<div>On 4/12/07, andie nachgeborenen <<a href="mailto:andie_nachgeborenen@yahoo.com">andie_nachgeborenen@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Even under the Republic full citizenship was available to non-Romans (i.e. people not from the 12 tribes) who had proved their allegiance to Rome by military service. Freed slaves, many of whom were not from the 12 tribes or even Italy, were automatically made citizens. </blockquote></div> On the point about "freed slaves"....  I would just like to add that awarding citizenship to freed slaves and doing so automatically, was unique to Rome among ancient societies.  Finley once described the Greek polis as a kind of exclusive guild, based on military service, with those in the guild holding a monopoly of citizenship.  Rome was not structured in this way, and the deeper question is "Why?"  Roman citizenship conferred great benefits, especially against abuse of process Awarding citizenship first to the elites of the Latin cities and then to the cities as a whole and then extending citizenship from there was unprecedented among ancient city-states.  So why should Rome be so different from the exclusivity of other city-states.  Brunt, has proposed that what made possible this process of extension of citizenship in the first place is the patron-client system.  To a certain extent the new citizens would become clients of the Patrons responsible for rewarding them citizenship. This allowed for the development of social networks across the usual city-state lines.  But, crucially, it established groups within Rome who would advocate citizenship status for certain people and group in the hope that these new citizens would owe loyalty to their patron.  Thus a freed slave became a client of the family that freed the slave and if the slave should prosper this would also help the family prosper.  If a city prospered then the patron who sponsored the citizenship of that city would also gain benefits, including electoral benefits.  This process caused many conflicts in the late Republic, for fear that a single person may gather the clients of whole territories to himself, simply as an award for sponsorship of citizenship.  Thus in the late Republic awarding citizenship to all of the cities of Cisalpine Gaul was logical and rational but the Senator (or Tribune) who was able to pass such a law would be rewarded with a vast amount of clients, thus causing fear and jealousy among other senatorial rivals. But Chris's original question was how "integrated" was the elite in the late empire.  My impression is that most of the elite rulers at the center of the empire, by the time of late empire, came from the "periphery".  Is this true?  Justin, do you know? But also it seems to me that the real day to day running of the empire was done by local elites, while the military "center" of the empire was run by the dynasts.  Jerry