concerning homeland resembles the modern-day understanding of the term. Loyalty, dedication to place, and willingness to make sacrifices in its name are considered sacred values, not to be questioned and certainly not to be discussed in tones of sarcasm. Superficially, this discourse appears to represent the beginnings of nationalist consciousness, which in the past two centuries has come to enjoy a dominant status in human society. But was the homeland of Thucydides, Plato, and the other Athenians the same national homeland imagined by Benito Mussolini, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and millions of other twentieth-century nationalists? At the end of the day, is there indeed nothing new under the sun?
In actuality, these two incarnations of homeland are as different as they are similar. Just as ancient Athenian society employed not representative democracy but direct participatory democracy, so too was it completely unfamiliar with the modern abstract, nationalist concept of homeland. The notion of homeland in the democratic states of ancient Greece was limited to patriotic loyalty to the polis, the small and supremely tangible city-state whose human and physical landscape was well known to all its citizens, owing to their firsthand knowledge of its size and borders. Daily they met its other inhabitants in the agora and joined them in general meetings, celebrations, and theatrical performances. From unmediated experience sprang the essence and intensity of patriotic sentiment, which was, for them, one of the most important areas of social consciousness.
In truth, the level of communication and the limited means of cultural dissemination were insufficient for facilitating the emergence of a large democratic homeland. Despite Aristotle’s dictum (as usually and loosely translated) about man being, by nature, a political animal, that classical human animal was the citizen of a city-state devoid of form, precise maps, newspapers, radio, compulsory education, and other such provisions. Therefore, when the Hellenic world was later united under the leadership of Alexander of Macedonia, the old patriotism of the polis dissolved, just as the democratic dimension disappeared from the everyday life of much of Greece.
In addition, the ethical lines demarcating democracy in the ancient city-state were far from identical to the political boundaries of the modern democracy. The sovereign citizens of the Athenian polis constituted a minority of the city’s overall population and the farmers who cultivated the surrounding lands. Only free males born to parents who already held citizenship were considered to be autochthonous and were incorporated into the electorate and its elected institutions. Women, immigrants, people of mixed descent, and the many slaves possessed no rights and were excluded from self-sovereignty. The universal conception of humanity that would emerge and splinter in the modern era was still unknown in the Mediterranean world, which was rich, refined, and thoroughly elitist.19
Loyalty to the homeland in the form of devotion to a league of citizens possessing representative self-government would appear in some of the literary works written in Rome during the Republican era. On the eve of its disappearance and its transformation into an immense empire, numerous scholars decorated it with verbal praises that would be preserved in European culture up to the modern era. We have already noted Horace’s famous declaration in Odes about the sweetness of dying for the homeland. More than intending to sanctify national soil, however, the great poet meant to express his devotion to the Republican homeland, or the res publica, just after Julius Caesar buried it forever.
In The Catiline Conspiracy, Roman historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a loyal follower of Caesar’s, identified the homeland with liberty, as distinct from to the rule of the few.20 The same was true of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the statesman whose contribution to thwarting this anti-Republican conspiracy earned him the distinguished status of “father of the homeland.” In his famous oration against the conspirator, he berates his opponent:
Should your parents dread and hate you, and be obstinate to all your endeavors to appease them, you would doubtless withdraw somewhere from their sight. But now the country, the common parents of us all, hates and dreads you and has long regarded you as a parricide, intent upon the design of destroying her. And will you neither respect her authority, submit to her advice, nor stand in awe of her power?21
In the end, this highly acclaimed orator, known for his rhetorical acuity, lost his life in the events that led to the decline and demise of the republican structure that was so dear to his heart. Shortly before his death, however, he put down in writing his unswerving views on the homeland in a Socratic-style dialogue echoed in many writings that appeared in Western Europe on the eve of the modern era. Cicero’s well-known Treatise on the Laws considers the common association between homeland and republic in a dualistic formulation:
I should say, that Cato [a well-known Roman statesman], and municipal citizens like him, have two countries, one, that of their birth, and the other, that of their choice . . . In the same way, we may justly entitle as our country, both the place from where we originated, and that to which we have been associated. It is necessary, however, that we should attach ourselves by a preference of affection to the latter, which, under the name of the Commonwealth, is the common country of us all. For this country it is, that we ought to sacrifice our lives; it is to her that we ought to devote ourselves without reserve; and it is for her that we ought to risk and hazard all our riches and our hopes. Yet this universal patriotism does not prohibit us from preserving a very tender affection for the native soil that was the cradle of our infancy and our youth.22
Like devotion to the Hellenic polis, loyalty to the Roman Republic was a supreme value, an extolled attribute transcending even nostalgia for one’s birthplace and the landscapes of childhood, inasmuch as it was the republic where one was his own sovereign, an equal partner in the ruling collective. Here an army of civilian volunteers, as distinct from a paid army, could be mobilized; here an individual could be required to die for the place. It was considered justified to be asked to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the public, as the public was the manifestation of one’s own sovereignty. As has already been stated, this conception of political homeland, which would remain unique in the premodern world, resembles the homeland of the modern nationalist era.
Indeed, many enlightened intellectuals of the eighteenth century were enchanted by the patriotic declarations they retrieved from the ancient Mediterranean world, and regarded them as evidence of an ideal regime of liberty, a realm without tyrants or kings. Nevertheless, one of these thinkers, the Neapolitan philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico, reminded his readers that Roman nobles “did not hesitate for the safety of their various fatherlands, to consecrate themselves and their families the will of the laws, which by maintaining the common security of the fatherland kept secure for each of them a certain private monarchical reign over his family.”23 Vico also did not refrain from criticizing his own Latin forefathers, noting that “the true fatherland was the interest of a few fathers . . .”24
Cicero’s Republican homeland was indeed an oligarchy, consisting of a limited body of civilians, with the electorate and the elected always belonging to the same small elite. Most important for our discussion of the concept of homeland is the fact that only those who were physically present in the Roman capital were eligible to take part in elections. Citizens residing outside the limits of the city itself were stripped both of the right to vote and the right to be elected. And because in Cicero’s time most citizens were already living outside the city, they were ineligible to play an active role in their beloved homeland.
The expansion and growing power of imperial Rome divested it of its connection to the civil homeland. In a number of ways, the empire was a great league of many city-states that each lacked any real practical independence. The third century CE transformation of the empire’s nonslave inhabitants into citizens who
