Peregrinus (Roman)

• 1. Introduction

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  In the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the Roman Empire's inhabitants were peregrini: free people living under Roman rule who had no claim to Roman citizenship. That is tens of millions of human beings, spanning territories from Britain to Egypt, who woke up each morning as subjects of the most powerful state in the ancient world, yet sat outside its most coveted legal category. They could be tortured in court. They could not legally marry a Roman citizen. When they died, the state could claim their property. The questions worth asking are not just what they lacked, but how they lived, how Roman rule reshaped the land beneath their feet, and how the line between citizen and non-citizen finally dissolved in a single imperial decree in AD 212.

• 2. The Word Itself

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  The Latin word peregrinus carries its own geography inside it. It comes from peregre, meaning "abroad," built from per, "through," and an assimilated form of ager, meaning "field" or "country." The full sense is something like "over the lands," a traveler moving across territories that are not quite home. During the Roman Republic, the term applied to any person without Roman citizenship, whether they were inside Roman-controlled territory or entirely beyond it. By the Imperial era, practice narrowed the word. Those living outside the empire's borders were called barbari. The peregrinus was specifically the free person living within the empire's reach but outside its civic core. That distinction mattered enormously for how the law would treat you.

• 3. Two Bodies of Law

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  Peregrini were governed by the ius gentium, the "law of peoples," a framework derived partly from the commercial law of Greek city-states. Romans used it to regulate dealings between citizens and non-citizens. What the ius gentium did not provide was the elaborate body of protections that made up the ius civile, Roman civil law. In criminal matters, the gap was stark. Peregrini could be tortured during official interrogations; no law barred it. They faced de plano, or summary, justice: execution at the discretion of the legatus Augusti, the provincial governor, with no required hearing. A Roman citizen, by contrast, could insist on a full assize court, with the governor sitting as judge, a consilium of senior officials advising him, and the defendant's right to legal counsel. Crucially, a Roman citizen could appeal any criminal sentence, even a death sentence, directly to the emperor himself. In civil matters, peregrini were generally judged by the customary laws of their civitas, their local administrative unit. Cases involving Roman citizens went before the governor's assize court and were decided under Roman law. When the two systems conflicted, Roman law always prevailed, giving citizens a built-in advantage in land disputes. The governor's verdicts, the source notes, were often swayed by the social standing of the parties involved, and often by bribery.

• 4. Tax, Military Service, and Family

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  Peregrini paid a direct annual poll tax, the tributum capitis, from which Roman citizens were exempt. Land tax, the tributum soli, fell on most provincial land as well; land in Italy was exempt, as was, probably, land held by Roman coloniae outside Italy. The military offered one path upward, but a narrow one. Peregrini were barred from the legions entirely and could only enlist in the auxiliary regiments, considered less prestigious. After completing a 25-year term, an auxiliary soldier and his children received citizenship. Beyond military service, peregrini lacked the right of connubium, the legal capacity to marry a Roman citizen. Any children from a mixed union were illegitimate and could not inherit citizenship or property. Unless they were auxiliary servicemen, peregrini also could not formally designate heirs under Roman law. At death, they were legally intestate: their assets passed to the state.

• 5. Civitas and Local Rule

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  Within this system, the civitas peregrina was the basic unit of local life. These administrative districts were built on the territories of pre-Roman city-states in the Mediterranean, or on indigenous tribal lands in northwestern Europe and the Danube region, after subtracting lands confiscated by Rome for legionary veterans and imperial estates. Civitates fell into three ranked categories: civitates foederatae, civitates liberae, and civitates stipendariae. The provincial governor held absolute authority to intervene in civitas affairs, but in practice he governed with a minimal bureaucracy and lacked the resources for detailed oversight. So long as a civitas collected its tributum and maintained the Roman trunk roads crossing its territory, the central administration largely left it alone. Leadership inside the civitas tended to stay in the hands of native aristocratic families who had dominated those communities before the Roman conquest, though many had lost significant land during the invasion. If a civitas capital was elevated to municipium status, its elected leaders, and eventually its entire council of up to 100 men, were automatically granted citizenship.

• 6. Land and Loss

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  Over 80 percent of the empire's population lived and worked on the land, and Roman conquest fundamentally altered who owned it. Under Roman law, land belonging to a people who surrendered unconditionally became state property. Some would be parceled out to Roman colonists, some sold to large Roman landowners to raise treasury funds, and the remainder kept as ager publicus, managed as imperial estates. Egypt, the best-documented province because papyri survived in its dry climate, suggests roughly a third of land there was in state hands. Taking together imperial estates, colonial grants, and land sold to private Roman owners, a province's peregrini may have lost ownership of more than half their land through conquest. Pliny the Younger recorded in one of his letters that in the time of Nero, who ruled from 54 to 68, half of all land in Africa proconsularis, roughly modern Tunisia, was owned by just six private landlords. The senatorial order was partly defined by wealth: an outsider wanting to join it had to meet a property qualification of 250,000 denarii. Many free peasants who had farmed the same plots for generations under tribal customary law found themselves reclassified as tenants, paying rent to absentee Roman landlords or to the agents of the imperial procurator. Even where the new landlord was a local aristocrat, the peasant might now owe rent for land previously farmed for free, or fees to graze animals on what had once been communal pasture.

• 7. Roads to Citizenship

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  The proportion of Roman citizens grew over time through several channels. Emperors occasionally granted citizenship in bulk: the emperor Otho, for instance, extended it to the entire Lingones civitas in Gaul in AD 69. Exceptional auxiliary regiments could receive a collective grant as well. Individual routes included the 25-year military term and direct imperial grants for merit or social standing. In practice, the provincial governor was the key figure. The emperor generally acted on the recommendation of his governors, a dynamic visible in the letters of Pliny the Younger, who as governor of Bithynia successfully lobbied the emperor Trajan, ruling from 98 to 117, to grant citizenship to several provincials who were his friends or assistants. Bribery was another well-used route for wealthy peregrini. A Roman army commander, the man who arrested the Apostle Paul in AD 60, admitted as much to Paul directly: he told him that he had become a Roman citizen by paying a large amount of money. Cities elevated to municipium status also gave their inhabitants Latin rights, a partial status that included connubium. A child born to such a union inherited full citizenship, provided it was the father who held it.

• 8. The Antonine Decree

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  In AD 212, the emperor Caracalla, who ruled from 211 to 217, issued the constitutio Antoniniana, granting Roman citizenship to all free subjects of the empire, with two exceptions: the dediticii, those who had come under Roman rule through unconditional surrender in war, and freed slaves. The historian Dio Cassius, writing near that time, attributed a fiscal motive to the move. His argument was that Caracalla wanted to extend two indirect taxes that applied only to Roman citizens, the 5 percent levy on inheritances and the 5 percent levy on the manumission of slaves. Caracalla had increased both to 10 percent. The source notes a complication in this reasoning: the annual poll tax had been paid by peregrini, not by citizens. Extending citizenship would, by the existing rules, exempt the newly enfranchised from that tax. It seems unlikely the imperial government could have absorbed that revenue loss, so the decree was almost certainly accompanied by a further measure ending Roman citizens' exemption from direct taxes. By the reign of Diocletian, who ruled from 282 to 305, citizens were indeed paying the poll tax. The Antonine decree would therefore have expanded the tax base primarily by obliging the existing citizen population, by then perhaps 20 to 30 percent of imperial inhabitants, to pay direct taxes they had previously avoided.