Citizenship and religion: inclusions and exclusions in the ancient world

Abstract

The essay tries to explain what was the meaning and the function of the three broad categories (the so called status: familia, civitas, libertas), which were built in the Roman antiquity and were utilized to include and exclude human beings, defining the person’s legal condition and what the subjects could do, what they could own, what they could attempt to achieve, in what they could succeed, and to what they could be submitted.