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Cecchet (L.), Busetto (A.) (edd.) Citizens in the Graeco-Roman World. Aspects of Citizenship from the Archaic Period to ad 212. (Mnemosyne Supplements 407.) Pp. xii + 341, colour ills, colour map. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Cased, €115, US$133. ISBN: 978-90-04-34668-0.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in citizenship, particularly in Roman history. Long assumed to be central to historical developments such as the consolidation of the Roman empire, citizenship was pushed to the margins of research in the 1990s and 2000s as historians focused on the cultural construction of identity and questioned the significance of legal and administrative structures. But the past decade has seen the pendulum of scholarly interest begin to swing back towards institutions such as citizenship, albeit with a new focus on the cultural frameworks that gave citizenship meaning. This edited volume, the fruit of a conference in Urbino in 2014, illustrates the vibrancy of recent work on citizenship in both Greek and Roman history.
C. opens with an introductory survey of regimes of citizenship from Classical Greece to the Roman empire, with particular attention to the differences between Greek politeia and Roman civitas (following the lines of an influential essay by P. Gauthier, ‘La citoyenneté en Grèce et à Rome: participation et intégration’, Ktèma 6 [1981], 166–79). The full and up-to-date bibliography will make this a very useful resource for those new to the subject, while its emphasis on the question of how citizenship was experienced and performed signals the central theme of the volume as a whole.
M. Giangiulio problematises the search for the origins of Greek citizenship in the archaic period. Rather than seeking to date the appearance of citizenship as an institution, he approaches the regulation of participation in public life as one of several, parallel processes of institutionalisation that produced the structures of the Classical polis. He suggests that participation became both a source of prestige and an expression of privileged status in archaic communities. He also highlights the diversity of political organisation, marginalising the Athenian model and pointing to very different formations such as ‘ethnos-states’ and ‘political regimes of fixed number’ (e.g. ‘the six hundred’ of Massalia) (p. 46).
C.’s own paper shifts attention to subdivisions of the citizen body, suggesting...