Citizens

So was Christianity really a Roman religion? Yes and no. For it obviously depends on what we mean by ‘Roman’ – a malleable and elusive adjective that can be used in many senses, from political control to style of art, from place to period of time. The right answer to the question of how many ‘Romans’ lived in ‘Roman Britain’ could well be ‘about five’, if we mean only those born and bred in Rome. It could equally well be ‘around 50,000’, if every single soldier plus the small staff of the imperial administration, including slaves, are all deemed to count. It would be more like ‘3 million’ if we reckon that all the inhabitants of the Roman province were now in a way Roman, even though most of them, outside the towns, would probably not have known where in the world Rome was and would have had no more direct contact with Roman power than the occasional bit of loose change in their pockets.

One important definition still rested in Roman citizenship. For an increasingly large number of the inhabitants of the empire, becoming Roman meant becoming a Roman citizen. Throughout the provinces in the first two centuries CE, there were many ways in which this happened. Non-citizens who served in the Roman army were made citizens when they completed their terms of service; local officials in towns across the empire were more or less automatically granted Roman citizenship; whole communities or individuals (like Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus) were made citizens for special services they had rendered; and slaves of Roman citizens wherever they lived became Roman citizens if and when they were freed. There were none of the tests or examinations that we have come to associate with acquiring citizenship, no saluting the flag, swearing loyalty or paying a fee. Citizenship was a gift, and by 200 CE, according to the best recent estimate, roughly 20 per cent of the free population had become citizens. To put it another way, there were probably at least 10 million provincial Roman citizens.

Citizenship brought with it all kinds of specific rights under Roman law, covering a wide range of topics, from contracts to punishments. The simple reason that, in the 60s CE, Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded was that Paul was a Roman citizen. For a few, citizenship was the first step in joining the elite of the central Roman government, on a journey that even led to the senate and imperial palace. Several emperors in the second century CE had origins outside Italy, from Trajan, whose family came from Spain, to Septimius Severus, who ruled between 193 and 211 CE and was the first emperor from Africa.

More and more senators were also of provincial origin. They included Lollius Urbicus, the governor of Britain from North Africa; Agricola, whose family came from southern Gaul; and many more, who proudly displayed their achievements in the capital (‘the fifth man ever to enter the senate from the whole of Asia’) in inscriptions in their home towns. Some emperors promoted the trend. In his speech in 48 CE which advocated admitting to the senate men from northern Gaul (‘hairy Gaul’, as the Romans called it), Claudius explicitly justified the proposal by looking back to Rome’s openness to foreigners from its earliest days and forestalling one obvious objection: ‘If anyone concentrates on the fact that the Gauls gave Julius Caesar, now a god, such trouble in war for ten years, he should consider that they have also been loyal and trustworthy for a hundred years since then.’ By the end of the second century CE more than 50 per cent of the senators were from the provinces. They were not drawn evenly from different parts of the empire (none came from Britain), and some of them, like the first ‘foreign’ emperors, may have been the descendants of earlier Italian settlers in the provinces rather than ‘native’, but not all, or even most. In effect, the provincials were now ruling Rome.

That does not mean the governing classes of Rome were part of some warm, liberal cultural melting pot. In our terms, they were relatively race blind. The reason that we can still debate the ethnic origins of the African emperor Septimius Severus is that ancient writers made no comment on them. But the Roman elite were certainly snobbish about senators from the provinces. People joked about them not being able to find their way to the senate house. Even Septimius Severus is supposed to have been so embarrassed by his sister’s bad Latin accent that he sent her back home. And Claudius’ speech arguing in favour of admitting ‘hairy Gauls’ to the senate was prompted by widespread senatorial objections to the proposal. Yet, at least by the second century CE, at the centre of the Roman world were a substantial number of men and women who saw the empire from both sides, who had two homes – Roman and provincial – and who were culturally bilingual.