The Italians were beneficiaries of Roman imperial expansion and exploitation and simultaneously the victims of the same phenomena. Long after Rome's conquest of Italy, the indigenous peoples of Italy remained second class subjects in the peninsula, a stark contrast to their experiences in the provinces, where the distinction between Romans and Italians was limited, if not imperceptible. Their untenable circumstances in Italy led to the Social War of 91 - 87 BCE, which concluded with Rome's begrudging grant of citizenship to Italian communities south of the Po River Valley. Yet the Italian struggle continued, as their difficulty in enrolling in the census and voting assemblies attests.
This paper offers a fresh consideration of Italian subjecthood in the context of Italian demands for self-determination and the Social War from a provincial perspective. Drawing on literary and epigraphic evidence, it examines how Italians strategically emphasized their distinctive position under Roman rule vis-à-vis Roman citizens and non-Romans in the provincial cities of Sicily, Asia, and Greece from the late second century to the late first century BCE, and the role of monumentalization and local, collective action in doing so.
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