Seite - 33 - in Austrian Law Journal, Band 1/2017

ALJ 1/2017 Women and Civic Identity in Roman Antiquity 33 the margins of society through two stereotypes: the shameless woman and the masculine woman.42 This female condition is a generic and general principle whose concrete contents are specified on a case-by-case basis, we might say, by subtraction, or, in other words, by excluding women in specific contexts. Obviously, this cannot occur without ambiguities or grey areas. V. What Citizenship? Before taking a closer look at some specific features of the female condition, we should first pause to consider the initial question: what citizenship did Roman women have? The most direct approach is terminological. Rome first had the noun citizen, civis, and only later – many centuries later – did the word civis give rise to the noun civitas, the citizen body as a whole.43 From the outset, civis comprised both men and women, with internal distinctions in the quality of civis that derive exclusively from their respective positions within the family. But at its dawn and for many centuries, the Roman state represented itself as the populus Romanus Quiritium which can be translated as the Roman people of men in the army. The Roman power system was organized on a military basis: popular assemblies were above all ranks of the army; only that which fell within this structure was public in the true sense of the word. The Roman people were simultaneously the state and the army, and consequently the popular assembly that was its most important organ. Women fell outside all of this, which explains their exclusion from the public sphere. For many centuries, the only true Roman was a man who bore arms: in archaic language the Quiris, not the civis.44 Civis was only the individual belonging to the same group, representing a kind of a relationship: cives Romani were men, women and children. Only after the relationship between the people and the army had disintegrated did it become unequivocally clear that the people consisted of all cives.45 42 Birgit Feldner, Zum Auschluss der Frau vom römischen officium, 62 REVUE INTERNATIONALE DES DROITS DE L’ANTIQUITÉ 381 (2000) (“die schamlose Frau” [“the shameless woman”] [Chelidon, Carfania, Agrippina] and “die männliche Frau” [“the masculine woman”] [Maesia, Hortensia]); see also (with some variations) ead., Women’s Exclusion from the Roman Officium 396 (Sept. 17, 2002), FORUM HISTORIAE IURIS, http://www.rewi.hu-berlin.de/zitat/0209feldner.htm (last visited Mar. 27, 2017) Feldner studies three cases: Das Skandalon der Chelidon, the lover of Verres; Das Exemplum der Carfania; Agrippina, die socia imperii, Agrippina the Younger, the fourth and last wife of Claudius. 43 In II century BCE civitas still describes the whole citizen body, but the dominant and most frequently used term is populus, see L. Peppe, La nozione di populus e le sue valenze. Con un'indagine sulla terminologia pubblicistica nelle formule della evocatio e della devotio, in STAAT UND STAATLICHKEIT IN DER FRÜHEN RÖMISCHEN REPUBLIK, 312, 329 et seq. (Walter Eder ed., 1990). 44 But see Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi, «Familia», «pater», «civis»: intrecci e contraddizioni, 40 INDEX 146 (2012) (Civis and Quiris cannot be superimposed because – as we will see shortly – they describe different identities, as they refer to different contexts. As such, although sensitive to the difference in context, we cannot agree with the conclusion of Capogrossi that in the «public» sphere [the guillemets are the A.’s] identified as “the political com- munity – above all as warriors and members of the primitive curias”; “the gap between pater and filius seems to disappear: another organizational criterion and another logic of inclusion/exclusion associated with the image of the civis prevails.” [author’s trans.]). 45 GAI 1.3: “populi appellatione universi cives significantur.” Very probably, only at the beginning of the Republic “popu- lus” starts to mean firstly the entirety of the cives, the “totalità dei cittadini”; see Aldo L. Prosdocimi, La Roma “Tar- quinia” nella lingua: forme e contenuti tra il prima e il dopo, 17 ANNALI DELLA FONDAZIONE PER IL MUSEO “CLAUDIO FAINA” 367, 407 (2010).