Status Civitatis

Roman citizenship (civitas Romana) was that status whereby a person was entitled to the rights and was subject to the duties of Roman law. The issue of citizenship may be more appropriately addressed in a discussion of constitutional law, yet, in the field of private law, it had important consequences for those individuals who were privileged to occupy the status of a Roman citizen (civis Romanus).

Roman citizenship was usually acquired by means of conception during a Roman marriage or birth from an unmarried Roman mother.

Furthermore, citizenship could be acquired by the formal liberation of a slave by his master (iusta ac legitima manumissio) and by law or decree by the authorities. During the Republic, the citizenship was initially granted to individuals and whole communities in only special instances and after the Social War (91-87 bc) it was granted en masse to all Italian allies. Augustus attempted to put a brake on the expansion of citizenship by designing a population policy that sought to preserve the Roman and Italian stock as the core of the empire. This entailed the sparser granting of individual naturalizations to foreigners whilst attempting to stem the flood of emancipated slaves. However, the realities of a coalescing empire forced upon his successors standards that were more elastic. Once Rome, Italy and the provinces had entered the stage of mutual assimilation, the citizenship was granted with increasing frequency to individuals or whole communities, often following the concession of the ius Latii (the intermediate legal status between citizen and foreigner given to members of Latin colonies). At the end, rather than being a conscious method for furthering Romanization, the extension of the citizenship to the provincials was its unavoidable result.

It may seem, therefore, merely the logical culmination of a process in the making for centuries that Emperor Caracalla issued an edict, the celebrated constitutio Antoniniana (ad 212), by which he bestowed Roman citizenship upon all the free inhabitants of the empire who were members of organized communities. The constitutio Antoniniana signified the final transformation of the traditional civitas into empire citizenship and led to the extension of Roman law to the whole empire.

Depending on their age, gender and mental capacity, freeborn Roman citizens (cives Romani ingenui) enjoyed a number of legal capacities or rights. In public law, these citizens had the right to vote in the popular assemblies (ius suffragii); the right to stand for public office (ius honorum); and the right to occupy military offices in the Roman legions. In private law, they had the right to contract a legal Roman marriage (ius conubii); the right to enter into legal transactions and conclude valid legal acts relating, for example, to the conclusion of contracts and the acquisition of property (ius commercii); and the right to litigate before the Roman courts. In addition, certain financial rights and privileges were reserved for freeborn citizens only. A person entitled to all the rights of the citizenship (ius civitatis) was referred to as civis optimo iure. However, not all Roman citizens were cives optimo iure. Roman women, for example, did not possess the ius honorum and the ius suffragii, and their contractual capacity initially depended on whether or not they fell under the authority (manus) of their husband. Similarly, freedpersons (libertini) were subject to various restrictions: they were excluded from all the important offices of the state, could not serve in the legions and could not contract a lawful marriage with a member of the senatorial aristocracy.^{^[262]} Furthermore, only some of the relevant rights were held by persons granted by law limited citizenship, such as the members of certain communities or individuals in Italy and overseas.^{^[263]}

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Source: Mousourakis G.. Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition. Springer,2015. — 339 p.. 2015

Status Civitatis

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