The Historians' History of the World 05

CLAIMS OF THE LATINS AND ITALIANS TO THE CIVITAS

[100-90 B.C.]

The citizen of Rome, in complete possession of that illustrious title, combined the enjoyment of two classes of rights, civil and political. The civil law regulated the forms and effects of marriage, the exercise of paternal authority, the holding of property, the capacity of willing and inheriting; it secured, further, the inviolability of the citizen’s person. The political law, on the other hand, gave the right of suffrage in the election of magistrates, and in voting upon projects of law; it conferred eligibility to public office; it permitted initiation in certain religious rites, and, finally, it conceded the honour and advantage of military service in the legions. The combination of these rights and capacities constituted the complete title to the Roman franchise. It was sometimes thus conferred upon individuals, in reward for special services; in a few cases the inhabitants of a favoured city were invested with it in the mass.

The admission, however, of a foreign city, in alliance with the republic, to the full right of citizenship, required it, in the first place, to renounce its own ancient institutions. The favoured community adopted at once the civil law of Rome, and organised itself internally upon the Roman model, with an assembly of the people, a curia, representing the senate, and superior elective magistrates, generally two in number, corresponding with the consuls. A city thus constituted took the name of a municipium

, that is, an office-bearing community. The inhabitants, when they presented themselves in Rome, might exercise the right of suffrage there, and were rendered capable of filling any of its magistracies.

It seems, however, that the petty states of Italy, attached to their own domestic institutions, were frequently unwilling to sacrifice them for these advantages, and rejected the concession of political rights, contenting themselves with the acquisition of the civil; which, while they placed them upon a footing of equality with the inhabitants of the city in respect to marriage, family authority, property, and person, did not require the surrender of their own political customs. Rome herself was not unwilling to recognise this distinction, and was wont to dispense the favour of her franchise with affected coyness, conferring her civil rights upon various states in succession, but reserving her political franchise as a special boon for the most meritorious.

Thus were formed within the bosom of the great Roman Empire various classes of communities, of different grades of civil and political condition; but every one among them, which acquired any portion of Roman rights, obtained the common designation of a municipium. Each municipium retained entire authority over everything relating to (1) the exercise of its religion; (2) the administration of its local finances, the election of its magistrates, the maintenance of its edifices and public works; (3) its internal police. The regulation of these matters appertained generally to the curies

or governing bodies, sometimes to the mass of the people. Accordingly, the municipes, or citizens of such a community, possessed, as Cicero proclaims, two countries, the one natural, the other political—the one actual, the other privilegial. Thus, he continues, we regard as our fatherland both the spot where we were born, and that which has adopted us; but that one of the two has the strongest claims upon our affection which, under the name of “commonwealth,” constitutes our own country pre-eminently; it is for that fatherland that we ought to be ready to die. “I shall never deny,” he says, “Arpinum, as my country; but Rome will be always more peculiarly such; for Rome comprehends Arpinum.”

While such were the distinctions introduced by the republic among those whom she adopted as her own citizens, she did not omit to classify also the condition and privileges of the various nations of Latium and Italy which fell successively under her sway.

Roman Catapult