Chinese, Mandarin

Spanish

English

Hindi

Arabic

Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Persian, Dari

Persian, Western

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

Sinhalese

Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

Somali

Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek, Modern

Chewa

Dakhini

Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

Sylheti

Zulu

Czech

Kinyarwanda

Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

World History 1

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The diversity of those living in the Roman Empire meant that Romans felt compelled to define the status of different groups. Not everyone was considered a proper Roman. As the definitions of foreigner and citizen shifted during Rome’s long history, the empire accommodated new peoples in different ways.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxH3>Citizens and Foreigners</OpenstaxH3>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The Roman Empire policed both its cultural and physical borders. In addition to maintaining their frontier with an army, Romans carried on a perpetual debate about citizenship, or <OpenstaxEm>civitas</OpenstaxEm>, and whether to extend its benefits to different groups. To gain <OpenstaxEm>civitas</OpenstaxEm> at birth, a person needed to be the child of two citizens. Citizenship conferred voting rights, the right to perform military service, the right to run for public office, and certain marriage and property rights, among others. The extent to which non-Romans were barred from enjoying these rights was not always clear. Foreigners themselves were categorized into different groups, including free provincials, or <OpenstaxEm>peregrini</OpenstaxEm>, who were not Roman citizens; army recruits; and those living beyond the Roman border. Foreignness was not a stable category, however; a person could move from one group to another, and the definitions were always changing.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	People could gain citizenship through other means than being born to Roman citizens. Enslaved people who had been manumitted and allied fighters in times of conflict were likely to be granted citizenship. “<OpenstaxTerm>Latin Rights</OpenstaxTerm>,” a limited form of citizenship, were often extended to existing communities when they were brought under Roman control. Finally, in 212 CE, the emperor <OpenstaxTerm>Caracalla</OpenstaxTerm> issued an edict that extended citizenship to all free people of the Roman Empire. Its effects are not clear; the emperor was accused of having an ulterior motive, and the surviving text of the edict appears to exclude a group of stigmatized foreigners or freed people. In any case, differences in status and ethnicity persisted among Romans despite the edict.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	A person could also lose the privileges of citizenship. Exile and expulsion were a common punishment for criminals. In a series of works, <OpenstaxTerm>Ovid</OpenstaxTerm>, a poet during the reign of Augustus, lamented his own exile to a city on the Black Sea. The reasons for his banishment are unclear, but he seems to have angered the emperor, alluding to “a poem and an error” (<OpenstaxEm>carmen et error</OpenstaxEm>) as the cause of his exile. People could also exile themselves voluntarily to avoid further punishment from Rome, especially the death penalty. There were eventually degrees of exile in which a person might lose their property or in fact be able to return to Rome. Finally, whole groups of people could be expelled from the city of Rome, including Jewish people and followers of Isis in 19 CE, as well as astrologers, philosophers, and actors during the reigns of the emperors <OpenstaxTerm>Nero</OpenstaxTerm> and <OpenstaxTerm>Domitian</OpenstaxTerm>.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxH3>A Special Case: The Jewish People in the Roman Empire</OpenstaxH3>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The Jewish people had a deep history in the Mediterranean by the time of the Roman Empire. For a considerable length of time, they had occupied the region of the Levant, which was founded as the Roman province of Judaea in 6 CE. Roman writers expressed varied attitudes toward Jewish people; some were sympathetic, while others were overtly hostile. There was often respect for the long tradition of <OpenstaxTerm>Judaism</OpenstaxTerm>, but it was offset by slander and violence.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	After the creation of the province of Judaea and the incorporation of the local ruling dynasty into the empire, various Jewish uprisings occurred. Inspired by the region’s reorganization, riots occasionally broke out in the cities of the eastern empire. For instance, when images of the emperor were placed in synagogues in Alexandria, riots occurred in 38 CE. There must have been dissatisfaction with the general treatment of Jewish people by the Roman state, but the worship of the emperor was clearly an issue. Further riots occurred in 40; only the death of the emperor Caligula in the next year prevented real war from breaking out.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Several wars did occur between Rome and the Jewish people in the first two centuries CE. Revolts against taxation and the Roman looting of the Second Temple in Jerusalem led to war in 66 CE. Roman forces besieged Jerusalem, and in 70 the Temple was destroyed during the conflict. Following the war, the <OpenstaxTerm>Arch of Titus</OpenstaxTerm> was erected in Rome in 81 to honor the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus for leading the Roman forces (<a href="#fig-00004">Figure 7.21</a>). The Arch of Titus and the <OpenstaxTerm>Colosseum</OpenstaxTerm> (the latter was built in 79) were paid for with wealth looted from Jerusalem and the Temple. The destruction of the Temple led to a profound change in Judaism; the Temple had functioned as a symbolic center for the Jewish people, and its destruction led to their splintering into different communities based in synagogues around the Mediterranean.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00004" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/e53a0fddaad4f6b65adbb786218ffe03354d4704" alt="A photograph of an old, faded, and broken in places carving on a wall is shown. Gold colored, the images are carved rising out of the background. The back of the wall is small squares across the bottom and larger squares across the top. In the image, a line of at least seventeen people are walking to the right. All of them wear short robes, belted at the waist, with lariats around their heads. Most have short or shoulder length curly hair and large noses. Many of the legs are missing from the carving as well as some of the figure’s arms and one head. They are seen carrying various items – three rectangular objects on long sticks, a large box with two long sticks in a crisscross pattern across the front, and a large two-tiered and high decorated pedestal with a candle holder with seven arced arms coming out of the middle pole." mediaType="image/jpg" width="1300" height="725" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="1300">
	<strong>Figure 7.21</strong> This recreation of a relief panel from the Arch of Titus, constructed in Rome in 81 CE, shows the Roman looting of the Jewish temple. (credit: “Arch of Titus Menorah” by “Steerpike”/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Roman views of the Jewish people were complex and contradictory. The historian <OpenstaxTerm>Tacitus</OpenstaxTerm>, for example, narrates the events of Titus’s capture of Jerusalem and the suppression of the Jewish revolt in his <OpenstaxEm>Histories</OpenstaxEm>. He begins by giving an overview of Jewish custom and history: “To establish his position over the race for the future, Moses introduced novel rites, quite different from those of the rest of the human race. In them everything we hold sacred is profane, and conversely they permit what for us is taboo.” Tacitus goes on to discuss Jewish fasting, observance of the Sabbath, and abstention from pork, all in hostile terms his Roman readers would identify with. He also reports that the Jewish people were from either Mt. Ida on Crete or Egypt, a common view among Romans.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Official Roman attitudes to the Jewish people were not consistently hostile, and the Jewish view of Roman treatment also varied depending on the political and cultural climate. <OpenstaxTerm>Philo</OpenstaxTerm>, an Alexandrian Jewish ambassador sent to Rome following the riots of 38 CE, recounts in his <OpenstaxEm>Embassy to Gaius</OpenstaxEm> that he explained to the emperor Caligula how past emperors and officials granted his people particular privileges: “[Augustus] knew that the large district of Rome across the river Tiber was owned and inhabited by Jews. Most of them were Roman ex-slaves; brought to Italy as war captives, they had been set free by their owners, without being forced to alter any of their ancestral customs.”
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	Philo contrasts Caligula’s hostility toward Jewish people with Augustus’s apparent approval of Judaism. But we also learn about the Jewish population in the city of Rome. Philo explains that there was a particular district of the city in which Jewish people lived, and that there were synagogues within the city. He also suggests that many Jewish people in Rome were formerly enslaved people who had been captured in conflict. It seems therefore that a substantial portion of the Jewish population was made up of freed people. Confirming some of these claims, archaeological evidence of the existence of synagogues and Jewish catacombs in Rome suggests that there was a substantial Jewish population during the imperial period.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

7.5.2 The People of the Empire

1 Understanding the Past

1.1 Developing a Global Perspective

1.1.1 World History as Preparation for Life after College

1.1.2 World History and Global Citizenship

1.1.3 Features of This Textbook

1.2 Primary Sources

1.2.1 Learning to Evaluate Documents and Images

1.2.2 Documentary Sources: Competing Narratives

1.2.3 Textual Sources: The Importance of Language

1.2.4 Hidden in History

1.3 Causation and Interpretation in History

1.3.1 Levels of Causation

1.3.2 Interpretation in History

2 Early Humans

2.1 Early Human Evolution and Migration

2.1.1 Human Evolution

2.1.2 Why Did Humans Move and Where Did They Go?

2.1.3 Early Human Technologies

2.2 People in the Paleolithic Age

2.2.1 Ice, Ice, and More Ice

2.2.2 Life in the Paleolithic Age

2.2.3 Diverse Paleolithic Peoples

2.3 The Neolithic Revolution

2.3.1 The Development of Agriculture

2.3.2 How Farming Changed the Human Experience

2.3.3 Neolithic Peoples

3 Early Civilizations and Urban Societies

3.1 Early Civilizations

3.1.1 Attributes of Early Civilizations

3.1.2 The First Urban Societies

3.2 Ancient Mesopotamia

3.2.1 The Rise and Eclipse of Sumer

3.2.2 The Rise of the World’s First Empire

3.2.3 Later Empires in Mesopotamia

3.2.4 Society and Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia

3.3 Ancient Egypt

3.3.1 The Origins of Ancient Egypt

3.3.2 The Age of Pyramid Building

3.3.3 A Second Age of Egyptian Greatness

3.4 The Indus Valley Civilization

3.4.1 The Origins of the Indus Valley Civilization

3.4.2 Trade, Writing, and Religion

3.4.3 The Era of Decline

4 The Near East

4.1 From Old Babylon to the Medes

4.1.1 Power Politics in the Near East

4.1.2 Foreign Affairs and Trade

4.1.3 Daily Life and the Family in the Near East

4.2 Egypt’s New Kingdom

4.2.1 The Hyksos in Egypt

4.2.2 The Pharaohs of the New Kingdom

4.2.3 Egypt’s Foreign Policy

4.3 The Persian Empire

4.3.1 The Rise of Persia

4.3.2 Darius I and the Reorganization of the Empire

4.3.3 Persian Culture and Daily Life

4.4 The Hebrews

4.4.1 The History of the Hebrews

4.4.2 The Culture of the Hebrews

5 Asia in Ancient Times

5.1 Ancient China

5.1.1 Prehistoric China

5.1.2 Early Dynastic China

5.1.3 The Zhou Dynasty

5.1.4 The Warring States Era and Qin Unification

5.2 The Steppes

5.2.1 The Nomadic Culture of the Steppes

5.2.2 Tribes, Confederations, and Settled Neighbors

5.3 Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia

5.3.1 Ancient Korea

5.3.2 Ancient Japan

5.4 Vedic India to the Fall of the Maurya Empire

5.4.1 Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro

5.4.2 The Aryans and Brahmanism

5.4.3 Buddhism

5.4.4 The Mauryan Empire

5.4.5 The Gupta Dynasty

6 Mediterranean Peoples

6.1 Early Mediterranean Peoples

6.1.1 The Late Bronze Age World

6.1.2 Phoenicians, Greeks, and Etruscans

6.2 Ancient Greece

6.2.1 Archaic Greece

6.2.2 Sparta and Athens

6.2.3 Classical Greece

6.3 The Hellenistic Era

6.3.1 The Kingdom of Macedon

6.3.2 Hellenistic Culture

6.4 The Roman Republic

6.4.1 The Foundation and Function of the Roman Republic

6.4.2 The Expansion of the Roman Republic

6.5 The Age of Augustus

6.5.1 The First Triumvirate

6.5.2 From Republic to Principate

7 Experiencing the Roman Empire

7.1 The Daily Life of a Roman Family

7.1.1 The Structure of Roman Families

7.1.2 A Day in the Life of a Roman Family

7.1.3 What Family Meant in Rome

Question	Answer
the Roman government’s distribution of grain to the population, which was also a political tool for the emperor	annona
the name for a typical Roman house, as well as the family unit	domus
an enslaved professional fighter paid to battle before an audience, sometimes to the death	gladiator
the trainer and manager of a group of gladiators	lanista
large agricultural estates in the countryside, worked by enslaved people to produce profit for the owner	latifundia
the patriarch of an extended Roman family, with authority over his wife, children, and any other dependents	paterfamilias
provincial contractors who bid for the right to collect taxes and profited from the excess money they gathered	publicani