Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece by Duplouy Alain; Brock Roger W.; & Roger W. Brock

Author:Duplouy, Alain; Brock, Roger W.; & Roger W. Brock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

2. Ancient Citizenship

They managed these things very differently in the ancient Graeco-Roman world—or rather, since in this case ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ are very different from each other, in the Greek and Roman worlds. This point was succinctly and elegantly made by the distinguished French ancient historian Philippe Gauthier, who entitled an article comparing and contrasting ancient Greek and Roman attitudes to and practices of citizenship ‘Roman “generosity” and Greek “avarice”’.13 As an ideal type, or at least as a stereotype, that binary opposition will work very well. But it’s not just the fact of the difference, but the reasons behind that fact of difference, that are of historical interest and concern. Most of our English political descriptive vocabulary comes from Greek, not Latin, but ‘citizen’ comes to us from Latin (civitas, civis), not Greek, and civitas is cognate with civilitas, civilization: both literally, that is etymologically, and metaphorically, that is symbolically, to be a citizen in ancient Rome was to be civilized. By implication, Roman citizenship was deemed to be one of the hallmarks, or high watermarks, of Roman culture. It was not just an institution, nor even merely a practice, but a culture, and a culture above all.14 So too was ancient Greek citizenship, for which the word was politeia, derived from the original state-form that they called polis. The traditional English translation of polis is ‘city-state’, and for many purposes that will still do. But the realization has dawned, properly and correctly, that a much more apt translation would be ‘citizen-state’, since that captures both the central, defining importance of citizenship in the ancient Greek world and emphasizes the ancient Greeks’ concrete rather than abstract understanding of the political community as a living corporate entity.15

To show just how closely citizenship as an institution was related to citizenship as a practice in Greece, we might observe, first, that the very same word, politeia, was used for ‘citizenship’ as for what we, again borrowing from Latin rather than Greek, call a ‘constitution’. Moreover, in illustration of how deeply and how intimately citizenship as both institution and practice was connected with citizenship as culture in ancient Greece, I observe that a polis’s politeia (in the sense of constitution) might be called, enthusiastically but unforcedly, its ‘soul’ (Isocrates), or (more measuredly, by Aristotle) its ‘sort of life’.16 So much for citizenship in Greece in general; now for Sparta.

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