This book explores the nature of Roman identity through a study of the
cultural and ideological effects of Roman citizenship on Greeks living
in the first three centuries AD. Terms such as culture and identity are
not static ideas, but constructions of a particular social milieu at any
given point in time. Roman citizenship functioned as a kind of
ideological apparatus that, when given to a non-Roman, questioned that
individual's native identity. Beginning from the hypothesis that the
possession of Roman citizenship provides solid evidence that a person
has at least some ideological interest in Rome, the theoretical bases of
Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu are used as guides in an analysis of
four sources: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Paul of Tarsus, the jurist
Ulpian, and civic coins minted in the Greek east. These sources answer
the question 'What is a Roman?' in different - and often conflicting -
ways, in turn showing that modern terms such as 'Romanization' gloss
over all of the diversity within, and plasticity of, the cultures of
both the Romans and those people whom they 'conquered'.