A Brief History of Universalism: Cosmopolitanism and the Roman Empire
And therefore when Hellenes fight with barbarians and barbarians with Hellenes, they will be described by us as being at war when they fight, and by nature enemies, and this kind of antagonism should be called war; but when Hellenes fight with one another we shall say that Hellas is then in a state of disorder and discord, they being by nature friends; and such enmity is to be called discord.
—Plato, The Republic, Book 5
As with the Vikings that we looked at previously, the Greeks of Plato’s time were well aware of the distinction between ingroup and outgroup. Even while the Greek world was divided into city-states, and despite their various conflicts, they knew Greek from barbarian and recognised their fellow Greeks as friends. Plato eventually concludes: “Then let us enact this law also for our guardians:—that they are neither to devastate the lands of Hellenes nor to burn their houses.” – with the clear implication being that it is fine to devastate the lands and burn the houses of the barbarians.
And yet this is also where our concept of cosmopolitanism originates, from Diogenes the Cynic, one of Plato’s contemporaries in Athens.
Diogenes, when asked where he was from, answered with one word: kosmopolitēs – generally translated as, “I am a citizen of the world”. This is perhaps the first expression of the philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism: the idea that there’s an allegiance and obligation to humanity as a whole that transcends one’s allegiance to nationality.
Details of Diogenes’ life are sketchy at best. He was born in Sinope in the late 5th century BC. The story goes that he and his father were exiled from Sinope for “defacing the currency” – though whether this was literal or a metaphor for his attacks on convention is unclear. He then lived in Athens and Corinth, and made other travels, including to Sparta and Miletus. He lived as a vagabond and a beggar, taking his shelter in a pithos, eating raw meat, masturbating in public, and generally flouting convention. The word “cynic” is derived from kynikos, meaning “dog-like”. The term was intended as an insult, but Diogenes accepted it with pride.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Diogenes, 1860
Diogenes lived during the last years of the Greek city-states period. The Greek people operated not as a unified country but as a set of city-states. The city-state or polis was the fundamental unit of political organisation, and it was to one’s polis that as a Greek one would hold one’s primary allegiance. Each operated independently, and each had their own form of government, some as democracies, some as monarchies, and so on. But what they had in common was the Hellenic language, culture, and religious beliefs.
To describe the world as a polis, then, is to claim that the entire world shares a common allegiance. The world is envisioned as a city or a community which encompasses all people. And Diogenes describing himself as a citizen of the world implies that he is putting that allegiance above whichever polis he happened to be from.
There are a few different ways to understand Diogenes’ conception of cosmopolitanism, and the idea that Diogenes was gesturing towards is probably somewhat different to how it’s understood today.
Diogenes was, by all accounts, a shocking and anarchic character. One way to interpret his cosmopolitanism, then, is less to do with having allegiance to the whole of humanity, and more to do with having allegiance to no one at all. As someone exiled from his home city, and living as a traveller, cosmopolitanism meant rejecting allegiance – it was an anti-political stance. He would have felt the divisions between city-states as arbitrary and artificial. The cynics wished to live in accordance with nature, free from the shackles of money, status and convention, and therefore city-states were merely another convention to be rejected.
But there’s also a positive vision of cosmopolitanism here. The usual translation of kosmopolitēs as “citizen of the world” seems deeply unsatisfactory. To start with, kosmos means “universe” rather than “world”, but even that doesn’t really get at how Diogenes would have understood it. The original meaning of kosmos was “order” or “arrangement” with connotations of harmony, and it could be applied to systems at many different scales, including the system of the universe as a whole. By Diogenes’ time it had firmly picked up that meaning of “ordered universe”, reflecting the belief that the universe was an ordered system. If Diogenes had merely wished to say that he was a citizen of everywhere he might have said: pantopolitēs (citizen of “the all”), or holopolitēs (citizen of “the whole”). But instead he was saying something with strong connotations of “I belong to the universal order”.
And to interpret it more prosaically and less spiritually, Diogenes believed in the universal human capacity for reason. As with Socrates, whom Diogenes was influenced by via Socrates’ pupil Antisthenes, his challenges to those who claimed to possess wisdom were done on the basis that through reason and dialogue one could arrive at understanding. Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism points at the wish for a community based on a common understanding of philosophical values.
Clearly Diogenes had more in common with other philosophers than with the average citizen of his home city of Sinope from which he was exiled. It is often the case that people feel themselves to have more in common with some particular international community than they do with their fellow countrymen, and – if it were put to the test – with humanity as a whole. If you’ve ever known any academics, you’ll know that they are more at home at an academic conference, wherever in the world it is held, than they are in their native country. Thus it surely was with Diogenes and his fellow philosophers.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that we don’t have any evidence of Diogenes travelling outside the Hellenic world. Recall Plato’s sense that the Hellenes were family. So it’s unclear whether he ever had to engage with truly foreign cultures, and perhaps his cosmopolitanism was never really put to the test.
Reportedly, Diogenes once met Alexander the Great:
At the approach of so many people, Diogenes sat up a little and fixed his eyes on Alexander. When the king greeted him and asked if there was anything he wanted, Diogenes replied, “Yes, that you should stand a little out of my sun”. It is said that Alexander was so impressed by this—and by the arrogance and grandeur of spirit of a man who could treat him with such disdain—that he said to his courtiers, who were laughing and joking about the philosopher as they walked away, “But I’ll tell you this: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!”
—Plutarch, Alexander, XIV
There was something very timely about Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism: his life coincided with, first, the rule of Philip II of Macedon, who united the city-states under Macedonian control into the League of Corinth, and second, Alexander the Great, whose Hellenistic empire subsumed the city-states under his rule. It’s entirely possible that as the city-states system lost its relevance under Alexander’s rule, there was a need to reckon with new conceptions of citizenship. Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism came at a time when the old model of citizenship increasingly didn’t make sense. It was likely a fertile time for rethinking that notion.
The ideas of the Cynics made their way into Greek Stoicism: Diogenes taught Crates of Thebes, and Crates taught Zeno of Citium, who founded the Stoic school. And after the Greeks, Stoicism made its way into Roman thinking. The Romans had a magpie-like approach to the cultural products of the regions that became part of the empire, and Greek culture in particular was highly regarded. Knowledge of Greek culture became a status marker and a sign of a good education.
The Stoic emphasis on duty, self-discipline, and practical virtue meshed well with the Roman ethos. Some of the best-preserved writing on Stoicism that we have now comes from the Romans rather than the Greeks, including Seneca, tutor to the emperor Nero, and Marcus Aurelius, emperor from 161 AD to 180 AD.
If thought is something we share, then so is reason—what makes us reasoning beings.
If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared.
And if so, we share a common law.
And thus, are fellow citizens.
And fellow citizens of something.
And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it—from this state that we share—come thought and reason and law.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.4
The Stoics took cosmopolitanism very seriously, and for them it was very much in line with the positive interpretation of Diogenes in which everyone is part of a universal order, though the Stoics expressed it somewhat differently. In Ancient Greek, logos means “word”, “reason” or “discourse”, but various schools of Greek philosophy have imbued it with greater significance. For the Stoics, the philosophical underpinning of cosmopolitanism comes from their metaphysical framework in which the Logos is simultaneously the ordering principle of the universe and also the human capacity for reason. Why is reason shared? Because you can engage in dialogue with another person and share in that reason. All humans share in this divine Logos, and therefore are united by something greater than mere nationality.
There is also an interesting clue to the importance of cosmopolitanism to the Romans here: Marcus Aurelius would have thought of himself as an emperor primarily, and though he regarded philosophy as important, would not have regarded himself as a philosopher in the way we think of him today. His Meditations were personal notes to himself, never intended for publication. The cosmopolitanism that he expresses is clearly a sincere part of his belief, not merely a politically useful fiction.
It’s worth noting that the Stoic and Roman conception of cosmopolitanism didn’t have the modern liberal connotations that we might assume today: There is nothing in this cosmopolitanism that precludes hierarchy, nor slavery, nor the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. Participation in the Logos may have entitled everyone to a basic respect or consideration, but that’s not at all the same as being your equal or your friend.
There’s a difference between holding a philosophical principle in the abstract and actually putting it into practice. But with the rise of the Roman Empire we actually see some aspects of modern universalism being put into practice. Long before Marcus Aurelius’s time, Marcus Tullius Cicero had adapted the work of the Greek philosophers and applied it to statesmanship.
Again, they [the Stoics] hold that the universe is governed by divine will; it is a city or state of which both men and gods are members, and each one of us is a part of this universe; from which it is a natural consequence that we should prefer the common advantage to our own. For just as the laws set the safety of all above the safety of individuals, so a good, wise and law‑abiding man, conscious of his duty to the state, studies the advantage of all more than that of himself or of any single individual. The traitor to his country does not deserve greater reprobation than the man who betrays the common advantage or security for the sake of his own advantage or security.
When Cicero talks of the common advantage, he is talking of the advantage of the whole universe. He is not setting up loyalty to country or the universe as being in opposition to each other, but rather one is nested within the other. The traitor to either of them is equally reprehensible. Rather than a zero-sum competition of different groups, there is a universal common good to which all can aim at. The good of the community is nested inside the good of the empire, and the good of the empire is nested within the good of the universe.
This is an interesting rhetorical move, and one that the Romans made very skillfully. An empire has to unite people who are likely very much aware of their differences. To do so it has to present that difference as not being significant in determining what’s good. To the extent that an empire asks its citizens to sacrifice their community for the good of the empire it will likely fail to persuade, but if it can set things up so that the two are seen as being aligned then that can be very powerful.
De Finibus was published in 45 BC, and we can see the practical effects of such arguments in the reforms of Augustus between 27 BC and 14 AD, which created a pathway to guaranteed citizenship through military service. While citizenship had been granted as an ad-hoc favour previously, Augustus’ reforms standardised it and turned it into an automatic process. After 25 years of military service in the auxilia, a man could become a Roman citizen, regardless of ethnicity.
While this likely isn’t motivated purely by a philosophical commitment to universalism, nonetheless, as a change from “Romanness” being an ethnic characteristic to something demonstrated by loyalty and cultural integration, the changes are philosophically significant. And even the bureaucratisation is significant in that it makes it an automatic and impersonal process, open to anyone. It’s hard to see these changes being made without the philosophical basis laid out by Cicero and the Stoics.
The Edict of Caracalla in 212 CE went even further, granting citizenship to all free men within the Empire. There was an immediate practical motivation – it was an expansion of the tax base at a time of financial difficulties – that was likely a stronger driver than the philosophy of cosmopolitanism, but it was nonetheless a massive transformation of the nature of Roman citizenship.
This universalism wasn’t just a civic practice. The Romans were also famous for their religious syncretism: the practice of incorporating foreign deities into their pantheon, either by identifying equivalents or by taking the deity wholesale and placing it into the pantheon. Before the Roman Empire, the Greeks were already practicing interpretatio graeca, by which they interpreted the foreign deities that they encountered with equivalents in their own pantheon as a way to understand what they were seeing. The Romans picked up the same practice and turned it to political advantage. Those equivalences became a way to assimilate the conquered territories into the Roman identity.
While acknowledging the radical nature of the Roman approach to citizenship, it’s no less important to keep in mind the limits on the universalism here: with the military service pathway to citizenship, that’s a strong test of commitment to the empire. While it may be open to anyone, not everyone will be willing to go through it – only those who truly wish to belong to the empire.
The Roman approach can be contrasted to other prior or contemporary empires, which might have incorporated the nobles of conquered territory into their administrative classes, but in which there was no idea of universal citizenship.
The Achaemenid Empire, for example, took a relatively liberal, hands-off approach to managing its subjects. It allowed conquered territories to maintain their own laws and customs, kept local elites in power where possible, and took the approach that so long as they paid tribute, they were not to be interfered with. But while learning Persian and adopting Persian customs might have been advantageous to those local elites, there was no concept of “becoming Persian” in the way that one could become a Roman citizen.
The Carthaginian Empire maintained a strict demarcation between citizens, subjects, and allies. Citizenship was restricted to those born in Carthage, and there was no route for others to gain citizenship. Where they established colonial cities, they did so to create commercial outposts as nodes in a trading network rather than for the purposes of territorial expansion and settlement. The populations of these cities remained separate from the native populations. This meant that they didn’t need to deal with questions of cultural integration. Local elites of subject nations were given economic privileges, but were not integrated into the Carthaginian culture. Areas under Carthaginian control were subject to laws which privileged Carthaginians over the locals, and any rebellions were brutally suppressed. This separateness ultimately proved a weakness when faced with Rome’s more integrative model: Carthage was unable to mobilise or motivate troops from among their subjects, since they were aware of their status as subjects and did not feel kinship with the Carthaginian Empire.
The extent to which Roman universalism had become established by the end of the empire is illustrated by the reign of Theodoric the Great. During the later years of the Roman Empire, under the foedarati system, barbarian tribes were allowed to settle on Roman territory in exchange for providing military assistance to the empire, but still living according to their own rule and without becoming Roman citizens. The loyalty of these tribes was often questionable. In 476 the Western Roman Emperor was deposed by Odoacer, the leader of the foederati, marking what is generally regarded as the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Though Odoacer was granted the title of dux Italiae by the Eastern emperor, Zeno, and given authority to rule the Western part of the empire, relations were strained at best and Odoacer became a thorn in Zeno’s side.
Theodoric was the son of Theodemir, king of the Ostrogoths of the Amal Dynasty. He was taken hostage as a child and raised in Constantinople in order to secure the Ostrogoths’ compliance with a treaty. He returned home at the age of fifteen or sixteen, and eventually succeeded his father as king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric made a deal with Zeno, emperor of the Eastern Empire, to wage war on Odoacer and to become Zeno’s recognised authority in the West.
After Odoacer’s defeat, Theodoric ruled much of the territory that had been the Western Roman Empire, maintaining Roman laws and institutions and rebuilding Roman cities. While he maintained his Gothic identity and allowed the Goths to live under their own laws and customs, at the same time he supported the Roman imperial project and seems to have aimed at creating a genuinely dual-track structure that combined a Gothic military with Roman civic institutions.
While maintaining Roman laws was undoubtedly pragmatic as a way to maintain legitimacy and compliance over the Italian territory, it’s hard to see this as mere opportunism. It was a consistent, decades-long project. He took for himself the title princeps, and the building works in Italy were aimed at restoring what the Romans had built. Despite his practical independence, he maintained his agreements with the empire in the East.
Taking on this identity would have been unthinkable if it had been any other empire. It made sense only because the notion of what it meant to be Roman had become flexible enough to transcend its ethnic origins and become a political and legal status rather than a purely ethnic identity. And it’s likely significant that Theodoric was brought up in that culture as a child. Neither Odoacer before him nor Theodoric’s heirs were able to hold together the dual identities of Roman and Gothic in the way that he did.
Despite having a notably universalist approach to citizenship, the legacy of this aspect of the Roman Empire largely did not directly survive. The countries that inherited their civil law framework from the empire generally switched to a jus sanguinis model of citizenship: you are a citizen if you were born to citizens. Despite the way that the empire had opened up citizenship beyond ethnicity, the paths to citizenship were always manifold, with inheritance being the primary path, and the other more universalist paths sitting in addition to that. As nationalism became codified in the 19th century, it was the jus sanguinis path that became part of the legal frameworks of these countries.
However, at the same time as the Romans were experimenting with new forms of citizenship, a breakaway cult from Judaism was gaining popularity with ideas about universalism that were a parallel to those of the empire. In the next essay we will take a look at Christianity.