Citizenship in Antiquity

Citizenship in Antiquity brings together scholars working on the multifaceted and changing dimensions of citizenship in the ancient Mediterranean from the second millennium BCE to the first millennium CE adopting a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective.The chapters in this volume cover numerous periods and regions from the Ancient Near East through the Greek and Hellenistic worlds and pre-Roman North Africa to the Roman Empire and its continuations and with excursuses to modernity. The contributors to this book adopt various contemporary theories demonstrating the manifold meanings and ways of defining the concept and practices of citizenship and belonging in ancient societies and in turn of non-citizenship and non-belonging. Whether citizenship was defined by territorial belonging or blood descent by privileged or exclusive access to resources or participation in communal decision-making or by a sense of group belonging such identifications were also open to discursive redefinitions and manipulation. Citizenship and belonging as well as non-citizenship and non-belonging had many shades and degrees; citizenship could be bought or faked or even removed. By casting light on different areas of the Mediterranean over the course of antiquity the volume seeks to explore this multi-layered notion of citizenship and contribute to an ongoing and relevant discourse.Citizenship in Antiquity offers a wide-ranging comprehensive collection suitable for students and scholars of citizenship politics and society in the ancient Mediterranean world as well as those working on citizenship throughout history interested in taking a comparative approach.Chapters: Chapters 47 and 48 of this book arefreely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at taylorfrancis under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.