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REFERENCES
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CLIFFORD ANDO
I. INTRODUCTION
Ancient models of cross-cultural contact under the Roman empire are notori
ously simplistic. The observations of Tacitus on Britain and Florus on Spain-that
the Romans encouraged the natives to live in cities on level ground, to wear togas,
and to speak Latin-are typical of Roman reflection on the topic.' Both Romans
and Greeks asserted, however, that Rome's relations with 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.2 This dominant view was best expressed by Horace: "Conquered Greece
conquers the wild victor and introduces her arts into rustic Latium."3
By asserting the superiority of Greek culture, advocates of this position
deflected attention away from Greek subjugation to a foreign power; in so doing,
they must have comforted Greeks unaccustomed to subservience to anyone other
than their fellow Greeks.4 Modem scholars have proved largely complicit in
that project, emphasizing the superiority of Hellenic culture as though that were
Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at Princeton University, York University, and the Annual
Meeting of the APA. I thank members 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 and monarchs over other
less powerful cities, Greek and otherwise, see Austin 1986:454-56.
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6 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. I/April 1999
5. Fuchs 1938; cf. Gauger 1980 and Swain 1996. On the social trends in which these stu
participate see Momigliano 1986:103-104.
6. Felicitous exceptions include Jones 1971:122-30; Gabba 1982 and 1984; Eckstein 198
1990, and 1995: 8-27 and 194-236; Stern 1987; Erksine 1990:181-204; Rogers 1991; Woolf
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
causal link-apparent even to contemporaries-between Greek classicism and Roman rule
Hidber 1996:75-81 and 117-23: Dionysius proposes Hellenic paideia as the means to unite Gr
and Romans culturally, while admitting that his ambition is capable of realization because of w
Augustus and the Romans had achieved politically. Similarly, the Panhellenion gave expression
Hellenic identity, and gave rise to much research into classical history, but its focus was on
relationship between the Greek people and their Roman emperor. Greek in inspiration, its exis
and content were inconceivable without Rome: see Jones 1996 and Birley 1997:217-20.
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ANDO: Was Rome a polis? 7
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8 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
I1. Mommsen 1887-1888: vol. 3, part 1, 231 n. 1: "Das der Latiner zu den Romern betrach
die Griechen vielmehr geradezu als Biirgerrecht (-noX-retLo, LnoXLteLoa), mit Rticksicht a
Stimmrecht; begreiflich genug, aber entgegen der r6mischen Auffassung."
12. On the success of references requiring metaphorical construal, see Soskice 1985:50-55
13. On this process and its dangers see Black 1962:220-42.
14. For a similar problem in Roman political thought, see Thomas 1996, a most elegant e
Thomas asks how the traditional idea of a patria could have been extended to such a larg
heterogeneous collectivity as the empire. Thomas begins with Roman juridical categories and
the overriding ancient tendency to see cities as both the basic unit of political life and the n
object for patriotic sentiments. He then shows that innovations in religious and public law of th
Republic and Augustan age, intended merely to extend earlier practice and based on antiq
research, in fact deconstructed the very foundations on which they were intended to build. The
was a fundamental shift in the notion of the "origin," a dissociating of the Roman people fro
particularized locality: this shift, in turn, allowed the creation of a shared patria, based on a
fiction, that transcended traditional geographic and ethnic boundaries.
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10 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
21. Posidonius fr. 253 Kidd, 11. 82-84 (Athenaeus 213B): t&v 8' BXXwv 'P uai'v Oi ve
Ek&V cyo(4XLcZGL lTpOcnTErG')xa7YLV, OL 8E XOlIOL VETU Lec0qEVOL TEXpYV L.tlOCLt TC 't
apXnS 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, in Greek astonishment that PWVicLo
spoke -i'v Acxtiv&v &&XEXTOV: see Kramer 1993.
24. Cf. Seneca on the rhetor Argentarius, 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 palli
quasi persona mutata rediebant et Graece declamabant. Argentarius derides this practice precise
because the change in garb, from toga to pallium, could not alter those facets of one's characte
that were, in fact, determined by one's patria.
25. On the development of this opposition in the classical period see Hall 1997:40-51.
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12 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
himself to the charge that he leveled against others, that of writing a false his
tory which labeled his patrons as Greek and their enemies as barbarians.33 In
the long run, it was not the category "Greek" that would stretch to accommo
date the polyglot population of the empire, a sad fact that Dionysius 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 the Greek world
through the legend of Aeneas. That legend provided Roman and Greek with a
shared mythological history, to be sure, but certainly not one that could read
ily unite them.35 This 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.36 Of course, it
remained possible for select cities to argue for a close connection with Rome on
the basis 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
the Romans, grounding that claim on little more than its location in the Troad.37
Such negotiations over kinship thus treated only membership among the Greeks
as questionable and subject to inquiry, while leaving the category Greek ontologi
cally intact. If the practical result of manipulating the mythological past was to
render the boundary between Greek and non-Greek quite permeable, that perme
ability was not acknowledged: ideological stress was rather laid on the existence
of the boundary.
More seriously and more ambitiously, in aiming at reconciliation Dionysius
departed from the path blazed by his intellectual forbears, Polybius and Posido
nius, with whose narratives he intended to join his own in a tripartite history of the
world. Reconciliation, for a writer of pr,aX-LX' 'tL^op'La such as Polybius, was
a non-issue. The growth of the Roman empire, like the evolution of the Roman
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14 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
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 the polis, neither in its attitude toward membership, 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 the manifest superficiality of this
presumption masks its more 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 framework within which
Greeks could justify their wholesale participation in imperial culture and political
life. Ultimately it would also force Greeks to choose, consciously or not, between
their polis of origin and the polis 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 through which Romans, and subsequently Greeks, articulated them, namely,
citizenship and popular sovereignty. In each case, describing the errors committed
by Greeks requires understanding the difference that separated Greek and Roman
thought on these topics.
We may begin by acknowledging that Greeks no less than modern scholars
wrestled with Latin political terminology. The fact that Greeks crafted translations
of Roman documents should not be allowed to mask the considerable conceptual
disjunction between their respective political traditions: did Greeks really under
stand the difference betweenpopulus Romanus and 6o 8i,uoq 'Pw iatv? According
to Cicero, "the res publica is the res populi, 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."45 The populus Romanus was
thus notionally permeable, open to those willing 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" inquit Africanus "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 the populus as a corpus, or Ateius 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, in qua gentes
civium patriciae non insunt. To Justinian belongs a particularly concise formulation: appellatione
populi universi cives significantur (Inst. 1.2.4). For the contexts in which Romans made explicit
reference to consensus, see Ruggiero, Diz. Epigr. s.v. Instinky 1940 is notable particularly for its
discussion of texts in which the ideology of consensus is operative without being explicitly raised.
More recently, see Nicolet 1979:332-39.
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16 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
51. On the lack of ideological import behind the rare, and exceptional, usage "king of th
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 the Republican origins of Augustan construals of imperium see Berange
1977.
54. Cicero Leg. 3.2-5.
55. See Magie 1905 s.v. or Mason 1974:132-34. Of course, the Romans had maintained 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 its maiestas visque were greater than those of the suspect consul Valerius.
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18 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
put on a crown or clothed himself in purple as a mark of pride. And they hav
built a council-chamber for themselves, and each day three hundred and twent
men take counsel, deliberating concerning the people, to govern them well. The
trust one man each year to rule over them and to control all their land; they a
obey one man and there is no envy or jealousy among them."' Without Appian'
narrative, I would leap to the conclusion that these Jews, desiring to interpret the
exercise of power at Rome in terms familiar from Hellenistic monarchies, hav
here described a consul and assumed that there was only one of them. But in
light of Appian's story, we should perhaps leave open the possibility that earnes
ambassadors mistook for a king-like magistrate the mere praetor who ordere
them about.6'
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20 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
Thus, for example, those who regard hospitium publicum as a status that
brought "all the private rights and privileges of Roman citizenship" without "i
burdens and obligations" seem, to me 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.73 Consider, for example, Cicero's defen
of Lucius Cornelius Balbus: it does not matter for us today, as it did not matt
for Cicero, whether Balbus might, as a matter of law, hold citizenship in Gad
and Rome simultaneously.74 Before the jury Cicero emphasized not that Balb
had conformed to any existing statute, but rather that he had formally renounced
his status as a Gaditanus once he moved his domicile to Rome: Cicero insisted
that Balbus now dealt with his former countrymen through pacts of hospitium
precisely because hospitium did not imply shared patriotic sentiment. Honorar
citizenship among Greeks, not unlike dual citizenship between a polis and
league, concretized very different attitudes toward the exclusivity of a patria
emotive, political, and legal demands.75
Again, unlike Greeks holding tao- or ouItnoXLtEia, municipal Italians aspir
to full participation in Roman life, and it was the municeps Cicero who best
articulated an Italian ideal.76 In the conversation that opens the second book of
legibus, Cicero referred to the land in which they walked as his patria; this elicited
a question from Atticus: "Have you then two patriae? Or is our communis pat
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 other municipal nien have two patriae: one by birth, and one by citizenship
Thus we consider as our patria both the place where we were born, and that pla
by which we are adopted. But that patria must be preeminent in our affection
in which the name of the res publica signifies the common citizenship of us al
For her it is our duty to die; to her we ought to give our entire selves, and
her altar we ought to place and to dedicate, as it were, all that we possess."77
Cicero thus urged that political loyalties need not stand in conflict wi
each other. Although the next sentence evidently emerged badly mutilated i
the archetype of all surviving witnesses to the Leiden corpus,78 it seems cle
that Cicero concluded this section by urging that loyalty to the communis pat
must take precedence over that to any other political collectivity. In the hierarc
of allegiances outlined by Cicero, loyalty toward Rome occupies a superordinat
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22 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
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 the war with Coriolanus: "For all the Latins, to whom we recently gave
equal rights of citizenship, will stand by us, fighting for this polis as if their patria,
and the many good cities colonized from here will protect Rome, regarding it as
imperative that their metropolis 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 to value Rome as apatria, above and beyond the city
of their birth. Second, Dionysius no less than Philip attributed an 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 their metropolis as their preeminent ntxTpL.
Indeed, it may well be that Greek 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 request was intended to
convey.88
The history of Greek politics did offer one potential model for the integration
of several communities into a single state, and that was the xotLV6V, or league.89
Yet understanding Rome 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 in bygone times attempted to bring the
Peloponnese into a state of common advantage, no one was able to bring this
about because each made the effort not for the sake of the common freedom but
for the acquisition of personal power. Yet in my time this object has been so
completely realized that there exists among them not only an allied and friendly
community, but they use the same laws and weights and measures and coinage,
86. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.17.1-2; the argument is repeated by Tacitus' Claudius (Ann. 11.24.4),
though not in this form by Claudius himself-perhaps a satirical reference through Dionsyius to
Claudius' Greek learning.
87. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.53.5: "Aocttvo'l -re yap tCXavCEq, otg vEWCr TTjv LotLOXJL;CEliV
8E8cw,tv, ovu GU v l aTOO0l, " 8i1pn t Trz Tc ccp TiT98E aY KVL6XsC
oL T' EVOEV86 XOLXL9OSELOOCL TtO6XeLS TOXXoXL xcXt &yaC'L TCEP'L TXVTOc TCOLOUlE4V0L CYW'E{79OXl
Ti) VUycp7tO-AOXLV 0t1UVOU5LV aOj."
88. For petitions to Rome for colony status see Millar 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.
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ANDO: Was Rome a polis? 23
90. 2.37.9-11, the key clause being xcOo6Xou be -coit ,oivo 8tLoXXa&CeLV tou Vu vLoij
Te O6v 8lO'COelLV
lO)XeW(; tcv Ga[ a'eXELV
IkXrt6vvr)ao , ' x tvtCcXU
axe 0V InV AU,lOCV t 6 v EepLf3oXov
OZvy)(YOVI ZlnTVajo elBk
U7TCXPXELV tOl, XOtOLXOuaLV aUrT)V, TCXXaX A ' 0 LVOXL XXd XOLVj XAl XOCtl LO6XEL; EX&aGTOL5 -CuO
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 yap tCOv XaxT& T)v 'ICxXv e,ovcv ....
94. Diodorus 37.2.4-5: 'EnoX4Eouv Ee PwLcx'LOL; EaUV-aL, Aaxo)cwvoL', Aeuxavot, Il
XEVItVOL, NwXavoL, XaL ETepRt TO'XEL( xai eOviq .... EuvEa-Cj%OvCrO 8E xat cuYxX7nyov XOLVTv
nEvTaLxocatv E,~ (Ej xv O'L e tT) T(XrpL8O; APXSLV C'LOL TXpOaeCFO0a 6VEXXOV XoI
OtL TpoPou rev90otL 8UVcXI.ELVOL rTEpiL CY XOLVT) O-T)PLO;.
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24 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
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 1958 may 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 the Greek political imagination.
97. Polybius 1.3.3-5: ev lIbv ouiv TOl5 Tp6O TOU6TWV XpOVOlq 6r, aEv UT 1topab&X EIVOU
3UVEf3tLVE; Tk T7( O'LXOUie;Vi5 TpO' EL;, 8\ca TO XXL XXa\ OaS 7tnLOXO),(q E`C 8E xat TO\
OuvTEXELO( Ocu`v O6qOl(& 8e; xOC xczta toC\ t6itoU<; &yineXCLV iexxcracc txv nenpczyVESvx. aci.o
8E TOUTCOV T&V Xalp&OV O'LOV Et 06 aTOCL87 aUIPcxLVeL yiVEGOaL T V LOTopiav, ouVnXe6aXOL
E a'Itc)Xixa xcx3. ALvx& -cp\,el to TC oua& xcv AOL'ov xcd Talg 'EXrnVLxO(Z Xcoct
Titp6r i'v YLIVe(YOCL t6?,Xo( -Ci\v &Vayopopv &ot&vtrcov.
98. Walbank 1965 and 1972:173-81; cf. Eckstein 1985.
99. See Pavan 1991 and Camoux and Bertrac 1993:xviii-xxii.
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26 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
pomerium represented was the imaginary wall around the borders of the empire,
through which the community of the empire became coextensive with the territory
of its polis.
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. Appian BCiv. 1.6.24: 68e ,uv ?x caO?@t(YV TtOLXLX&V T0oXL'teLCXPTN0L0Lool ' opvotxv
xCa ,ovapXLctv 7CEpLeG-U.
s r t e t s ws s *~T) t T) o t *
108. Appian praef 6.23: xad 1aicv "be PiX; r I'XPL VUV iUCv E'L ;V. XpXOVtl oU, fXcOLXErc,
l OU XeyOUl,V, &V to V) VOVLG), lQOV OpXOV MCltOUl.eLVOL l;OV ntE
OvoIICoucQLv, o XaL t(O3V TtpoCxaip&v atpa7y&v ovo,u tat
See also Cassius Dio 53.17-18 and John Lydus Mag. 1.4 (o`m nx
TPWV.EZOL, otov CL npw,TT)V xeyaXpc0v ti( 7TorS noXLt-cebx) and 2.2. O
Roman emperor, see Wifstrand 1939.
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ANDO: Was Rome a polis? 27
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( T?) PaGLtXSL XtL iTplV ELS X6T)'V XxtaoTi(Vxl.
I 10. 10.36.2, and cf. 3.4. 1.
111. Off 2.8.27: itaque illud patrocinium orbis terrae verius quam imperium poterat nominari.
Cf. Erskine 1990:202-203 and Dyck 1996 ad loc.
112. Texts collected in Buckler 1935. See IGRR IV 1410.6-7; IGRR IV 1611 (= OGIS 470),
tablet B.6-8; IGRR IV 1756, section X, 11. 101-102; and IBM 894.
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28 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1/April 1999
intended, at least in part, to claim Augustus as their father, too. These Gree
began to share the empire, by first sharing the emperor.
Citizenship remained a contentious issue, of course. But long before th
universal extension of the franchise Greeks began to use first-person possessiv
adjectives to refer to Roman institutions.113 In the words of Aelius Aristide
"You, again, have best proven the common maxim that the earth is the mothe
and communis patria of all. Now at last it is possible for a Greek or non-Greek
traveling with or without his possessions, to pass wheresoever he wills, as easi
as if traveling from country to country. The Cilician Gates do not cause fear, nor d
the narrow, sandy roads from Arabia to Egypt, nor impassable mountains nor t
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."'14 We 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 the Romans 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
nevertheless defined by the geographic and imaginative dispersal of its citizen
On the contrary: as we have seen, Aristides lacked a model and a term for
national state. He has rather succumbed to that reasoning which, with the benef
of hindsight, Cassius Dio put in the mouth 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 our faithful allies, as though they dwelt in some unified cit
of us all, regarding this polis as truly their own, and their cities as its fields
and villages."'15 Dio's clumsy expression in this climactic phrase divulges the
poverty of his political vocabulary even as it discloses the model that exonerat
his selection of Rome over Nicaea as the primary object of his loyalties and the
beneficiary of his talents. Libanius participated in the same mentality as Dio,
albeit with different attitude, when he argued that men must choose between t
polis of their origin and "the polis founded by a certain emperor" that drain
the city-councils of the East."'6
Greeks did not universally subscribe to the binarism that forced Libanius t
choose between Antioch and Constantinople. Career inscriptions throughout th
East celebrate men like Tiberius Claudius Diogenes of Aphrodisias, and we shoul
note that the council and people of Aphrodisias listed first in their dedication,
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ANDO: Was Rome a polis? 29
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30 CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 1 /April 1999
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