Roman citizen

Citizenship in the time of Ancient Rome was a privileged status afforded to certain individuals with respect to laws, property, and governance.It is hard to offer meaningful generalities across the entire Roman period, as the nature and availability of citizenship was affected by legislation, for example, the Lex Iulia. In the Roman Republic and later in the Roman Empire, people resident within the Roman state could roughly be divided into several classes:Slaves were considered property and had only certain very limited rights as granted by statute. They could essentially be sold, tortured, maimed, raped and killed at the whim of their owners. The killing of a slave was a matter of property rather than a crime against a human being. Despite this, a freed slave, a freedman, was granted a form of full Roman citizenship. It was the exceptional feature of ancient Rome that all slaves freed by Roman owners automatically received Roman citizenship. The natives who lived in territories conquered by Rome, citizens of Roman client states and Roman allies could be given a limited form of Roman citizenship such as the Latin Right. This amounted essentially to a second-class citizenship within the Roman state. The Latin Right is the most widely known but there were many other of such Rights. A Roman citizen enjoyed the full range of benefits that flowed from his status. A citizen could, under certain exceptional circumstances, be deprived of his citizenship. Women were a class apart whose status and rights in Roman society varied over time. However, they were never accorded all the rights of citizens; they were not allowed to vote, or stand for civil or public office, although they did have the right to own property. They were, at least in theory, subject to the almost complete power of their paterfamilias, in many legal areas having rights barely more than those of slaves. Inside of Republican high society the marriages were used to cement political alliances and therefore combined by the paterfamilias. The paterfamilias could even force a divorce and then remarry his daughter to another politician.
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