ROMAN CITIZENSHIP AS PRIVILEGE AND TOKEN OF HUMANITY IN AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Finally, we can address Christian thought on Roman citizenship arising from two non-exegetical works by Augustine of Hippo. The first pertains to the bishop as protector of the oppressed.
After 420, the disorganization of the Roman armies of the West allowed a resurgence of piracy on the Mediterranean, which saw slave traders from Asia Minor making raids on the African coasts and kidnapping their inhabitants in order to sell them in the Roman East. Augustine attempted to liberate certain of these unfortunate people and denounced these practices in 428 in a letter to his friend Alypius, then in Rome, and whom he asked to obtain imperial support: “But who resists these traders, who deal not in animals but in humans, and not in any humans whatsoever but Roman provincials? They invade everywhere and eveÂrywhere offer sums of money in order to hand over people from anywhere, kidÂnapped by force or lured into traps. Who resists these traders, in the name of Roman freedom, to say nothing of freedom in general, but of this freedom in particular?”[283] Through this example, we see how much Augustine was filled with all the values of Romanness, which here has him take on an imperial tone befitting Cicero’s speeches against Verres.[284] For him, Roman citizenship remained an ideal of collective life and a real legal privilege.[285]The other text is a passage from the De civitate Dei contra paganos, The City of God, written circa 413, in which Augustine sought to denounce the pride of the magistrates of the Roman Republic. They were the historical model for the pagan senators of his time who criticized the Christian emperors’ abandonment of the cult of the ancestral gods, which in their eyes was the cause for the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410. For Augustine, only the city of God would fulfill the desire for justice that Cicero wrongly said had been realized in the Rome of his time.
But he allowed that the virtutes of the ancient Romans had justified an earthly recompense, the domination of the other peoples, who were less virtuous than them. Thus, God had truly desired the Roman Empire and rewarded their virtus. But it had been ruined by pride, the desire for glory, and the libido dominandi, the lust for domination, whereas a much more just solution could have been possible:If the Romans have in some way harmed the nations on whom they imposed their laws after having subjugated them, is it not only because they did so at the price of terrible bloodshed? If they had done it in accord with the other nations, it would have been a greater success, but there would not have been the glory of triumph. The Romans lived under their own laws, which they imposed on others. But, if that sharing had taken place without Mars and Bellona, without consequently giving a place to Victory, and without there being victors - for lack of combat - would the condition of the Romans and of the other nations not have been the same? Especially if they had done right away what they did very humanely and very freely later on: associate all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to the City and declare them Roman citizens; thus belonged to all what had belonged to some. And the plebs, which no longer had its fields, would have lived thanks to the state, because it would have been easier to pay the expense of their food from the taxes paid by consenting nations through good administrators of the state than it was to extort those monies from the defeated.[286]
This text falls into a pattern of polemic against the pagan senators whose advocate Symmachus had been in the dispute over the Altar of Victory in 383. Augustine sets down as fact the claim that Roman laws were always the best, and that they would have been accepted by all if the Romans had negotiated rather than fought. Such a perspective is of course an illusion, but the essential fact is that Augustine disapÂproved of Roman imperialism, but not the Roman Empire.
He only regrets that Roman domination had been imposed by war, owing to the Romans’ concern for glory, and that the extension of Roman citizenship, this exceptional benefit, had not been immediate. Augustine does not say anything specific about Caracalla, nor about the other pagan emperors who could have been generous in granting Roman citizenship before him. But, in a personal capacity, Aurelius Augustinus’ family had very probably received it in 212.This reasoning on Augustine’s part reveals the mentalities of his age. At the time of the Republic, the imperium of Rome over its provinces had benefitted only the City, and later Italy, but belatedly. Under the Empire, the imperium could be considered as profitable for all regions, with increasing degrees of plausibility after Augustus, then after 212, and even more so after the suppression of Italy’s priviÂleges under Diocletian. For Augustine, this situation obtained in his time and was the only normal one, and so he thought that it would have had to have existed startÂing with the Republic. This was, however, to deny the historical trajectory of the Empire, to deny, in other words, its transformation of an Italian privilege into a common good. Because the political superiority of the Republican regime blinded him, Augustine, who was excessively Ciceronian, denied the administrative and legal superiority of the monarchical Empire in supposing that its achievement could have brought into existence even from the time of conquest.
This mindset is expressed in particular in Augustine’s acceptance of the priviÂleges of the Roman plebs, whom he thought to be without land, which supposition he owes to Latin historiography about the age of the Gracchi. Augustine thought that this had been the pretext of the imperialist and unjust wars from 150 to 30 BCE, which rendered them different from earlier wars, which were, according to him, defensive and thus justified. But Augustine supposed that another situation would have been possible.
The expense of feeding the plebs should have been levied on consenting nations and not extorted from those defeated. The peoples’ consent would have to be gained through awareness of the benefits of Roman laws, which would have brought them to accept the imposition of tribute in exchange for Roman citizenship, as a payment of thanks to the Roman people for the honor and rank it conferred on those peoples. Thus, a Mediterranean world organized around Rome and guaranteeing peace and law could have existed as early as this era. The tribute would have guaranteed civil peace in Rome and the security and prosperity of the other regions, as was the case with the grain dole of Africa in Augustine’s time.Augustine’s reasoning implicitly supposed that the telos of the conquering ReÂpublic was the imperial administration, that the aim of the war was peace, and the goal of the inequality of the statutes was the equality of rights. Cultural reasons explain his admiration for the republican regime and the virtutes of the Roman heÂroes, and his origin and position as a provincial justifies his attachment to a citizenÂship and to common laws. This composite point of view defines a conception of Roman history characteristic of the Latin west, which was as opposed to the senatoÂrial point of view of the Romans of Rome as to the Eastern Romans’ monarchical conception. Augustine dreamed of the improbable alliance of a republican governÂment and an imperial administration, all in the service of an ideal Romania, in which nations would have voluntarily thanked Rome for its benefits by nourishing its plebs. For Augustine, the shared rights of the civitas Romana showed the vanity of the conflicts of the past. Why had they made war in the past as they did, if not for a pointless glory, since the descendents of the victors also paid taxes, tributa, and since the others could learn as much as them and likewise become senators, someÂtimes without ever having seen Rome?[287] Reasoning as performed by Augustine, through the anachronisms that it supposes, is a remarkable testimony to the menÂtalities of Late Antiquity, and was part of the legacy of the Antonine Constitution, that of a Romanitas, a Romanness made visible and natural.
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