When we think of ancient Rome, we often imagine the grandeur of the empire and its military power, yet one of Rome’s most important “inventions” was perhaps not as visible, but far more influential for the modern world: the idea of citizenship as a legal status that could be expanded and granted, used to bind very different peoples into one political system.
In the ancient world, belonging was normally tied to a city or an ethnicity, and in Rome began that way, too. Early Roman citizenship originally belonged to the inhabitants of the city itself, in time, however, Rome became different, because it gradually transformed citizenship from a narrow local privilege into a flexible political tool.
