In short, the Roman Republic may in some ways be shaped like a polis, but it was a full order of magnitude larger than the largest poleis, even before it acquired provinces outside of Italy. This is in Italy alone, not counting Rome’s ‘overseas’ holdings (at that point, Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia). And that massive polity in turn governed perhaps another two million other Italians who were Rome’s ‘ socii’ (‘allies’), perhaps the social category at Rome closest to ‘resident foreigners’ (metics) in Greek poleis. We know that in Italy in 225 there was something on the order of three hundred thousand Roman citizens liable for conscription, which implies a total citizen population right around a million. While a polis like Athens or Sparta with total populations in the low hundreds of thousands was already very large by Greek standards, the Roman Republic was much bigger.

Harriet Flower defines this period as part of “the republic of the nobiles” which as we’ll see is an apt title as well.īut even by the beginning of this period, the Roman Republic is enormous by the standards of a polis. In particular what we’re going to look at here is really a snapshot of the republic as it functioned in the third and second centuries, what Roman historians call the ‘Middle Republic’ (c. We’re going to be taking a snapshot of the Roman Republic, necessary because the republic changed over time. Which leads into the other major difference: size. They imagine the republic differently than a polis and that leads to some meaningful differences in its structure and nature, even though it seems to share a lot of ‘DNA’ with a polis and in some sense could be described as an ‘overgrown’ city-state. On the other hand, as we’re going to see, the Romans have some different ideas about the res publica (that’s their phrase which gives us our word ‘republic’). As we’ll see, the Roman Republic has a lot of the same features as a polis: a citizen body, magistrates, a citizen assembly, all structured around a distinct urban center and so on. As with that series, we’re going to start by defining our community and its constituent parts in this part, before moving through the elements of its government in subsequent essays in this series.ĭiscussing the Roman Republic after already looking at the normal structure of a polis offers an interesting vantage point. This is the first of a planned five-part series looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquity, to match our series on the Greek polis.

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