Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 37) Cédric Brélaz, Els Rose - Civic Identity and Civic Participation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages-Brepols (2021).
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Introduction
Classical Contexts of Citizenship and Democracy
‘Te city (polis) has decided’. Tese are the opening words of the earliest
known example of legal codifcation in Archaic Greece, a constitutional act
which was copied and engraved on the outside wall of the temple of Apollo
Delphinios, the tutelary deity of the city of Dreros in Crete about 650 bce.
Te fact that the members of the emerging political community in Dreros
referred to themselves through an abstract word (polis) and presented their
will as resulting from a collective decision-making — whoever the people
allowed to take part in this process were, all of the male inhabitants of Dreros
or only part of them — is symptomatic of the eforts made by this group to
create social cohesion and to build a common identity. In this case, the process
of self-assertion was made even more explicit through the permanent display
of the wording of the decision on a public, sacred building of the town.
With
this material achievement and physical marker, the political community
proclaimed its existence within the urban landscape.1
As soon as the frst city-states emerged in the Greek world during the
early Archaic period,2
participation in and assertion of belonging to political
communities at the local level were among the fundamental principles and
values on which societies would rely for centuries in Ancient Greece and
Rome. Cities represented the frst circle of political integration — although
non-civic political and social entities (rural communities, ethnic groups,
tribes, etc.) were also atested in many areas of the ancient world, also
under Roman imperial rule3
— and civic membership was one of the key
elements in promoting local collective identities, not conficting with other,
infra-civic forms of social participation such as belonging to family clans,
neighbourhood groups, religious clubs, or occupational associations.4
The possession or acquisition of citizenship was usually a requirement to take part
in public life, which included not only participation in political assemblies
but also in collective religious and social performances.5
Greek cities down
to the Roman imperial period, as well as local communities in the Western
part of the Roman Empire, if not all formal democracies, still conceded a
substantial share of power to ordinary citizens through popular assemblies
and other public activities. Moreover, the atachment to what remained the
original homeland of each individual continued to have a strong emotional
and symbolic signifcance for most people throughout Antiquity, also afer
most areas of the ancient world became parts of a global empire under Roman
rule.6
For all these reasons, citizenship and democracy, or to put it in a more
generic way, civic identity and civic participation are generally considered as
concepts typical of the political experience of Classical Antiquity.
Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages are therefore usually not associated
in scholarship with these two concepts, which are seen as inconsistent with
the political, social, and ideological context of the late and post-Roman world.
This mainstream view partly relies on the idealization of the Greek political
experience during the Classical period, in particular of ffh- and fourth-century
bce Athens which is supposed to have encapsulated and embodied the values
of citizenship and democracy during Antiquity.7
Within Classical scholarship,
a narrative developed assuming that Greek democracy would have started to
undergo irreversible alterations from the late fourth century bce, as Athens
was defeated by Philip II, king of Macedonia, in 338 bce, and as property
qualifcations were introduced for the citizens to enjoy full civic rights in
Athens a dozen years later. Tis decline theory has been challenged since
the 1970s,8
but it is still a common view in scholarship that it would not be
possible any more to speak of democracy from the late Hellenistic period
(second to frst centuries bce), and especially under Roman rule, because
of the prominent role played by local elites in the public life of Greek cities.
Te last vestiges of ancient democracy would have irrevocably vanished with
the rise of the Principate in Rome, due to the autocratic and authoritarian
nature of the new regime.9
Yet, notwithstanding the deep infuence Athens had on the political culture
and institutions of the other cities during the Classical period and even in the
subsequent centuries, it was an exception within the Greek world in many
respects, and in particular with regard to the duration of the democratic regime (although, interestingly, it was not the earliest democracy).10
In most other Greek
cities the people were not given as much power as in fifth- and fourth-century
bce Athens. Moreover, even in cities which had an oligarchic constitution
restraining the ability for citizens to take part in the decision-making process,
the demos was in theory still considered the holder of sovereignty of the whole
political community (or at least was presented this way), and popular assemblies,
rather than being simply abolished, were used by oligarchs to enhance their
legitimacy.11 Civic participation cannot thus be reduced to the experience of
Athenian radical democracy in which the demos was at the core of every collective
decision,12 and we should pay atention to the whole range of possibilities
and forms for the people to take part, to diferent extents, in the public life of
political communities, even in the cases where explicit or efective democratic
institutions were lacking. The same observations apply to Rome which never was
a democracy in the Athenian sense.13 Even afer the libertas — the term used by
Livy (The History of Rome 2.1) to describe the regime which was established afer
the last king was expelled from Rome in 509 bce — was seriously undermined
because of Augustus seizing power in 27 bce, the comitia or popular assemblies
were formally maintained, though with dramatically reduced tasks, and the
expression res publica continued to refer to the Roman state throughout the
imperial period.14
This is even more true of the local communities of the Western
part of the Empire which were granted constitutions paterned afer the Roman
model (municipia, coloniae). In the later case, and unlike in the city of Rome
where the comitia were deprived from any efective power in elections only a
few decades afer the regime of the Principate was launched, popular assemblies
continued to elect local ofcials and priests and to carry out legislative duties
during the frst and second centuries ce.
15 Tat these tasks were still regarded
as prerogatives of the people in local communities during the second century
ce is shown by the fact that the corresponding provisions were included in
the by-laws issued under the reign of Marcus Aurelius in favour of the new
municipium of Troesmis in Moesia Inferior (modern Romania).16
With regard to citizenship, the general assumption in scholarship is
that local citizenships in the Roman Empire would have been irremediably
superseded by the large-scale granting of the Roman civitas already before
the Constitutio Antoniniana was issued in 212 ce,
17 and that the very value of
citizenship would have weakened because of this process during Late Antiquity.
Yet recent model-based studies have shown that the proportion of Roman citizens among local populations in the Roman Empire during the frst and
second centuries ce has been overemphasized so far.18 Regional studies also
show that there were huge discrepancies in the percentage of Roman citizens
according to the area and that, contrary to what is generally assumed, Roman
citizenship was not necessarily considered atractive for all local elites, who
remained commited to their home cities and primarily acted in accordance
with their own local or regional agenda which implied membership and
participation in provincial communities through the possession of local
citizenships.19 Moreover, the universal granting of Roman citizenship in 212 ce
did not afect the collective statuses of local communities and thus did not
make local citizenships disappear.20 One of the unexpected consequences
of the Constitutio Antoniniana was, on the contrary, the increasing atention
paid by Roman citizens throughout the Empire to their small ‘homelands’
and the celebration of local identities, cities still competing during the third
century to get privileges from imperial power and praising their glorious past.21
Despite the gradual encroachment of imperial power on local autonomy
and the trend towards centralization in the administration of the Roman
Empire from the late third century ce,
22 cities were still a key actor for the
governance of the Empire under the Tetrarchy and during the reign of
Constantine, as is shown by the fact that, interestingly, imperial authorities
themselves continued to foster local communities by granting civic status to
villages or other dependent entities at the beginning of the fourth century.23
Even if the impoverishment of civic elites led to the decline of the epigraphic
habit — namely, of the practice consisting in self-representing and celebrating
local notables and political communities through the systematic engraving of
stone inscriptions and display of monuments — throughout the Empire from
the middle of the third century ce and then generated a dramatic drop in our
evidence with regard to the functioning of civic institutions,24 legal and literary
sources (and in some cases inscriptions as well) hint at the continuance of civic
ofces and popular assemblies across the Roman Empire long beyond the end
of the third century, albeit with large variations depending on the region and
with deep transformations.25 Te most visible fgures in local communities from the fourth to the sixth centuries were the curiales, who were originally
members of local councils (ordines decurionum or curiae in the West, boulai in
the East).26 During that period, belonging to the local elite became gradually
disconnected from the holding of civic ofces: wealth and landownership
only, together with social reputation, were now the decisive criteria, and local
notables began to form a social group acknowledged as such by imperial power
and referred to in legal sources as principales, honorati, or possessores/κτήτορες.27
Next to local magnates, the rise of the bishop as leader of the civic
community is one of the main features of the political, social, and religious
transformations experienced by local communities in the later Roman Empire.
Te deep change brought about by the development of episcopal power as the
central civic authority in Late Antiquity and of the bishop as, in the words of
Liebeschuetz, ‘the only [permanent functionary] who had achieved his position
with popular consent’,28 has recently been characterized as a transformation
both with regard to the scope of this power (the defnition of the group subject
to it) as well as its nature, character, and legitimization. Peter Brown points at
the inclusion of several types of inhabitants of city and countryside (the poor,
those living in the rural areas outside the city walls) as full and fully entitled
members of the bishop’s community, in which the boundaries between those
with and those without citizenship eroded.29 Te kind of power the bishop
exercised added to this transformation of the community he was called to
oversee.30 Te legitimacy of his power, whatever concrete forms it took, was
ultimately in his role as a pastor — a kind of power qualifed by Brown as ‘sof’.31
Claudia Rapp, in her seminal book on episcopal authority in Late Antiquity,
responds to the body of scholarly literature that focuses either on the secular
or on the religious aspects of episcopal authority. Her study makes clear that
these two aspects cannot be separated.
The model she provides to study
late and post-Roman episcopal leadership in a systematically integral way is
threefold, taking into account the pragmatic, spiritual, and ascetic authority
of the bishop.32 Supported by both archaeological and textual sources, Rapp
underlines the merge of civic and ecclesiastical responsibilities within the
ofce of the episcopate. Tese responsibilities, as Rapp argues, were ofen
of ‘interchangeable nature’,33 for example, with regard to the public function of the episcopal residence, his role in the fnancial administration of the city,
his infuence on the city’s public space by competing with other infuential
citizens for taking the lead in the building programme, and, not in the least,
his role in charity as a new form of civic benefaction.
Te focus of scholarship on the ruling class of local communities in the
later Roman Empire as well as on bishops led to underestimation of the
role played by another crucial actor of civic life: the people. Te people had
been an indispensable interlocutor and partner of local elites during the
Hellenistic and early Roman periods, even in the cases where they were not
secured participation in the decision-making process through unambiguously
democratic institutions. To a certain extent, local elites, in the context of civic
life and civic ideology, could not conceive their own existence without the
people, and even needed the demos/populus for the legitimization of their own
social position and political power, hence the constant dialogue and interaction
between the two groups which is a characteristic of the political sociology of
cities during the Roman imperial period.34
Yet the rise of bishops as political
actors in the local communities of the Roman Empire from the beginning of
the fourth century onwards, and the resulting progressive transfer of many
competences from the secular authorities to the Church in the administration
of cities, gave new opportunities to the people to express themselves as a group
and to have an infuence on local governance, as shown by the role played de
facto by the people, as a community of believers, in episcopal elections.35 Te
participation of the people in the election of bishops and in the public life of
local communities in the later Roman Empire and in the post-Roman world
ought not to be interpreted in terms of long-term continuity of democratic
practices dating back to the Classical period. We should rather pay atention
to the large-scale changes experienced by civic ideology and practices from
the fourth century ce because of the restrictions of local autonomy through
imperial power,36 of the increasing social inequalities between the people
and the local elites, and of the overarching Christianization of society and
ethics. Symptomatic of the transformations which afected civic identity in
Late Antiquity is how civic discourse and terminology were reinterpreted in
accordance with Christian concepts.37 Tis process of rephrasing the Classical
defnition of civic membership, especially during the ffh and sixth centuries,
is a key issue for our enquiry: capitalizing on the defnitions given by the
apostle Paul and by Augustine of what community belonging should mean
for Christians, Caesarius, bishop of Arles at the beginning of the sixth century,
claimed that the true homeland for Christians, the christianorum civitas, had to be searched for in heaven.38 Community membership now meant frst and
foremost to be part of the chosen people of God.39
Next to the theological considerations supporting these claims, the
deep geopolitical transformations which afected the Roman Empire from
the beginning of the fifth century undermined the signifcance of cities as
political entities and as forms of social organization.40
In addition to major
economic difculties, the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire into
many separate Germanic kingdoms and the predominance of the military,
landowning aristocracy among the leaders in these new states exacerbated
the decline of the cities as political communities and led to the reshaping
of collective identities on the basis of ethnic, rather than civic, categories.41
In the East, cities, although they were not transformed into administrative
units directly depending on imperial power, were deprived from most of their
competences during the sixth century because of the centralizing policy of
imperial authorities. However, even if the government of the early Byzantine
Empire, as well as of the Germanic kingdoms in the West — unlike the Roman
Empire until the fourth century ce — did not rely on local autonomy any
more,42 towns were still communities somehow,43 made of local notables
forming a ruling group on the one hand, and of ordinary people on the
other. Te issue as to whether the inhabitants of these towns maintained,
nurtured, or developed a sense of common awareness and of urban — if not
civic — identity is of particular signifcance for our questioning.44 For that
reason, this book also includes a chapter on the early Islamic world in order
to examine whether, in a diferent cultural context which did not emphasize
civic ideology (although Islam spread into regions which had been part
of the Roman Empire and which had a long tradition of civic culture like
north-western Africa, southern Spain, and north-western Syria), phenomena
similar to what happened in the early medieval West and in the Byzantine
Empire can be observed or not with regard to collective identities and popular
participation in early Islamic towns.
Tis raises the more general issue of popular participation beyond, or
regardless of, the formal recognition of power to the people through democratic
institutions. Te group consisting of the majority of the population of a town, whether it was characterized as an acknowledged institutional actor through
the words demos or populus in their political meaning, or rather as a crowd
through expressions such as plethos, ochlos, plebs, or turba, could have a share
of power in local government, take initiatives for the common good, or, in
any case, play a role in public life.
Already during the early Roman imperial
period, the people of local communities, next to their prerogatives allowing
them to take part in the decision-making process through the casting of
votes during formal assemblies, were able to infuence and to act in public
life through shouting, and by exercising physical pressure on the elites during
popular gatherings or meetings, whether or not legally called. Acclamations
and other expressions of popular will outside the ordinary voting process
were even fostered in the later Roman Empire, as consensus among the
people was used as a means to legitimize the status or decisions of local or
provincial elites and of imperial power, and was regarded as the result of God’s
approval.45 During Late Antiquity, the inhabitants of cities had many ways
to express their will or, at least, to infuence public life, including through
mob violence.46
This sociological, not institutional, ability of the people to
potentially interfere as a mob in the everyday administration of the towns is
a constant, diachronic element in the urban history of Late Antiquity and the
early Middle Ages as well. How frequent and signifcant this form of popular
participation was, and how strong the town-dwellers’ self-awareness was,47
will have varied greatly, depending on local contexts, and possibly also on the
existence or not of an old civic tradition.48 In Constantinople, for instance,
which was in any case an exception as the capital of the Empire and as the
New Rome encapsulating the political relationship between the emperor and
the people, the symbolic role devoted to the people in monarchic/imperial
ideology, the active participation of the city population in the rituals for the
acknowledgement of new emperors, and popular response, ofen through
violence, to political events involving imperial authorities represented such
distinctive features of the Byzantine Empire that Anthony Kaldellis, in a
stimulating — albeit deliberately provocative — way, could label the nature
of the regime in Byzantium down to the twelfh century as ‘republican’.49
References to the Classical defnitions and practices of citizenship and civic
participation have been constant in political thought and experience in the
Western world since the late Middle Ages. The Roman Republic, in particular,
was set up as an ideological model for supporting communal experiences in Italy: as early as the mid-thirteenth century, several Italian cities deliberately
emphasized their Roman past, or invented one, to foster local pride;50 in the
mid-fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo explicitly atempted to re-enact the
Roman Republic to promote in the city of Rome a communal government
which would be independent from aristocratic families and from the papacy;51
in early sixteenth-century Florence, Machiavelli, in his Discorsi sopra la prima
Deca di Tito Livio, presented the Roman Republic as an example for polities of
his time.52
Later on, in the context of the Enlightenment, the Roman Republic
was deliberately identifed as a model by America’s Founding Fathers as well
as during the French Revolution.53 As more radical republican ideas were
making progress during the frst half of the nineteenth century, Classical
Athens, which had seemed so frightening to political thinkers so far because
of the share of power the people had thanks to democratic institutions,54
started to be considered as a source of inspiration for liberal revolutions,55
and nowadays in many European countries children are taught at school that
Periclean Athens should be seen as the archetype of modern democracy. All
these claims of a Classical legacy in modern political discourse with regard
to citizenship and democracy led to an idealization of the Greek and Roman
experience in the feld. A direct consequence has been the neglect of the civic
practices and discourses from the late Roman period onwards, as well as, to
a lesser extent, of the rise of communal entities in medieval Europe since the
eleventh century. In this context, Maarten Prak’s recent book, Citizens without
Nations, is a ground-breaking contribution to the discussion.56 In his book, Prak
shows that the origins for the concept of citizenship in early Modern Europe,
rather than in the legacy and claim of Classical models, should be searched
for in the experience of urban citizenship in medieval local communities.
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