From a different point of view, E. T. Salmon suggests that the action of the Emperor Caracalla, who bestowed Roman citizenship on nearly all free men living within the Empire in 212, actually had an unforeseen and dangerous result. Men who joined the army with the aim of winning Roman citizenship through service were no longer incited to enlist by this presumably strong motivation. Roman citizenship was worth serving for, since it conferred on a man the right to go to court and to make a legal will, not to speak of its social and other advantages. If it could be acquired automatically, this possibility could have discouraged enlistment by noncitizens.
"The commonwealth was not yet lost in Tiberius's days, but it was already doomed and Rome knew it. The fundamental trouble could not be cured. In Italy, labor could not support life..." - Vladimir Simkhovitch, "Rome's Fall Reconsidered"
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Citizenship & unintended consequences
From Mortimer Chambers's Introduction to The Fall of Rome: Can It Be Explained?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
I'm not a fan of "diagrams" in economics, but sometimes... This is a screen capture of slide 36 from a SlideShare presentatio...
-
In the Google News this morning, "The Fed may have saved the economy by hiking rates for 18 months—and may have guaranteed crisis for...
-
Bosch season five air date: 18 April. Ten episodes. Four days later, six of the transcripts were already available. A few days later, the ...
-
JW Mason : "... in retrospect it is clear that we should have been talking about big new public spending programs to boost demand.&quo...
-
Comparing the labor cost of Nonfinancial Corporate Business (NCB) to NCB profits since 2018. The vertical gray bar during 2020 shows the re...
No comments:
Post a Comment