Roman Imperial Texts: A Sourcebook

15. Introduction: Identity in Community

15 Introduction Identity in Community Identity consisted in community for the Romans, as well as for the Semitic and Greek cultures of the Mediterranean world in the time of the Principate. All these cultures viewed a person’s identity as composed primarily of the groups to which they belonged. Identity in community is shown in various genres of literature and cultural artifacts. We will move in this introductory discussion from a brief consideration of a scene in Homer’s Odyssey to a foundational text in Greek philosophy to illustrate the formative idea that a person’s identity is primarily constituted in terms of the community in which he or she lives. Homer’s portrait of Polyphemus the Cyclops is strange and threatening not simply to Odysseus in the world of the Odyssey but also to most of its Mediterranean readers. This is not in the first place because he only has one eye and eats humans, but because he lives alone. Homer portrays him as more than a “loose cannon”; though he is a giant, he is also evidently not human because he doesn’t live in community. The other Cyclops creatures in the area appear to be living independently of one another, and this is strange for both the Greeks who encounter the strange species in Homer’s Odyssey and the Romans who encounter them in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Romans accepted the Greek idea that to be human is to live in community. Aristotle’s ideas on the inevitability, utility, and value of human communities, including cities, are ideas that Romans fully accepted. 105 34. ARISTOTLE ON THE COMMUNAL FORMS OF HUMAN LIFE 1 All forms of community are political, for people walk along together for some mutual benefit, and they seek to provide something for life. And it seems that it was for the purpose of mutual benefit that the political community came together at the beginning and now endures, for this is what lawmakers seek, and they call “just” what is for general benefit. The various communities seek benefit in partial ways: thus sailors sail to make money or something like this, soldiers engage in warfare, whether for money or victory or the taking of a city, similarly tribal groups or assemblies—some communities seem to be formed on account of pleasure, or religious groups and dining associations are formed on account of sacrifices and social interaction. Still, all these seem to be subordinate to the political community, for the political community seeks not a short-term benefit but one that addresses a whole life. People offer sacrifices and arrange for social gatherings when doing so, pay honors to the gods, and set up times of rest with pleasure for themselves. For the sacrifices of olden times and festivals appear to be set in place after the harvest, as a sort of firstfruits, because this was especially the time when there was time for these things. All these communities, therefore, seem to be segments of the political one, and it follows that various sorts of friendships generate correspondingly various communities. The Romans followed the idea, found in Aristotle and current in other branches of Greek philosophy as well, that regards every person as essentially defined by relationships, and under obligation in each of the relationships constituting one’s existence.2 The broadest level of community we shall consider here is that of the urbs, the Roman city. As we begin to think about the city in the Mediterranean world, it is worth noting that Aristotle’s word “political” is cognate with the Greek word for city—polis. For the Greeks, and for the Romans who accepted and valued Greek cities as legitimate places for cultural growth and human community, the city is the place where the primary or highest community of humanity is actualized. 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1160a9–30; author’s translation of Greek text in Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea, ed. L. Bywater, OCT (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 168–69. 2. Cicero, De Officiis 1.16.1–1.18.59. 106 | Roman Imperial Texts Contemporary readers might expect citizenship in the early empire to be the first-level Roman community that defined Mediterranean peoples under the Principate. But it is rather difficult to get a handle on what Roman citizenship meant in the first century, and New Testament students remain divided on whether the three references to Paul’s Roman citizenship in Acts...