Making Roman Subjects: Citizenship and Empire before and after Augustus

Abstract

Beginning with a semantic history of the term negotiator, this essay reconsiders Augustus's role in the history of Roman citizenship. It restores negotiator as a byword for how Roman officials in the Late Republic understood Romans in the provinces and argues that the term's connotations, combined with several Late Republican institutions, reveal a vision of these Romans as partaking in Roman imperialism. Several of Augustus's actions, including the development of a new language for understanding these Romans, promoted a new vision of the place of citizens in the empire, making them subjects of an empire which had previously been theirs.

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