[
1275a]
[1]
so that we have to consider who is entitled to the name of
citizen, and what the essential nature of a citizen is. For there is often a
difference of opinion as to this: people do not all agree that the same person
is a citizen; often somebody who would be a citizen in a democracy is not a
citizen under an oligarchy. We need
not here consider those who acquire the title of citizen in some exceptional
manner, for example those who are citizens by adoption; and citizenship is not
constituted by domicile in a certain place (for resident aliens and
slaves share the domicile of citizens), nor are those citizens who
participate in a common system of justice, conferring the right to defend an
action and to bring one in the law-courts (for this right belongs also
to the parties under a commercial treaty, as they too can sue and be sued at
law,—or rather, in many places even the right of legal action is not
shared completely by resident aliens, but they are obliged to produce a patron,
so that they only share in a common legal procedure to an incomplete
degree), but these are only
citizens in the manner in which children who are as yet too young to have been
enrolled in the list and old men who have been discharged
1 must be pronounced to be citizens in a sense, yet not quite
absolutely, but with the added qualification of ‘under age’
in the case of the former and ‘superannuated’ or some other
similar term (it makes no difference, the meaning being clear)
in that of the latter. For we seek to define a citizen in the absolute sense,
and one possessing no
[20]
disqualification
of this nature that requires a correcting term, since similar difficulties may
also be raised, and solved, about citizens who have been disfranchised or
exiled. A citizen pure and simple is defined by nothing else so much as by the
right to participate in judicial functions and in office. But some offices of
government are definitely limited in regard to time, so that some of them are
not allowed to be held twice by the same person at all, or only after certain
fixed intervals of time; other officials are without limit of tenure, for
example the juryman and the member of the assembly. It might perhaps be said that such persons are not
officials at all, and that the exercise of these functions does not constitute
the holding of office;
2 and yet it is absurd to deny the title of
official to those who have the greatest power in the state. But it need not make
any difference, as it is only the question of a name, since there is no common
name for a juryman and a member of the assembly that is properly applied to
both. For the sake of distinction therefore let us call the combination of the
two functions ‘office’ without limitation. Accordingly we
lay it down that those are citizens who participate in office in this
manner.
Such more or less is the definition of
‘citizen’ that would best fit with all of those to whom the
name is applied. But it must not be
forgotten that things in the case of which the things to which they are related
differ in kind, one of them being primary, another one secondary and so on,
either do not contain a common nature at all, as being what they are, or barely
do so.
3 Now we see
that constitutions differ from one another in kind, and that some are subsequent
and others prior;