The Army and the Spread of Roman Citizenship

Abstract

This paper draws on recent advances in our knowledge (much of it owed to the proliferation of military diplomas) and a new analytical method to quantify the number of soldiers and their children who received Roman citizenship between 14 and 212 c.e. Although significant uncertainties remain, these can be quantified and turn out to be small relative to the overall scale of enfranchisement. The paper begins by reviewing what is known about grants of citizenship to soldiers, with particular attention to the remaining uncertainties, before presenting a quantitative model of the phenomenon. The total number of beneficiaries was somewhere in the region 0.9–1.6 million — significantly lower than previous estimates have suggested. It also emerges that the rate of enfranchisement varied substantially over time, in line with significant changes in manpower, length of service (and hence the number of recruits and discharged veterans) and the rate of family formation among soldiers. The Supplementary Material available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000662) contains a database of military diplomas (Supplementary Appendix 1), a mathematical model of enfranchisement implemented in MS Excel (Supplementary Appendix 2), a description of the model (Supplementary Appendix 3A) and a derivation of the model of attrition across service cohorts in Fig. 6 (Supplementary Appendix 3B).

The Uncertain Past

“…57 (2006: 234-5). 57 All the chapters in this volume operate with a 95 per cent threshold, as do Lavan (2016) and Lavan (2019a) (where the economy of persuasion favoured a high threshold, the argument being that we can be confident that the actual number of new citizens was much less than previously thought).…”

“…Lavan (2016),Lavan (2019a). Jew uses the same approach in a forthcoming study of Athenian carrying capacity Danon (2021).…”

Citizens of the Wor(l)d? Metaphor and the Politics of Roman Language

“… 40 Sherwin White 1973: 237 indeed claims that the Claudian era ‘open[ed] the last period in the history of the extension of the Roman citizenship, which from the time of Claudius appears to develop without a break until the issue of the Constitutio Antoniniana ’. On Claudian citizenship grants, see Rostovtzeff 1957: 18; Sherwin-White 1973: 237–50; Levick 1978; 2015: 194–5; Lavan 2019; Malloch 2020: 36–7.…”

The Poet Nemesianus and theHistoria Augusta

“…For the view that the overwhelming majority of the Empire's inhabitants were not enfranchised before 212, see the compelling paper by Lavan 2016 (cf. Lavan 2019, showing the limited numerical impact of enfranchisement through military service).…”