THE ROMAN MODEL OF CIVIC INEQUALITY

There are two critically important implications to be found in this analysis of citi­zenship in terms of shared subjection. The first is that, while citizens were tied to­gether by their vertical bond of civil obligation as subjects to a common sovereign authority, they need not share any horizontal ties of obligation or allegiance to each other.

But he realized that such aims were centrally relevant to lesser forms of civil association such as the civitas, which Bodin defined not only by shared subjection to a common imperium but also by the sharing of laws, and the urbs, which shared all these as well as the same walls and locale.^[305] Indeed, Bodin fully recognized the paramount importance of cultivating horizontal collegial ties between citizens through membership of subsidiary groups in a well-ordered state, such as in corpo­rate or collegial bodies [corpora et collegia].^[306] But while (as a normative claim) cultivation of such ties may be beneficial or useful to the state, they are by no means necessary or essential (as an analytical claim).

The second, and perhaps more important, implication to consider is the funda­mental civil inequality programmed into the heart of Bodin’s idea of citizenship.

But for Bodin, it was not at all clear why the civil rights constitutive of the vita aktiva - whether legislative, deliberative, or judicial - should be so privileged in conceptualizing citizenship, as Aristotle insisted. Such a definition may have been practicable in the more localized context of the polis in Greek antiquity, but it did not seem usefully applicable to the early modern context where civil status could be fully divorced from civil rights. Why should persons without such civil rights be thought any less of a citizen than those who do have such civil rights?

Bodin thinks the Aristotelians simply cannot supply a satisfactory answer to this question. For him, there is just no good reason to show why lack of political or civil rights should be taken as evidence for lack of citizenship'. Civil rights - “hon­ors” or “privileges” as he, very revealingly, calls them [“immunities and privi­leges”] - are not proxies for citizenship status. As perverse as it may sound to the modern liberal ear, he is perfectly willing to admit that even disenfranchised per­sons within the state were nevertheless technically “citizens,” by virtue of the more basic fact that they were subjects under the same sovereign authority as those who were enfranchised with civil rights.^[307] For Bodin, such persons might be second- class citizens - but they were nevertheless “citizens.” Indeed, the misfortune of the disenfranchised citizen did not make them any less a citizen than the enfranchised citizen, whose “greatnesse of the priveledges make not the subject therefore [any] more...a citizen.”^[308] One can be fully disenfranchised and yet still be fully a citizen.

Bodin thus does not allow for any liberal egalitarian notion of civil rights in conceptualizing citizenship in the modern state.^[310] Indeed, as far as Bodin was con­cerned, civic equality was not only normatively undesirable as incongruent with the natural inequality of persons, but it was also entirely extrinsic to citizenship, as he shows with reference to the legal classifications of persons in classical Rome, to which he appeals in both the Methodus and the De Republica as the exemplary case in point. He observes in his chapter De Ordinibus Civium that in the Roman Em­pire, citizens subject to the Roman imperium were nevertheless classified legally and hierarchically in numerous ways, in terms of diverse orders and ranks with dif­ferentiated civil rights and privileges, yet all the while being regarded legally as Roman citizens. One might, for example, hold the servile status of a person statu- liber or manumitted libertini, and yet still be regarded a citizen just the same as a freeborn ingenui.^[311] Likewise, one might be a rustic, living in the areas surrounding a city, and yet still be regarded as a citizen just like an urban dweller, a “burgher,” living within “city walls” and enjoying special municipal privileges.^[312]

Nor was this civil inequality among Roman citizens unique to the later Empire. Applying this analysis to the later Republic, Bodin flagrantly flouted the conven­tional understanding of the relationship between Rome and her allies (the socii) before the Social War of the first century B. C. E., arguing instead that the lex Iulia de civitate, the statute that extended civil rights - and, it was thought, Roman citi­zenship - to Latins and all socii, was an entirely superfluous act insofar as citizen­ship was concerned. All socii were already Roman citizens of the same state [respublica], even though they lacked civil rights and were not of the same civi­tas.^[313] This was, in turn, precisely because they were all already under the Roman imperium.^[314] So, Bodin concludes:

If the title of “citizen” is valid in all [categories of persons in the Roman Empire], that [Ar­istotelian] definition, which measures all citizens according to the right to hold honors, vote, participate in deliberation, give judgment, and immunity from paying tribute is false, especially when the lex Iulia de civitate granted citizenship [civitatem] to all of Rome's allies [sociis - who, at one time, lacked these rights].^[315]

The general lesson to be gleaned from the Roman imperial experience was that in­habitants of different cities and lands, “however scattered their lands may be,” are nevertheless citizens of the same state, “provided they are controlled by the same authority.”^[316]

But most remarkable here was his attempt to show just how deficient the classical Aristotelian analysis was in making sense of the most important legal act concerning citizenship in the Roman Empire, the Antonine grant of citizenship to all free persons:

Moreover, even the lex Antonini Pii de statu hominum was conceived by these words: In orbe Romano qui sunt, cives sint Romani. He conveyed citizenship [civitatem communicarit] not merely to the allies [sociis], but also to all the provinces [provinciis].^[317]

No concept of citizenship, certainly not the Aristotelian, could handle such a diver­sity of persons, languages, and customs as was present in the Roman Empire except with the very minimalist definition now being defended by Bodin, which not only preserved such diversity but also the civic inequality among citizens:

Nevertheless [despite the universal grant of citizenship], he did not equate the provincials to Italians, nor the praefecturae of Italy to the municipia, nor the municipia to the Italian Latins...

Again, in the De Republica, Bodin articulates the same point concerning the full compatibility of civic inequality with citizenship:

For Antonius Pius gave Roman citizenship to all subjects of the Roman imperium, not by re­scripts, but by law promulgated for all peoples: so that Rome might be the common patria unto all nations. In this way, indeed, he appears to follow the example of Alexander the Great...But Antoninus was content with the Roman world. And even though the city, or rather, the distribu­tion of the immunities of the city appear to have been conveyed to all, the immunities of citi­zens were nevertheless quite diverse, as it is seen not only in the commentaries and responses of the jurists who flourished after Antoninus Pius, but indeed even in the edicts of the Princeps.³⁶

Of course, such civic inequality and internal differentiation in the citizen body was hardly exceptional to Rome.

Indeed, his analysis of Rome as the exemplar of a diverse yet juridically united citizenship, with members of one respublica subject to a common sovereign impe­rium, could be generalized as a universal theory of citizenship in all states ancient and modern. Bodin recognized that it was a general historical pattern observable in all the great historical states of the classical world such as Egypt, Israel, Athens, Sparta, as well as modern states such as Venice and Florence. “Everywhere,” Bodin writes, “we shall find this difference in citizens” - even in “imaginary” states, such as Plato’s kallipolis that “divided [citizens] into three states; that is to wit, into Gov- ernours, Souldiors, and Laborers.”³⁷ Even in monarchical France was it possible for persons of the highest rank (such as “the order of the clergie” and the noble

bus civitatem communicarit.

35 Methodus (1566), 159: Neque tamen provinciales Italis, nec Italiae praefecturas municibus,

nec municipes Italos Latinis, nec Latinos municip_ colonis Latinis, nec Latinas colonias Ro­

manis colonis, nec Romanas colonias Quiritibus, nec Quirites Romanis aequavit, ut falso ple- rique putant.

36 De Republica (1586), 86: Nam AntoninusPius omnes imperio Romano subditos (servitia sem­per excipio) civitate Romana donavit, non rescriptis, sed lege populis omnibus [Bodin adds a marginal citation here to l.in orbe de statu ho. =D.1.5.17] lata: ut essetRoma gentium omnium patria [Bodin writes in a marginal note: l.Roma. ad municipal.= D.50.1.33] communis. In quo quidem Alexandri magni exemplum quodammodo visus est imitari. Is enim orbem terrarum Civitatem communem, suo vero castra civitatis illius Arcem [Plutarch in Alexand.] appellabat. Sed Antoninus orbe Romano contentus est; ac tametsi civitas vel potius civitatis ac immunita­tum largitio cum omnibus communicata videretur: varie tamen civium immunitates fuerunt, ut videre est non modo in Iurisconsultorum [Bodin adds a marginal note to l.1 & toto titulo de censib. = D.50.15], qui post Antoninum Piumfloruerunt, commentariis ac reponsis; sed etiam in Principum edictis.

37 Methodus (1566), 160; Commonweale (1606), 68-9.

“dukes, counties, marquesses”) and persons “in the lowest place of all” (such as “makers and sellers of womens paintings, dancers, jesters...the ministers of foule and vaine pleasures’) all to be united together in one civil body (a “citizenry”) under the sovereignty of one king.^[318]

On the question of civic equality, then, the conclusion is clear. As Bodin put it, “There was never Commonweale, were it true, or but imaginarie, or the most popu­lar that a man could thinke of; where the citisens were equall in all rights and pre­rogatives; but that alwaies some of them have had more of lesse than others.”^[319]

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