced them, felt their safety
ensured by Rome's success? What was to stop a non-citizen provincial from
identifying himself as Roman, in order to celebrate his love of his country
and his membership in her community? To return to the language of Paul,
I believe
it was
necessary
in the era of
the martyrs
of Lyons
to specify
that
some of those Christians held Roman citizenship-and not simply to identify

them as Roman-precisely because so many non-citizens had begun identifying
themselves as Roman."'' Insofar as this revolution in provincial self-definition
was aided by the universalizing themes of imperial rhetoric and by long-standing
awareness of Rome's willingness to extend its franchise, itwas for similar reasons
that the term "peregrine" disappeared in legal texts of the later empire. The
ConstitutioAntoniniana obviously rendered it irrelevantwithin theempire, but the
government did not subsequently classify those outside theempire as "peregrine":
to do so would have implied that those outside the empire possessed a character
equivalent to the recently enfranchised within. Legal texts of the later empire
thereforedivide humanity between Roman and barbarian.
The rapid spread of citizenship and the dissolution of the category "Roman"
was not altogether to Rome's liking. It could have promoted egalitarianism,
a distinctly un-Roman concept. Sporadic claims of citizenship in legal contexts
remindus that some benefits continued to accrue to citizens, especially in criminal
courts.
But
even
as these appeals went
on,
the government
began
to recognize
a very different division of the population, into honestiores and humiliores. No

extant text defines
these terms, but two facts emerge
from those texts that recognize
the categories: first, appeal to these categories becomes markedly more frequent
from themiddle of the second century on and, second, "thehonestiores/humiliores
distinction cut across the citizen/alien one: therewere citizens and aliens on both
sides of thedividing line."'20The vast expansion of the semantic field of Romanus,
coupled
with
the increasingly
rapid extension
of
the franchise,
thus had as its
117. Reynolds 1981:321 no. 4.

118. See PlutarchMoralia (Praec. ger. reip.) 814C, togetherwith Jones 1971:113-16.
1 19. See
the texts cited
in n. 22.
120. Garnsey 1970:266.
30
CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY
inevitable consequence the development of new categories of status, categories,

most importantly, thatwere not determined by the language of ethnicity.
IfGreeks slowly shifted their conceptions of homeland and of city to accom
modate their participation in imperial government and ultimately to justify their
loyalty to the imperial city, what became of the classical city? In his narrative of
events inAthens during theMithridatic war, Posidonius put a speech in themouth
of the demagogue Athenion, inwhich that self-appointed philosopher urged the
Athenians to "tolerate no longer the anarchywhich the senate of theRomans has
allowed to continue, until it should see fit todecide how we are to be governed."'2'
Athenion and his followers chafed at the disjunction between Roman rhetoric an
nouncing the freedom of Greek poleis and the realities of Roman rule.More than
a century later,Plutarch still felt called upon to comment on this feature of Roman
rule: "Being yourself governed, you govern a city managed by proconsuls, the
procurators of Caesar."'22Given the technological constraints on transportation
and communication in the ancient world, Rome had little choice but to govern
throughcities, and theempire consequently brought urbanizationof all areas of the
Mediterranean to new heights. Did these cities, the new and the refurbished, laid
out on Roman models and decorated with Roman monuments, ultimately inspire
the sort of partisan loyalty found in classical poleis? I do not think so. Rather,
each new
forum was
a mirror
for that other
forum; each city a representation
of
The City. The improvements in quality of life brought by these urban centers thus
reflected toRome's credit. The slow desertion of the classical city in late antiquity
may have been due, in part, to Christian
withdrawal
from this world
and, in part, it
was a response to the financial and personal duties incumbent on the curial class.
But Rome, ironically, made that desertion possible by lowering the place such
cities held
in the hearts of men.
For Rome
had finally become,
in the words
of the
Syrian Greek andRoman juristModestinus, "the communispatria of us all."'23

University of Southern California
cando@usc.edu
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Was Rome A Polis

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Was Rome a Polis?

Author(s): Clifford Ando

Was Rome a polis?

ISSN0278-6656(p); Io67-8344 (e).

Volume 18/No. I/April 1999

ANDO:Was Rome a polis?

deeds in the language of honorific decrees-presupposed amental geography that

in a paper of this scope. This essay argues for amethod

of researchingGreek accommodation toRoman rule by investigating themodels

arenas. This essay

The exponents of the varied late-Republicanmodels shared a single method:

ence and then broadened

the scope of this archetype

of the second and first centuries

LaotnoXLTeia, these approaches

Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999

yielded results contrary toRoman conceptions of those same institutions.1'The

In the third stage of this process, Greeks' evolving understanding of Roman

ANDO:Was Rome a polis?

archetype of the political collectivity. Greek cognition developed hand in hand

their city, and her laws the laws of their homeland."6

II. ROME FROM A DISTANCE:

of this era, Greek

this topos to justify

the rivalry of Greek

In the third and fourth centuries

i 8E oCUx aXv 'EtoT.LtLxcl

tuTcxuoinovp'Loq &X6yo e'ac; See also 12.25 (8&cxptprL ,UOl

Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999

againstRoman aggression. They therefore shared a conception of political life in

na-tp(q once again."21

Justwhom does Posidonius here label as Roman? Strictly speaking, a person

he did not have

to say that he held noxeLtov

'P&,IcZtoq.22 Yet I very much

thatPosidonius here observes such constitutional niceties. Inpractice, Greeks had

in notxpL' does considerable

to the conventional meaning of the term.

did not aid attempts

warriors of Rome to near-paritywith theirmore civilized subjects. Dividing the

Greeks were, of course, capable of distinguishing ethnic subdivisions

TtaCtpL8Ot T tXLV OVOVai'OUoL.

ANDO:Was Rome a polis?

within theGreek world, a process visible in classical andHellenistic diplomacy

for its own

clude Roman affairswithin the contemporary history of theMediterranean (i.e.,

Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999

to join his own in a tripartite history

33. See Bowersock 1965:108 and Sacks 1990:135.

ANDO:Was Rome a polis?

constitution, had takenplace xacx yuaLv, according to nature.38It simply didn't

itself presumes that she is a polis, with institutions and thereforementalities at

cities.43 That Greeks

itself. On the contrary,designating a community as apolis gave it status, implied

Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999

for any reason, but a crowd bound by consensual

particular normative order and by common interest."45The populus Romanus was

ANDO:Was Rome a polis?

agglomeration of citizens defined ultimately and almost exclusively by descent.47

as OE:L&rT or occe3PeLo is understandable

(?t5 -rV Pwiczcov

KLaTLv), not knowing,

writes, the import (8&vcxciLq)