Roman citizen
As a Roman citizen you would carry a legal status worth more than any jewellery – one that could stop a magistrate from flogging you and let you appeal all the way to Caesar.
A status, not a nationality
Roman citizenship (civitas) was a legal package rather than an ethnic identity. At first it belonged to the free inhabitants of Rome itself, then it spread outward: Italian allies won it after the Social War of 91–88 BCE, colonies and loyal towns received it, veterans of the auxiliary troops earned it after 25 years of service, and freed slaves of citizens inherited it. In 212 CE Emperor Caracalla granted it to almost every free person in the empire.
You could recognise a male citizen by his name. The tria nomina – a personal name, a family name and often a nickname, as in Marcus Tullius Cicero – was a badge of status, and so was the toga, a heavy semicircle of wool that only citizens were allowed to wear in public.
Mornings at the forum, afternoons at the baths
A typical urban citizen rose at dawn, perhaps paid a morning call on a richer patron, then spent the morning on business, lawsuits or shopping in the forum. Work tended to stop around midday. The afternoon belonged to the public baths, which cost very little, and the main meal came in the late afternoon.
The toga itself was a nuisance: hot, heavy and hard to drape without help. Satirists joked that ordinary Romans avoided it whenever they could, wearing a simple tunic at home and pulling the toga on only for courts, ceremonies and the games.
Rights and their limits
Citizens could marry legally recognised Roman spouses, make contracts and wills under Roman law and, in the Republic, vote in the assemblies. Crucially, they could appeal against summary punishment by a magistrate. The apostle Paul famously invoked this right to have his case heard in Rome.
Equality, however, was theoretical. Votes were weighted towards the rich, and by the imperial period the law openly split citizens into honestiores, the respectable classes, and humiliores, who faced harsher penalties for the same crime.
