Roman empires and the form of religious practice.1 And always, polis-religion is relegated to the archaic period. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, by contrast, polis-religion would have been weakened and defeated at the same as the traditional city-states were, and the lonely individual would have henceforth made his or her own religious choices from among the totality of cults and gods offered thanks to the opening of the Mediterranean. More precisely, it would have been from the fourth century BCE that the evolution and differentiation of religious choices in the Mediterranean world would have led to the collapse of civic religion, which would have been unable to integrate the new options.2 Then, commencing with the triumviral period through the last quarter of the first century CE, deviations in public life from earlier norms in public religion would have become obvious. These deviations revealed the diversification of the religious system and provoked ongoing reevaluation of the role of cults in society. Put another way, according to these people, the history of religion in antiquity is actually the history of the destabilization and dissolution of civic religion, which was unable to coexist with social structures that exceeded a certain level of complexity.
The Myth of the Decline of the City
Let us examine these claims in detail. For the moment, it suffices to recall that the modern myth of the decline and disappearance of city-states in favor of more complex systems was long ago denounced and corrected by Louis Robert, Philippe Gauthier, and numerous other historians. One can admit without difficulty that one phase in the history of city-state civilization ended when foreign kings, in the form of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great, and their successors came to dominate Greek lands. Henceforth, city-states were no longer able to have an autonomous foreign policy or, in other words, to make war and choose their enemies and allies on their own. Also, for a while, it was equally impossible for them to freely choose their own magistrates. But beyond these restrictions, Greek city-states continued to be Greek city-states, functioning and evolving according to the model of the so-called classical city. The Macedonian and Hellenistic monarchies did not have the means wholly to control the city-states, and the citizens of the Greek city-states did not become members of the Macedonian or Seleucid monarchies to which they were subordinated. They remained citizens of Athens, Thebes, Rhodes, or Ephesus, and they conducted themselves as such. What was terminated in the fourth century BCE was the age of the myth of the Greek city. One could compare what happened to the Greeks with that which occurred in Europe after the First and even more after the Second World War. The age of the absolute preeminence of Europe was then ended. The myth of Europe, the leader of the world and of civilization, still exists and, from time to time, particular European states pretend that nothing has changed. But the facts are there. Henceforth, world politics and economic life are shaped by other states and continents. And yet, who would say that the European states have been dissolved? That they are in full decline, together with the entirety of European culture? That one can no longer analyze France, for example, in light of its constitution, society, and culture?
Similarly, the Greeks continued to the end of antiquity to live in city-states and to order life according to this model. City-states evolved, as they had evolved from the sixth to the fourth century BCE; they came to employ a backwards-looking rhetoric and lamented the passing of that glorious age when they had dictated terms to the king of Persia. But this did not prevent them from being passionate about the political debates that took place in their city-states, before and after the Macedonian or Roman conquest.
Nor was Roman experience any different. Its ascension to the status of world power over the course of the six centuries before this era, between the period of the Etruscan kings and the advent of empire, is well known. From the start of the fifth century BCE, Rome organized itself as a respublica, a city-republic, with citizens, magistrates, Senate, and laws, and it evolved greatly over the next centuries. Over time, it conquered Italy; later, at the head of an alliance combining the city-states of Italy under its power, it discovered how to resist Carthage, before spreading both east and west while subduing nearly the entirety of the known world. This imperial phase had two consequences at an institutional level. First, the Roman republic had to adapt to the demands of its imperial project, to endow itself with magistracies capable of waging wars permanently on all fronts and to build institutions that combined at the same time effectiveness as well as the defense of essential civic liberties. This prepared the way for the general-magistrates who would contest with each other for power in the last century of the republic.
The second grand change that took place at Rome and in Italy over this period concerned a central element of civic life: the definition of the body politic. In the archaic period, many city-states had known a degree of horizontal social mobility—a circulation of elites—and thus a relatively easy policy with their citizenship. But, over time, the Greek city-states gradually imposed strict limits on grants of citizenship. For this reason, their civic bodies were relatively small, which from a military point of view constituted a clear disadvantage, because the armies of city-states were composed of citizens. From this perspective, Rome remained an archaic city. Oligarchic, yielding the franchise based on tax status, Rome had a much more open conception of citizenship. It progressively integrated the populations of city-states that submitted to it, as citizens of full right or of secondary status—the famous Latin citizens, who possessed only some of the rights of a Roman citizen. It was these who offered to the Romans a virtually inexhaustible supply of soldiers, the famous allies, the socii, of whom the alliance with the Latins of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE constituted a prefiguration. At the same time, it was perfectly normal for Romans to free their slaves, who on this basis became citizens. Magistrates could equally well grant citizenship to people whom they favored. This does not mean that the Romans treated citizenship as a cheap commodity, even in Italy. The process was slow and took centuries before becoming an important phenomenon. In the period of the Second Punic War (218–202 BCE), at the end of the third century BCE, its effects were already making themselves visible, and they would be one of the reasons for Roman victory. The major change came after the Social War, the war with the socii, the allies, when in 90 BCE the Italians, citizens of the second category and the principal bearers of the toils of war, revolted against Roman hegemony. The Romans prevailed, but in the course of the years that followed the victory, all the citizens of the Italian city-states became Roman citizens of full right.
From then, the respublica of the Romans counted more citizens than any other city or civic polity in the world: in 70 BCE, after the Plautian–Papirian law of 89 BCE, which conferred Roman citizenship on all Italians, one is given the figure of nine hundred thousand male citizens; at the beginning of the principate of Augustus, in 28 BCE, the count is four million citizens, including women and children. Such a number of citizens had previously been unimaginable. But this spectacular expansion, which constitutes a profound change to the Roman world, in no way caused the city-states of Italy to break down. On the contrary, it reinforced them, by incorporating them in the very definition of citizenship.
It is essential to understand how the system of the city-states functioned after the Plautian–Papirian law, which distributed citizenship throughout the city-states of Italy, which gradually became either municipia, to wit, autonomous municipalities, or colonies of Roman right. Every Italian had to make a declaration before the urban praetor, at Rome, to indicate the city of origin in which he wished to be enrolled. It is by virtue of his city-state or political community of origin, his “little fatherland,” that he became a Roman citizen, and it is there that ever after he had his origo, his legal place of origin. From this time, a Roman citizen had a double belonging, to his natural fatherland or fatherland of birth, and a universal fatherland, Rome. A number of authors seem to me to confuse everything when they reduce this double belonging to a simple hierarchy of the duties of loyalty, higher to Rome, lower to one’s local polity.3 Of course there is a hierarchy of duties, but the two types of duties and, indeed, of rights are not exclusive of one another. Each is as strong as the other.
It is not necessary to conclude that, after 89 BCE, Roman citizenship was granted by the separate Roman city-states. Nothing could be more incorrect. Roman citizenship was acquired by birth or adoption, by manumission and enfranchisement when one was a slave, or by
