Rome made everyone a citizen. Then it learned what citizenship was for.

This week the country is arguing about who belongs. Who gets a council house, who gets to work, what a person owes before they can draw on what the rest of us built. It sounds like a modern quarrel about migration and welfare. It's one of the oldest questions a state can ask, and Rome gave its answer in the year 212 - an answer that should stop us cold.

For most of Rome's history, being a Roman citizen was a prize. It carried rights that other people in the empire didn't have, and it was handed out sparingly: to Italians, to soldiers who had served their time, to favoured cities. People wanted it precisely because not everyone had it. A thing that everyone holds stops being a status and becomes just the weather.

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