Citizen

Key terms

What a citizen is

Rights and duties

The good citizen

Beyond the city

The city and the person

What is a person’s relation to the city he lives in? A citizen is a member of a political community, and the question is whether that membership is natural or chosen. These readings ask what the community is, what binds it, and what it gives its members.

3 readings

In Book II of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles delivers the funeral oration over the Athenian dead of the first year of the war. Here he describes the “constitution” of Athens, which “favours the many instead of the few” and “is called a democracy”. The speech is the best-known statement in ancient literature of the ideal of the citizen of a free city.

In Book I, section 25, of Cicero’s On the Commonwealth, Scipio Africanus, the chief speaker of the dialogue, defines a “commonwealth” (res publica) as the “constitution of the entire people”. He adds that the people is bound “by the compact of justice, and the communication of utility”. The dialogue was written in about 51 BC, and the definition is cited by Augustine in the City of God.

In Book I, chapter 2, of Aristotle’s Politics, in the English translation of Ellis, Aristotle concludes the account of the origin of the “city” from the household and village. He says that “man is naturally a political animal” and cites Homer’s man “without society, without law, without family”. The sentence is the best-known of the Politics and the ground of its account of the citizen.