Maybe this is for Cafe Society because it is a quote from a TV show, The West Wing, but I am interested in commenting on the historical accuracy of the quote and not the TV show. In the show President Bartlett has ordered an air strike (non civilian target) against a country that blew up one of our planes and killed some of our citizens. The quote:
Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth unharmed, cloaked only in the words “Civis Romanis” - I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally understood as certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.
Is that really accurate?
No, does not fit with reality. Pirates and bandits made travel dangerous for everyone, even Romans at anytime you want to pick. People would generally travel in large well protected groups.
There might be the odd exception, like couriers on emergency missions, but nothing like that which I can think of would apply to all citizens.
The wording “known world” makes this difficult for me to believe. What exactly were the Romans going to do if a Roman citizen got jacked in the Magdha or Han Empires? Those were too far away for them to project any force. And who in the Magdha or Han Empires could read it anyway?
It may be possible that this was a nationalistic or patriotic saying in the Roman Empire, but more of a bravado-type thing, than a fact.
I doubt that was true in the city of Rome itself. Is there any city on the face of the earth today where “no harm” can befall someone? There is no reason to believe Rome would be an exception.
Given what happened to Gaius Julius Caesar, in the Capitol, on the Ides of March 44BC, while he was serving as Consul of the Roman Republic, I think the statement is somewhat exaggerated.
I was just thinking of a couple of highway robbers in, say, modern day France, having just murdered a prosperous citizen and stolen all his goods, saying “Merde… We have killed a Roman, we must hand ourselves in without delay.”
Given what happened to him when travelling by boat on the Med a few decades earlier, I would concur.
No ones going to sortie a fleet, or send in the legions, just because a few citizens got popped somewhere, not unless they were already looking for an excuse.
The phrase is ‘Civis Romanus sum’, and the idea long pre-dates Sorkin. I was taught this in school many years ago. But it wasn’t a cloak of protection against brigands but corrupt officials.
This, and even then it was demonstrably not working all the time.
The phrase got famous via Cicero, who wrote a pretty angry bit about the (former, I think ?) governor of Sicily who’d sentenced a Roman to a caning followed by crucifixion, whereas Roman law precluded Roman citizens from corporal punishments of any kind. The victim, according to Cicero, had kept saying he was a Roman citizen to try and get his sentence commuted. To no avail.
Roman on Roman killing is a different category from that posed in OP, which is harm done to a Roman by a non-Roman. Rome was not going to kill several indiscriminately chosen Romans for the murder of one Roman by another, but it would have no compunction about killing non-Romans for the murder of a Roman by a non-Roman.
Citizens could only be executed for treason in Ancient Rome, but I’m unsure whether the perps in this case would have been charged with treason had they failed in their goal. However, they could have been subjected to any number of lesser punishments.
Still, there were plenty of non-citizens in Rome at any given time, and it would be absurd to believe that they were all 100% law abiding people.
So, leaving out ‘free of the fear of molestation’, would the Romans seek retribution against anyone who had molested a citizen? And if they didn’t know who the molester was would they retribute some poor schmucks just to get the point across?
Eventually, if enough Roman citizens got molested by some group, or especially important ones got molested, the Senate would be moved to send a force of Roman military to put an end to this (like Pompey vs. the pirates). When that happened, they went after everyone involved: everyone on the pirate ships, including non-combatants, the families of the pirates living on shore, the ports the ships operated from, the suppliers of those ships, etc. – everyone that they thought was involved, even vaguely. these were punitive expeditions.
But generally the Romans did not just grab random locals and punish them. (Unlike the Nazis, who often executed 10 random locals for every German soldier killed by the Resistance.) Now if your town was molesting Roman travelers, and Rome sent an expedition against the town, and the town resisted, when the Romans won, every single occupant of the town was punished (killed, or sold into slavery, usually). That was deliberate Roman military policy – it tended to encourage opponents to negotiate a surrender rather than resisting.
So while the statement in the OP doesn’t accurately portray the reality it does speak to the intent of the Romans. Of course that means President Sheen has made a mistake.