Citizenship, Universalism and Stoic Cosmopolitanism: The Roman Case

Abstract

The question of citizenship very quickly went beyond the problem of simple legal status within the Roman territorial empire to raise the question of the philosophical and political articulation of a somewhat deterritorialized citizenship, since being a Roman citizen no longer necessarily means living in Rome or coming to exer­cise your civil rights in Rome.
The territorial extension and the more or less rapid integration of populations has prompted reflection on the relation­ship between the individual citizen and the civic group now dispersed through­out the empire. If there are Roman citi­zens throughout the empire, is citizenship simply a Roman citizenship that spreads throughout the imperial space while pre­serving Roman centrality or, on the con­trary, is it acquiring such a specificity that it can be understood as a supra-civic citi­zenship that acquires a universal character while retaining its initial specificities or does it become a citizenship that replac­es the very idea of the civic? The debates on these potential changes have stirred up lawyers, philosophers and politicians be­tween the Republic and the Empire.