Appartenenza e alterità : sull’idea di cittadinanza nell’esperienza giuridica romana

The paper discusses a plethora of ideas regarding the concept of Roman citizenship, which is addressed in the light of a theory of fellowship (meaning ‘to be part of a given community’) and a theory of otherness (meaning ‘a relationship with someone who is not part of a given community’). There will be a brief overview of the development of citizenship in Ancient Roman history (during the period of Kings, Republican and Imperial Rome). Several interpretations of well-known phrases, such as ‘civis Romanus sum’ or ‘adipisci civitatem ob virtutem’, are discussed and many phenomena are analyzed, such as the expulsion of the Latin population from Rome in the second century B.C. The purpose of this article is to suggest that, as far as possible, historical investigation should be conducted using an approach which anthropologists term emic: an attempt should be made to look from within the phenomena being studied, trying to conceive of the world from the protagonists’ point of view, and to understand their ‘reality’, how they lived, in which contexts, in the awareness that each historical phenomenon is specific and unreproducible.