Civis Romanus Sum

It is 70 BC. Publius Gavius was stripped naked in the market square in Messina on the northeastern tip of Sicily. He was flogged on the orders of the provincial governor, Gaius Verres. Gavius had done nothing except publicly denounce Verres’ corruption, a crime so well recorded that it still feels immediate two thousand years later. As his punishment was dealt out, Gavius cried the only words that should have mattered, “Civis Romanus sum.”

That is, “I am a Roman citizen.”

Those words meant something much more specific than they do now. Those words meant that no magistrate anywhere in the world could bind, flog, or execute a Roman citizen without trial in Rome. This was not an abstract guarantee, but a thing profoundly backed by the knowledge that Rome would destroy anyone who dared test it. A Roman citizen could walk unmolested from Britain to Syria, from the Rhine to the Euphrates, and without any protection other than his citizenship, he knew he would not be touched. This was certainly not because the provinces loved Rome or benefited from it. God knows history is filled with examples of them feeling anything but, but because the provinces feared what Rome would do if they laid a hand on one of their own citizens.

Verres flogged Gavius anyway and then crucified him. It was the first crucifixion of a Roman citizen on the island. The cross was erected deliberately on a hilltop overlooking the Strait of Messina so Gavius could see Italy as he died. His final view was that of his own country.

Cicero prosecuted Verres the following year, and the speech he gave, which is recorded in the fifth book of In Verrem, is one of the most furious pieces of rhetoric that survives in the Latin canon. Cicero understood that the security guarantee that had been violated was not simply the rights of a single man, but something much deeper that undergirded all of Roman citizenship itself, which in turn rested on universal credibility. The threat was clear: harm one of ours anywhere, and the response would be total and exhaustive. Verres had not merely killed a citizen, he had demonstrated in public that the guarantee could be broken. And Cicero understood that once this was broken, it could not easily be restored.

The Republic’s fiscal legitimacy was ultimately a function of the perceived certainty of Roman retribution. The moment that certainty faltered, the moment a governor could flog and kill a citizen and survive the consequences, the entire security architecture and therefore the tax collection architecture of the Republic began to degrade.

A generation later in Jerusalem, the apostle Paul was seized by a mob and brought before a Roman tribune who ordered him flogged for interrogation. Paul too was a Roman citizen, and he spoke the words -- Civis Romanus sum -- the tribune stopped the scourging at once. The soldiers withdrew, and the tribune came to Paul and asked, “Are you really a citizen?” Paul said, “Yes.” The tribune admitted that he had purchased his citizenship for a large sum. Paul replied that he had been born one.

What is interesting about Paul’s invocation is not only that it worked, which of course it did procedurally, but the limits of what it purchased. Paul’s citizenship got him transferred out of the Jerusalem garrison and onto a ship to Rome where he was tried before Caesar. Ultimately it did not save his life. Paul would be executed in Rome, probably under Nero, but it bought him a hearing before the capital and the sovereign. What actually sustained Paul through this journey and ultimately through martyrdom and prison and the sword was not his Roman citizenship, but an authority that outranked Caesar entirely.

For most of the post-Cold War period, American citizenship, or perhaps more precisely American Capital, operated on a similar principle. There existed between roughly 1991 and perhaps 2019 a set of implicit guarantees that functioned less like law and more like physical properties of modern space. Certain zones were simply outside the domain of violence. An Ivy League campus during finals week was one of these. A glass tower in Midtown Manhattan where insurance executives held their annual investor conference was another. Doha, Qatar, a peninsula of reclaimed sand, sovereign wealth, and air conditioning where half the financial elite parked their family offices and the other half attended beautiful conferences, was another.

The “understood” rule, which had gone unwritten but is quite legible, was that these zones were not merely safe, but categorically exempt from the kind of violence that happened elsewhere on the edges of empire and civility. These zones were treated as exempt. The rules that governed the rest of the world, where car bombs went off and gunmen entered schools and missiles hit apartment buildings, did not apply by elite consensus, not by written law. These buildings were not particularly fortified, and these spaces did not have great security, but the social contract amongst elites guaranteed it.

This guarantee had of course been failing ordinary Americans for years. What is new is that it is now failing for the people who believed they had purchased exemption from that failure. Ordinary Americans are largely immobile. They can’t move their tax residency. They absorb the degradation because there is no better alternative. The wealthy could always opt out -- gated communities, private security, international mobility, client-state residences -- and this class has exit options.

The contract was not between citizens and the state in any democratic sense. It was between the wealthy and the imperial center. You participated in the economic architecture of state capital that undergirded American hegemony, and in return the system provided you with zones where violence would not find you. In much the same way the Secret Service protects the President, the implicit structure of American state capital protected everyone in certain tax brackets and zip codes. This was certainly not perfect and not always reliable, but the consensus was so complete that the exceptions -- a kidnapping in Mexico, a mugging in a parking garage -- were national news stories, treated as systemic errors to be stamped out rather than features of the ongoing landscape.

What participation in the American system bought was not efficiency or competence. It bought the guarantee. The three unspoken words: I am a net American taxpayer. And violence does not happen here.

Consider what has happened in the last 18 months.

On December 13, 2025, a gunman entered an unlocked building at Brown University during final exam week and shot eleven students, killing two. Brown is exactly the kind of place Americans implicitly imagine to be outside the ordinary landscape of violence: old, elite, orderly, protected.

And as I write this -- yesterday, as I write this -- Iranian missiles are hitting Doha. Sixty-six missiles fired at Qatar in a single barrage. Sixteen people injured, one critical.

What is different about the last 18 months is not the character of the violence but the response. The Brown shooting produced nothing but compliance audits of campus security. The strikes on Doha, direct military action on the sovereign territory of America’s most important Gulf partner, produced diplomatic hedging and transactional recalibration by our allies. The point is not that violence never breached elite space before, but that breaches were once followed by overwhelming restoration of the guarantee. In none of these cases did the response reaffirm the collective security guarantee. In none of them did the state behave as though something sacred had been violated. The mechanism that once restored this guarantee after a breach -- overwhelming, identity-defining, seemingly irrational acts of sacred state violence -- is no longer visible.

The Ciceronian response is a structural one, not a moral one. It is not that any of these individual events are historically unique. It is that the perception of guaranteed safety is a binary good. In the same way that a Roman citizen could walk from Britain to Syria, not because every legionnaire in every province was personally committed to his safety, but because the universal expectation of retribution made the question irrelevant, the American guarantee worked because no one thought to test it. The moment Verres demonstrated that a governor could crucify a citizen and survive, the question was no longer moot. It was open.

What has been opened in the last 18 months is exactly this question. Can violence reach you if you are a net American taxpayer? Until recently, the answer was understood to be no. The answer is now visibly and publicly yes. And unlike the rest of the class architecture that absorbs this cost because they have nowhere to go, the wealthy have options. They can move their capital. They can move their families. They can move their tax residency. And some of them already are.

Lord Palmerston understood the commercial value of this guarantee better than anyone. In 1850, when a British subject named David Pacifico had his property destroyed in anti-Semitic riots in Athens and the Greek government refused compensation, Palmerston ordered a naval blockade of Greece. In the House of Commons, defending the blockade, he delivered what became known as the Civis Romanus Sum speech:

“Whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so too a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”

The entire structure of British commercial supremacy depended on the credible certainty that a British subject’s person and property were inviolable anywhere in the world. The blockade of Greece was not about David Pacifico or his furniture. It was about the next merchant considering whether to open a trading house in a foreign port. The guarantee had to be maintained because the commercial empire and therefore the tax yield and legitimacy of collection for the state ran on it.

Rome proved the principle. Britain made it explicit commercial doctrine. America inherited it as atmosphere. The American version of this guarantee was never as explicit as Palmerston’s, but it didn’t need to be. What I want to suggest is that the atmospheric guarantee is now visibly depressurizing and no one is talking about what comes next.

When the guarantee itself becomes a scarce good, scarce goods command a premium. The states and systems that can credibly provide what America is ceasing to provide -- genuinely reliable security for its citizens and their capital -- will command extraordinary willingness to pay.

When protection fails for immobile citizens, a state decays slowly. When it fails for mobile capital, the repricing is sudden. The question for the next decade is which sovereigns can offer what Rome once offered -- the cloak, the words, the guarantee that your person and property are inviolable, backed by a credible threat that makes violence against you and your property unthinkable.

When this earthly guarantee of protection fails, when the state in which you live can no longer credibly promise that your person and property are safe, the demand for a transcendent guarantee increases massively. The periods in which religious observance surges most powerfully are not periods of poverty or ignorance or fallen humanity -- just the opposite. They are periods in which the state’s monopoly on protection, on legitimacy, on scale, visibly collapses. The moments when Christianity has been at its strongest and most prolific -- the late Roman Empire, the post-Carolingian fragmentation, the English Civil War, the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War -- are all the result of an earthly sovereign that can no longer keep you safe. You seek a transcendent one because you are being rational. The rational response to the failure of a small protection is to seek a superior one.

My contention is that we are entering a period where this appeal becomes, for a growing number of people, not an anachronism but a live option. When everything in your life -- your family, your community, your career, your property -- is green-lit by the enemy, when violence can reach you anywhere and knows who you are, the question of what protects you becomes deadly serious very fast. And for the first time in most of our living memory, the state doesn’t have a convincing answer, no matter how much it’s willing to spend.

Although Cicero was able to win his case and Verres went into exile, the guarantee of protection for Roman citizens was never fully restored. Within 20 years, the Republic was dead, and it was replaced with an empire that would soon grant citizenship to everyone but guarantee it to no one. It was only a few hundred years then until sheep would be grazing in the Forum, and Rome would be nothing more than a distant memory.

The only question left is: now that you are exposed, where will you get your protection from?