Citizenship as the City’s Revealing Mirror: Comparative Considerations on the Content and Historical Context of Citizenship in ancient Athens and Rome

Lunch talk with PAW Magie Lecturer, Kostas Buraselis.

To precisely define a certain citizenship in both the ancient and the modern world is not at all a simple effort. For this human condition combines both theoretical-legal and practical aspects and tends to exceed the clear contours of specific rights and tasks. Citizenship includes above all a sense of belonging to a human civic society, big or small, and of somehow complying with its set of principles and rules. Thus, the concept and practice of being a citizen of a certain city/country necessarily contain or reflect at least some crucial marks of the self-understanding and the intellectual and ideological foundations of that city and/or state. It will be here attempted to apply these thoughts to the data of Greek (esp. Athenian) and Roman citizenship in classical antiquity and thus try to gain a comparative view of how exactly these data correspond to the other features and structures of the corresponding cities and societies.

Please RSVP to Barb Leavey (blleavey@princeton.edu) if you plan to attend.