Citizenship in Roman Egypt before 212 CE1

It is common knowledge that the Roman concept of citizenship was more complicated than a simple dichotomy ‘citizen – foreigner’ or ‘Roman – non-Roman’. This is especially visible in Egypt, which provides us with thousands of individual stories, with Romans constituting only a tiny minority of protagonists. The group of peregrini, who constitute the vast majority in Roman Egypt, was far from homogenous. The major division is into peregrini cives and peregrini Aegyptii. The former enjoyed citizenship of one of three poleis, and since 130 CE also a fourth one, Antinoopolis. Although they could be sometimes classified as one group of astoi, especially in regard to fiscal burden, some special rules applied to citizens of individual poleis. This is clear in the case of Alexandrians, who are often treated separately from the astoi in the Gnomon of idios logos, not to mention citizens of Antinoopolis who were granted by the city founder, Hadrian, a set of privileges not applicable to other astoi. In other words, all four poleis were originally independent from each other, as they were established in different times and based on different sets of laws, but their citizens were perceived as one group in respect to some matters important for Roman administration. This chapter is devoted to two types of citizenship in Roman Egypt – Roman and local ones – and addresses the question whether the local citizenship of Egyptian poleis was shaped independently by each city or uniformly by Romans.