In the practical politics of the ancient world there was no concept of human rights to defend the individual against the powerful forces around him. The only protection both within a person’s own community and to some extent outside was membership of a citizen body. Citizenship was not, however, only a defense: it was a source of opportunity for the individual to acquire greater significance by acting in conjunction with his fellow citizens. The concept of citizenship arises and changes in accordance with the history of the city. In what follows I trace the development of Greek notions and then show how they were overtaken and modified by the domination of Rome to the extent that a new concept arose that would have been as alien to the early Romans as to the Greeks of the Archaic Age.
For Aristotle citizenship was essentially active participation in the political life of the community:
Who is the citizen and what is the meaning of the term? For here again there may be a difference of opinion. He who is a citizen in a democracy will often not be a citizen in an oligarchy. . . We may say, first, that a citizen is not a citizen because he lives in a certain place, for resident aliens and citizens share in the place; nor is he a citizen who has legal rights to the extent of suing and being sued; for this right may be enjoyed under the provisions of a treaty. Resident aliens. . . we call citizens only in a qualified sense as we might apply the term to children who are too young to be on the register, or to old men who have been relieved from state duties. . . But the citizen whom we are seeking to define is a citizen in the strictest sense, against which no such exception can be taken, and his special characteristic is that he shares in the administration of justice, and in offices. (Politics 3.1274a 1-23, adapted [trans. Everson])
It is immediately apparent that citizenship is activity and that it involves duties as well as privileges. Mere social and economic association is not enough. As Aristotle says later:
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Again, if men dwelt at a distance from one another, but not so far off as to have no intercourse, and there were laws among them that they should not wrong one another in their exchanges, neither would this be a state. Let us suppose that one man is a carpenter, another a shoemaker, and so on, and that their number is 10,000: nevertheless, if they have nothing in common but exchange, alliance (in war), and the like, that would not constitute a state. {Pol. 3.1280b 17-23)
Aristotle of course is putting forward his own concept of the city-state (polis), deriving from his belief that the polis is a natural organization and that man is a “political animal.” Moreover, for him the aim of the city is not merely life {i. e. physical survival) but good living {Pol. 1.1252b27-53a4). This is why its legislators concern themselves not only with avoiding injustice but with eunomia, good behavior in general {3.1280 5-6). However, Aristotle is both idealist and empiricist. His Ethics and the Politics, which is a pendant to it, take men’s opinions about what is good and just as a basis for inquiry, and the greater part of the Politics is not the construction of an ideal community, like Plato’s Republic, but a consultant’s advice to statesmen in differing sorts of existing community. His concept of the citizen reflects the rules of the city-states he investigated.
World History
