The Breaking Point of a Republic

Americans today take for granted the notion that immigrants to the country desire U.S. citizenship. Yet the history of citizenship is not a simple story of inclusion and progress. It’s also a story of strain, of what happens when political membership expands beyond the institutions, norms, and shared commitments that once held it together. The Roman Republic confronted this problem at scale — and the consequences were rather profound.

For non-citizens living within Rome’s domain during the days of the Republic, citizenship was not always an obvious improvement. Citizens were assessed a tax based on an appraisal of their property in the census: the higher one’s wealth, the more tax one had to pay. They were also required to put their lives and time on the line, serving many years in the Republic’s armed forces. In exchange, they enjoyed the protections of law, along with the right to vote and run for office at Rome. The votes of the rich counted for far more, since they not only paid more taxes but served more extensively, and in positions of higher responsibility, in the army. Citizenship was, in practice, not a single status but a sliding scale of increasing skin in the game paired with corresponding opportunities. This “graded” system created cohesion by aligning privilege with contribution, a structure largely absent in modern egalitarian frameworks.

Rome’s founding, at a trading post on the Tiber, drew together outlaws, rejects, Latins, Etruscans, and, so the legend goes, Trojans, and citizens might be welcomed from various races, at least in theory. But citizenship remained tightly guarded for centuries. Eventually, the Romans extended full citizenship, and more often various grades of partial citizenship, to select communities for outstanding service, mainly to nearby towns in Italy.

In general, however, they preferred to keep the peoples of Italy as formally independent, non-citizen allies. In exchange for military service, these communities were left autonomous and free from regular taxation. For them, becoming citizens would have meant doing much the same fighting, paying higher taxes, and, in practice, probably not even voting or running for office, since such opportunities required one to be physically present in Rome.