Last time we observed that Greeks and Romans saw advantages in making citizenship exclusive. But while we long to be dreamily inclusive in the name, presumably, of ‘human rights’, ethnic, religious and other barriers seem to stand in the way. The Romans can help us.

In AD 212, partly to raise tax, Caracalla made citizenship automatic for all free peoples within the empire. But even though many foreigners/barbarians (e.g. Germanic peoples such as Goths, Visigoths and Vandals) settled within the empire to serve in the Roman army (etc.) after that date, we know of very few granted full citizenship. What was going on?

The answer lies in Rome’s most brilliant, and certainly influential, invention - a public, structured and codified system of civil law (ius civile). Access to this guarantor of civilised dealings between men was eagerly sought, but it all depended on one’s status. Various disabilities (e.g. being a slave, or a freedman, or guilty of certain crimes) debarred one from all or some aspects of it. The important thing was to be free, and after Caracalla it seems that as long as you were a free barbarian, you had full access to the ius civile like any Roman citizen, if you wanted to take advantage of it. Your free barbarian could therefore own property in the Roman world, serve in office, make legal contracts, marry Romans, and so on. As a result, a Roman historian could say ‘the whole world has been made Roman, because there is peace everywhere and Roman laws and judges everywhere’.

The point about this is that, by making Roman legal procedures automatically accessible to free foreigners, Romans overrode all nationalistic, ethnic and religious boundaries. And this might be a way forward in today’s world, where religion and ethnicity in particular all seem to muddy the waters of citizenship, i.e. define identity for the purposes of citizenship in terms of the right to deal under English law. This right would be granted only gradually, if at all, in various intermediate stages, till full citizenship was bestowed. So (for example) if you wanted to buy a house here, you must become an English citizen first.

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